The march of Macs into the enterprise: Demand is on the increase No, it isn't an April Fool's joke we forgot to publish. The Register* actually made it to a recent in-person Apple event: the 2022 Mac Administrator and Developer conference, MacAD. Apple, it seems, may be getting ever more serious about the enterprise. The theme of the event - with actual humans in the Brighton seafront venue …
I can see the appeal. Walled garden, relatively strong design, lower support costs (except for parts), at expense of greater hardware cost. Some difficulties will arise with AD interfacing, package management/deployment, permissions control & browser compatibility. AD in particular is a showstopper for any other platform to make inroads if we are honest.
But I imagine the main driver is because marketing-motivated people want "shiny". Nothing to do with the computing capability that sits in the box.
Having developed on Mac maybe 20 years ago, it was a much nicer experience at the time than Windows equivalents. Today, the platform is a bit of a pain because of the walled garden; and other development environments have "somewhat" caught up. The power is there under the hood of course; just locked down un-necessarily.
For me, the abstraction of everything behind layers upon layers of API's is such that "knowing" the API is way more important than knowing the language to get stuff done, or what platform you do it on. It wasn't long ago you could download DEV C++ and an SDL library and do fun stuff very easily. Today, just configuring a dev environment and API is an absolute pig; knowing what you need to do anything remotely useful is often half the battle. Co-incidentally, this is also why I have became such a fan of Python. Very easy to find libraries that do what you want for most subjects.
No current platform is any better or worse in regard this particular problem.
Nothing to do with the computing capability that sits in the box. ...... Binraider
It is just that sort possible misinformation which has Apple Silicon competitors playing second fiddle to new leading algorithms and walled garden applications/private and pirate operations, Binraider, for surely it is exceptional processing ability and utility which makes all the difference in the world to deliver worlds leading facilities ..... more exclusively virtually rendered presentations ‽
Does "Enterprise" mean a computer running Adobe software?
Does enterprise mean a bank computer NOT running Adobe software?
Does enterprise mean medical devices?
If those and more are all enterprise, then Apple needs to pick a target and stop with the ambiguous shareholder speak.
Having developed on Mac maybe 20 years ago, it was a much nicer experience at the time than Windows equivalents. Today, the platform is a bit of a pain because of the walled garden;
Macs aren't "walled gardens", never have been and still aren't today. Yes, macOS does have an app store (as does Windows), but there are no restrictions as to where software needs to come from (a lot of Mac software isn't even on the macOS app store). There's also a ton of 3rd party hardware for Macs.
If anything, Macs are even less of a walled garden than they once used to be when Macs still had some proprietary stuff like expansion slots (NuBus), network protocols (AppleTalk) and certain interfaces (ADB), but this has been history for almost a quarter of a century now.
So I'm not sure where you get the walled garden from as this has never been true.
macOS absolutely is a walled garden.
In order to ship any macOS software whatsoever, I have to register with Apple, and send them a copy of every single application I want to ship for them to inspect.
If they arbitrarily decide they don't want me to publish a given build, they won't notarize it and then my customers cannot install it.
While it is still possible for a user to disable the notarization checks, temporarily, and with some difficulty, customers will not do so.
Ergo:
Apple have total control over what products we are able to sell.
They also know exactly what we're developing, even when it is in an alpha stage. If they felt like competing, they can squash us like a bug.
You can be completely accurate but still very misleading.
You act as if registering with Apple is a bad thing. You don't need to sell your application through the app store, but if you think it is unreasonable to require developers to code sign their software, you're one of the reasons why security has gone to hell in the past couple decades.
The computer industry has turned into a wild west that the average computer user has zero hope of surviving.
If you want to install/run an app that hasn't been certified, you can do so easily by doing right-click->open. It's beyond trivial. If something like that is too advanced for a user to perform, then by definition that user does not have the skills required to vet whether a piece of software is safe to use.
I agree that it's annoying how Apple has locked down the hardware, but I've reach the point in my life where I just don't give a shit. My sanity is a precious commodity, and I'm just not willing to spend the spoons necessary to babysit my computer that can go belly up by just looking at it wrong. So, Apple it is. Hardware lock-in aside, Apple's platform is the best compromise I am aware of between flexibility, security, and ease of use.
"What, precisely do you think is inaccurate and why?"
They just don't understand. One of Apples best skills is hiding this kind of developer DRM so that their fans just don't know its there until it smacks them in the face and they have to... err buy a new shiny mac?
Compared to Microsoft's attempt at developer licenses with the Windows RT Surface (single handedly putting the ARM ecosystem back by 5 years) and Windows 8.
In order to ship any macOS software whatsoever, I have to register with Apple, and send them a copy of every single application I want to ship for them to inspect.
Nonsense. First of all, you only need to send them a copy of your application if you want to sell through the Apple app store for macOS. You don't have to do that to sell or offer your app through anywhere else.
In addition, you only have to register with Apple if you want to use Apple's development toolset (XCode), but there are other compilers and IDEs (like VSCodium) which you can use if you're inclined to do.
Lastly, if your software isn't notarized then the user gets a warning but he can still decide to run your application. Yes, it got more complicated on Apple Silicon (command line) but still it's easily possible to run non-notarized apps on macOS.
macOS absolutely is a walled garden.
No, it's not, and the term doesn't mean what you think it does.
On ARM, macOS is absolutely a walled garden, it will only run notorised apps with an Apple signature unless it's an Intel app being emulated on Rosetta.
There are workarounds, some easier than others, but they're all aimed at raising the bar just high enough so users are herded to Apple's App store, making developers pay for a Developer ID and the 30% tithe to the church of Apple.
In my company it wasn't marketing-motivated that wanted "shiny," it was all the engineers that worked on linux-based products that found OS-X's BSD core a much more suitable work environment than windows.
Lots of non-engineers preferred the greater usability and stability. We quickly reached about 50% conversion before some organizational changes forced removal of Macs as an option. (Internal forums were full of discussion, where people argued based on the benefits they saw.)
I've observed the use of Macs in enterprise settings. For those users who know computers well, devs primarily, they're not too bad.
For those who don't, it's a total disaster eventually. The lack of centralised control means that there's too much left to the end user. I've seen fleets of Macs being dumped for Windows laptops and AD, with a sigh of relief all round.
How the hell do you even image a Mac these days?
"The lack of centralised control means that there's too much left to the end user"
As someone who's spent 30+ years with hybrid Mac+Windows networks, this made me properly LOL.
Windows PCs don't have 'centralised control' either, not out-of-the-box. You have to add *infrastructure* to do it: Windows Servers, Active Directory, System Center, WSUS, Intune, and/or a metric f*cktonne of third-party otherstuffs... and on top of that you then need the skills to use it (or get someone to do it for you).
Guess what? Exactly same applies to Macs. Light bulb moment.
Yes, the choices maybe smaller (albeit increasing) and also tilted more towards third-parties (at least historically), but they're there. Yes, the customisation may be more limited, or even better than, Windows PCs. Tools exist that cover Mac deployment, apps, updating and remote support and so forth. You just have to add the right tools and skills to the mix and your Macs will be under your thumb in a heartbeat just like your PCs. Some of those tools even do both platforms to lesser or greater degrees of capability and effort.
Which is better, which is worse? Neither, they're basically just different, that's all. Vive la difference. YMMV etc.
As for imaging: does anyone still 'image' Windows PCs these days? Hasn't that gone the way of the dodo? Isn't 'Modern Deployment' all the rage? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/windows-10-deployment-scenarios
A/C
Except, according to this article, it isn't quite the case that there is a net equivalency in how Mac and Windows can be administered. This article says that:
"The upshot is that on a JumpCloud-managed system, the user will be gently nudged (with a soon to be configurable message) that, maybe it's time to get those updates done?"
I don't know whether that limitation of JumpCloud is universal across all third party Mac enterprise admin tools, but I see no reason to suppose that any other third party product isn't similarly limited (all corrections welcome!).
I think that that specific aspect matters a lot, especially if you're following any kind of zero-trust security principles. Taking that philosphy to the limit, you'd not be letting a badly out of date un-unpatched machine on to the company network or services. It's the user's fault for not updating as and when prompted, but when it's finally considered too toxic to handle it become the admin's job to sort it out.
I absolutely agree that one's mileage will vary. There are of course some users that can be trusted with keeping things as they properly should be. Then again, there's an awful lot more who'd rather not have that burden added to their lives, and a few who absolutely should not be given any say over corporate IT admin whatsoever. If Apple really are saying that the user has to be in charge, that just doesn't suit a large number of people.
Yes, imaging is still a thing. There's not a lot that Windows won't deal with if it finds drivers missing. That means you're not having to maintain the stock company image quite so much to account for the myriad hardware, so it can be nothing more than a quick way of dropping in a guaranteed dross-free Windows install.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple do take a dive into Enterprise management, but I'd bet that they'd do it as "Apple administer this machine as a service for your company", instead of giving companies the freedom to admin as they see fit. From Apple's point of view this would be fantastic - they'd displace all the third party products that are currently in-use, they get a revenue stream, and they can extend their walled garden even further. It might even suit companies, who can then dispense with their admin staff. And if problems arise, well that's unlikely to annoy enthusiastic embracers of Apple's shiny offerings.
Apple actually bought an MDM company, Fleetsmith, but good gravy is it crap. (At least, at the time I was evaluating it). There are numerous third party solutions that are infinitely better including Jumpcloud, jamf, Addigy, etc, depending on what your needs are.
There are definitely some hooks missing in MacOS that one would expect, especially if you're used to Windows MDM, but IMO it's definitely good enough for enterprise use.
How the hell do you even image a Mac these days?
(I've only seen the user end, don't have details on the management side)
Where I work, you boot the Mac into recovery mode and reinstall, which registers and notes that the serial number matches a managed device. The management tool then applies all the policies and configures your user account and 2FA. AD integration seems adequate, since you can just kinit a Kerberos ticket and all the SSO stuff works fine too.
I work on an engineering team doing development and infra work, and it's really nice to have similar tools as all our Linux stuff locally. I want to say I'd rather have a Linux desktop (and have run on for many years until recently) but Mac is "good enough" at being Linux-ish and integrates with the larger AD environment easier. I run Linux at home other than a Windows laptop for the family.
You don't, because you're not supposed to.
The single biggest annoyance was wiping a machine when giving it to a new user, which Apple finally solved with Monterey.
But everything else should be handled via MDM. This is also how Windows machines should be managed, BTW. Centralized management of Apple hardware still isn't at the level you can get with MS, but it's catching up.
Everything should be MDM now. If you're still imaging machines manually, you're doing it wrong.
Any Linux distribution is much better suited to engineering work than any Apple crapware, where you don't even fully control your computer if you have admin rights.
I do see programming hipsters prefer Mac in general, because they can now show off that they're part of the elite clique of Apple worshippers when they're coding in the trendy coffee shop down the road.
Apple just don't care about the enterprise. They sell consumer kit that has to be integrated into an IT department the same way as a square peg is in a round hole (even if many of their products don't exactly carry consumer level price tags). Apple have had dabbles with the enterprise in the past, but seem to find it all a bit too much like hard work for the reward, and they then completely remove entire product lines a year or two later. There are many management solutions for those of us who have large Mac estates, but it is never easy, and Apple don't care when a patch then makes it even more work. It's just something you end up living with.
My last IOS upgrade broke IMAP functionality for me on the apple email client. The solution was to download another email client, but only after approximately 8 weeks when apple care support came back to me and told me that IMAP was business only functionality, and apple do not provide business support. Their products are consumer only.
Straight from the horses mouth.
AC, as while I'm gone from the company a good long while, the... manner... shall we say... of how I present the info would tie me to things...
So yeah: That answer is total, complete and utter BS.
They have a Business Support team - it used to be called AppleCare Enterprise Support. Now Business Support.
iOS supports IMAP - has done since iOS 2 or 3 (memory fails me on that particular point, right now.)
What iOS struggles with, mail wise, is strong authentication or MFA. (Obviously, iCloud being the exception as it's what they want the consumer to use).
Even now, a few jobs on from my time in company I tell people to use Outlook or other mail clients if they have an exchange server or an IMAP server with strong authentication.
What you in particular need to do, is call back AppleCare, with your case ID (you did get one, it's probably with the survey (which you should fill out negatively, their workers live and die by those and in this case a bad one is deserved)) and calmly and politely request to speak to their second level support about the case.
If they refuse, thank them, end the call and call back in ten minutes - should give whoever is on the case end enough time to fill in notes.
Then, when you call back, ask again to speak to a senior advisor - at that stage unless they've changed their procedures, you should get put through to one (wait times differ, obv...).
Then explain the issue and especially explain the information you've given here.
I'll be honest here: If I was ever caught giving this blatently incorrect info in my time with them, I would have (rightly) been hauled over the coals by team leads, their bosses, etc...
If you get nowhere, kick up a fuss and ask for Customer Relations...
Annoyed Ex-AC AC!
Simple question then, have they resolved the issue regarding strong authentication and IMAP? If not then no amount of calling BS is going to change the fact that the update broke what was working previously.
The solution was to install Outlook or the Gmail client. Both continued to work after the upgrade and still do.
So you pay twice for a piece of kit that you would pay if you'd buy any other equivalent performing kit.
Updates acrively break functionality (I can confirm the IMAP debacle) and to get even to speak to someone (let alone fix it) you have to jump through hoops to maybe get the vendor to do what they're supposed to be doing...
Not ff-ing break existing functionality.
That's exactly what happened with us. Devices that had not had the latest update installed continued to work, updated devices didn't. It took 8 weeks for apple support to confirm this was a post-update problem (which involved lots of screenshots, videos and logs being sent back and forth), and say they were not supporting it. I held off for another 8 weeks, then I decided to bite the bullet and switch to Outlook or the Gmail client depending on the users requirements. We then finished off updating everyone's devices, which broke each one in turn with the Apple client.
As the former Apple employee stated above, this was caused by strong authentication, or the lack of. Apple dropped strong authentication between IOS releases, for reasons only known to Apple but probably in an attempt to push people to their Apple services. If your IMAPs continue to function, great, but they just are not using strong authentication.
I got a feeling that enterprise specific stuff in the OS is about to become a thing of the past anyway. If you're safe in the internet on your consumer Mac, why bother applying any enterprise policies? Your companies intranet will get broken into anyways (says Microsoft) so you should always work like your computer will get broken into, in a way. Better to think like that! I'm sure there is still use for software policies but truth is Macs don't have the thick crust of bloatware that WinBoxes have in a big company and so, they are definitely less annoying using.
I'm surely wrong on many counts here, but there is a grain of reason in my gut feeling, isn't there?
If the assumption is that everything is broken, can I get a refund, please.
Finding software that doesn't require internet access to activate or open is, increasingly a losing battle; besides open source of course.
The bloat line is true. Running Windows even vanilla install natively on intel mac vs OSX there is a more than synthetic benchmark performance difference. But do corp-mandated bloatwares work on Mac, and if not, do you allow macs on your estate? (E.g. monstrosities like FireEye or Tanium).
There's a reason in many businesses, that the exec get their own network, domain, and independent services, rather than the monstrosity foisted upon everyone else.
The particular issues I've had (with our fleet of now about 60 iPads) are that there seem to be differences with what management features are available between enrolled (bought through an Apple dealer) devices and random ones you had to buy retail quickly because Apple's lead time was measured in months.
Also, there is/was no way to push files to a device/app remotely. It may be that some tools do better than others but last time I looked, the restrictions where down to Apple and whilst perfectly sensible in many ways, did not a properly remote-manageable platform make.
The big problem we found was more about profile based management without being forced to use an MDM. We cannot use JamF as it's a US company (our privacy risk managers nixed that), and Snow Software needs a Microsoft server to work, which is something our security team immediately vetoed (like most sane organisations we would never condone exposing a Windows server to the Net).
Basically, it appears we'll probably end up writing our own..
> We cannot use JamF as it's a US company
I'd never even heard of JamF, not being an Apple user, until a few months ago when, apropos of nothing, they started spamming my corporate email address.
To my surprise, research indicated that it is a bona fide company. So I wrote back asking where they had obtained my contact details. Precisely no response, but the spam abruptly stopped.
I wouldn't touch them even if I were running an Apple shop.
-A.
JAMF is legit so stop talking rubbish.
Their MDM control is about the same as any other MDM like Intune and MobileIron and Airwatch. However because they built their product up from the beginning managing MacOS they are one of the best at MacOS computer.
Just jump onto their support forum and you're see how big and widely used they are.
I never disputed they're the best at managing Apple devices (because they are IMHO). They're simply a US company and thus subject to the sort of US laws that caused Safe Harbor and then Privacy Shield to fail which, I must add, didn't actually address the legal issues, they were merely procedural sticking plasters which is why the aforementioned failures did not exactly come as a surprise to our lawyers.
We don't particularly want to get into software development, but it appears we may have to, at least for internal use.
Not true:
https://www.apple.com/uk/support/professional/enterprise/
What Apple hasn't had for a long time was onsite service, and guaranteed reaction times (e.g. 4hrs) are still to come (not sure that is necessary for non-server stuff that Apple sells, though), but Apple most definitely does care for the enterprise market.
But they certainly don't go out of their way to make their products easy to use in an enterprise environment, but that's because enterprise environments are Windows focused. Apple would have to meet a moving target, with their major competitor in the PC space in charge of when and how much that target moves.
Kind of hard to make a commitment for support when a Patch Tuesday that alters AD behavior can set them scrambling with no notice. So maybe it is better in a way to have Apple's half hearted support, because it doesn't raise your expectations too high.
An all Apple corporate environment would be pretty simple to manage, it is the second class status with Windows that makes things difficult. You'd just have to learn a different set of tools but that would be true if you were migrating from Mac to Windows, or Windows to Linux or back in the day Mainframe to Windows.
Kind of hard to make a commitment for support when a Patch Tuesday that alters AD behavior can set them scrambling with no notice. So maybe it is better in a way to have Apple's half hearted support, because it doesn't raise your expectations too high.
Or maybe it's simply time as a business to re-consider the complete reliance on Microsoft centric stuff like AD, because even in a Windows only environment it can (and often does) cause great pain (like the mess Microsoft made out of printing, repeatedly).
Apple would have to meet a moving target
Yup - the traditional Microsoft game which they haven't really changed in the lifetime of the company.
This is why we moved to true Open Standards (the stuff Microsoft absolutely abhors) - Apple products happily support it out of the box (although their webdav sucked - we'll have to check if they fixed that) so the combination of Apple gear and Linux back end works really well for us.
Given the very low patch management overhead it also results in a much better TCO - the "expensive" hardware becomes dirt cheap when you start adding in the staff time now not wasted on managing and waiting for yet another patch or update.
That said, I realise we've been lucky to have management who actually have a clue. It's rare.
Every macOS update is multiple GB, I lose the whole morning every time as it takes forever.
Worse, every update takes down the entire office, as every Mac hits Apple - it doesn't seem to be possible to cache it locally, unlike WSUS/apt etc.
Windows updates are far smaller, Linux ones are almost always miniscule, both are easy to cache locally so the office pipe has to download them once, then everyone gets it over the gigabit link.
Every macOS update is multiple GB, I lose the whole morning every time as it takes forever.
Weird? I have several machines on the beta channel (read: much larger downloads due to diagnostics code) and I have as yet to spend more than 30 minutes updating a machine. Ever. Since roughly MacOS 10.3 or so.
Worse, every update takes down the entire office, as every Mac hits Apple - it doesn't seem to be possible to cache it locally, unlike WSUS/apt etc.
RTFM. System preferences - sharing - content caching. It's even built in - no need to find and configure extra software, and the other devices on the network will automatically find it and use it. Note of warning: it is one of the few options that does prompt a full reboot, though.
Windows updates are far smaller,
LOL, that's not what our network monitoring software said before we terminated our use of Windows - the only thing smaller is the data flow outbound to Microsoft. Also, YOU choose when to update. No mid-day interruptions, no "please wait with the shutdown because I don't care you have to go somewhere but I have more sh*it to install".
If you lose a whole morning, maybe you should invest in reading up on what you use.
This shows how much they care - https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/06/apple_patched_zerodays_in_macos/
No roadmap = enterprise's have to make assumptions in their planning about Apple's behaviour
but, Apple's behaviour = random a lot of the time, such as not issuing fixes for allegedly supported version, but now actually appear to be unsupported.
And yes, it's fine having dedicated support channels for the enterprise, but that only offers limited support after things go wrong. How is Apple's dedicated enterprise support channel going to fix vulnerabilities that Apple won't fix?
"It's just something you end up living with" because the simple facts are that "Apple don't care for the enterprise".
Maybe some enterprises care for Apple? I posted this here 18 months ago:-
———-
...At the end of 2019 they (IBM) had ~290,000 Apple devices of which ~200,000 use macOS. At the same time they had 383,800 employees, obviously some employees will use more than one device. I have a relative who is a very senior IBM techie who told me that in his (large) part of IBM far more techies use Linux than Windows - He was also of the opinion that a number of IBMers elected to go to Apple rather than move from Windows 7 to 10.
According to IBM, Mac users cost less to support with about 1/3 of the support personnel and are generally happier and more productive.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-cio-mac-users-perform-better-more-engaged-than-windows-users/
https://www.jamf.com/resources/press-releases/ibm-announces-research-showing-mac-enables-greater-productivity-and-employee-satisfaction-at-ibm/
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/number-of-employees
The experience I have is that Macs work for longer (so the lifetime cost is lower) and they cost less to support (with the proviso that your IT infrastructure is set up to work in a Mac friendly manner, rather than a Windows friendly manner).
It used to be that if you were a business, and you needed to get business done, you used a PC (with DOS or Windows), if you were a creative you used a Mac and if you wanted to play games you used an Amiga.
In the 2020s it seems that you’re a business, and you need to get business done, you use a Mac, if you’re a creative you use Linux (with the caveat that we still use Macs for that use-case too, but Linux seems to be very well catered for in this field) and if you want to play games you use Windows.
Anticipated Asset Lifetime for a standard windows laptop - including warranty period - typically 36 months. (Max life is obvs longer, but we're talking AAL here).
Mac? I'd easy give them 72 months AAL. EoL determined by how far through the product lifecycle a given model is and how long support lasts. (Yes, people got burned by the short software life of the G5). Barely longer than the power supplies lasted.
Not sure that is correct. The PowerMac G5 was sold from 2003 to 2006, and the last MacOS version that supports it (10.5 Leopard) was fully supported until June 2011 (which is 5 years after end of sale).
Which means depending on when you bought your G5 it was supported for 5 to 9 years.
We take the extended warranty that lasts 36 months. Then we use them for perhaps 5 years or (better) till they break. At that point, we cannibalise where possible. At some point in the future, we will doubtless have to change over to Windoze11 and its TPM but, until then, we have no users with it and 10 works fine if you put an SSD and lots of memory on a 4+ year old device.
I frequently upgrade Macs over 15 years old, and last month I got the gig to replace 10 x G4 PowerMac towers from 2002/2003. They'd had their original CRT displays replaced with Apple 30-inch Cinema Displays about 2008.
Still all working, and I usually visited about once a month to do general maintenance.
Their business is changing direction due their market disappearing with Brexit, so an intended major revamp in 2025 has been brought forward.
Likewise - I look to get at least 5 to 6 years out of laptops. Desktops can quite often go to 7 or 8 years if they are only used for basic stuff.
Yes, a few will die beyond the end of the 3-year warranty, and may or may not be repairable economically (laptops especially - although bits can quite often be obtained on ebay relatively cheaply). but we get the lifetime we expect out of most devices.
@45RPM I disagree with paragraphs “It used to be” and “In the 2020s” so just for fun I think they should read thus. ;)
It used to be that if you were a business, and you needed to get business done, you used a PC (with DOS or Windows), if you were a creative you used a Mac for 2D graphics an Amiga for animation and video and an Atari ST for music and if you wanted to play games you used an Amiga or Atari ST.
In the 2020s it seems that you’re a business, and you need to get business done, you use Windows, if you’re a creative you use a Mac and if you want to play games you use PlayStation, Xbox or Windows as none of them have all the AAA games.
Linux business use is the backend infrastructure, servers etc.
Of course, these are just generalisations, as I said just for fun.
In the 2020s it seems that you’re a business, and you need to get business done, you use a Mac, if you’re a creative you use Linux (with the caveat that we still use Macs for that use-case too, but Linux seems to be very well catered for in this field) and if you want to play games you use Windows.
Sorry but that's nonsense.
Even today, with Mac sales higher than ever before, the majority of business applications are still Windows only. The only saving grace here is that more and more stuff has been transferred to becoming web based so the OS no longer matters much as long as it has a modern web browser.
And as for creatives using Linux, that has never been true either. Most creative tools like the Adobe suite aren't even available for Linux, and the Linux (FOSS) substitutes, aside from exceptions like Blender, are so poor that one would rather use Windows versions of creative tools under Wine or in a VM. In reality, though, creatives rather stick with macOS or Windows, aside from a few niches (e.g. use of Linux as render farms).
Apple didn't name it's newest Mac 'Studio' for no reason ;)
What business software do you need that doesn’t have an acceptable alternative on the Mac? Sure, the big name might not be available, but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing available for a Mac Only enterprise (trust me on this, I run one, and support another).
With regard to creative software on Linux, I admit that I was being slightly flippant. But the same point as the above exists - in amongst the ‘rubbish’ on Linux there are some real diamonds - and not just Blender either. If your creative field is video, 3D or software development in particular then Linux has your back. And just because it doesn’t have ‘Adobe’ plastered all over it, doesn’t mean that it isn’t great.
'And just because it doesn’t have ‘Adobe’ plastered all over it, doesn’t mean that it isn’t great'
There are much better modern and cheaper alternatives to Adobe's buggy baggage. Just take a look at Affinity Software's equivalents of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
The experience that I have is that my standard PCs (running Linux mostly) run perfectly well until and beyond the point that accountants have determined that they have no value and the BOFHs insist that out of warranty means obsolete.
There was one exception: a Dell XPS720. Never, ever spec a supposedly standard machine that's based on a hardware architecture (in this case BTX) which no one else is using or looks likely to adopt.
-A.
need to get business done, you use a Mac,
A lot of people who used to have Mac, had so many issues (overheating, IMAP against o365 breaking, USB devices randomly being blocked after pressing the incessant nags for updates), that they finally decided to go to a Windows desktop.
With Apple now starting to serialise their hardware components, you must have a fat purse and be a gluttom for punishment to keep on buying Apple crapware...
On the other hand, my Lenovo X230 has been buzzing with Linux for the last 10 years and still performs more than adequate for coding and administrative work.
Except for laptop toastiness, I’ve never experienced those issues. And all my Macs, from the SE/30, through my Quadra, G3, G5, Mac Pro, MacBook Air (and all those of my colleagues) still work. I have a storeroom of old Macs from the day my business first started through to the present day - and I am reasonably sure that I can pull any one of them out and have it boot.
But if we want to talk about overheating, I’d be delighted to show you my Lenovo (or, in fairness, any of my laptops with an Intel or PPC CPU - this isn’t a Windows vs Mac thing!)
Yup - as with all machines. They have no batteries. Some require a little power to boot, but the trick there is to plug them in and flick the PSU on, off and on again. Which, in fairness, must put some strain on those old caps. I will recap them one day. Maybe. Well, if I need the machine again.
this isn’t a Windows vs Mac thing!
Nobody mentioned previouasy that it was.
I only mentioned that my 10+ year old Lenovo was still happily spinning.
How many Macbook Airs older than 10 years are still around. If I need to change my battery, I can pull it out of the bottom, dkn't have to completely open the case, heat up the battery, clean up glue residue, glue it back in and close the case again.
If I for any reason need to change the RAM modules I can do this without having to unscrew the case, as there's a little latch on the bottom that makes changing RAM a matter of minutes...
Apple crapware is designed with planned obsolescence in mind. If you don't mind polluting the planet unnecessarily, while paying double for a piece of kit, than what you'd pay for equivalent hardware from any other vendor, you should go for it...
It's just not something I personally think is a good use of resources.
Perhaps it's because I have an old mac, but my Macbook pro from 2011, purchased in 2012 celebrated it's 10th birthday the other day. Yes, replaced the disk with bog standard SSD (not possible now, of course). Works still like a dream.
A word from the wise. Buy up any off the last macbooks you see being offered for sale. the ones with user replaceable ram and hard disks. These are going to be in great demand shortly. 2016 and older, perhaps. 2015 for sure. You WILL be able to sell at a profit if the kit was in any way looked after.
Perhaps soldering is going to be the next tech skill in demand, to remove and upgrade those damn mac hard disks.
I've worked on deploying MacOS within work places.
After a lot of playing around with different vendors we found JAMF was the best product to use. It's like SCCM and Intune slapped together in a toolset that works really well with the control you could only dream you had on the Windows side of things.
Application packaging and deployment was soo much easier than Windows. I've used many tools over the year for different system on windows and they are all clunky compared to JAMF Composer although it does look they took the best parts of some of the products from other vendors.
JAMF integrated really well with Azure Conditional Access and even has a PKI connector for AD if you want to go down that route.
I'm not really an Apple fan but they had deployment from out of the box way before Autopilot and patching and managing your devices is easy.
We give our business users the choice of device and it's about 50/50 but the resources to manage Apple are very low. Hardware prices about the same compared to business Windows laptop. But you save a lot where you don't have to pay Microsoft each year just to use their Operating System.
Yeah that yearly enterprise license fee really adds up over time, and most people don't figure it in when comparing prices and declaring Apple "overpriced".
And it has a bigger effect the longer the lifecycle you expect from a PC - i.e. if you go from 3 year to 5 year replacement cycle that's two more yearly Microsoft bills that have to be included in the cost of the Windows laptop.
Obviously for home users the math is completely different. For now at least. Microsoft seems to be slowly moving towards making Windows a yearly subscription for home users.
@DS999 “And it has a bigger effect the longer the lifecycle you expect from a PC - i.e. if you go from 3 year to 5 year replacement cycle that's two more yearly Microsoft bills that have to be included in the cost of the Windows laptop.”
The effect is not bigger the longer the lifecycle. If you went to a 5 year replacement cycle at 5 years when the laptop is replaced you would have had 5 years of Microsoft bills. If you stayed on the 3 year cycle after 5 years (2 years with the replacement laptop) you would have had 5 years of Microsoft bills.
The result is the same Microsoft’s hand would have gone in your pocket just as many times and taken the same amount.
5 years on enterprise is 5 years of Microsoft bills no matter how long your replacement cycle is.
No you're missing the point, if you are comparing "cost of laptops" you have to add in three years of support if you expect to use that laptop for three years. But five years of support if you expect to use that laptop for five years.
Yes, the yearly cost is the same either way but the people who claim Macs are expensive by saying "look at this Macbook for $2000 I can get the same config in Windows for half that" aren't comparing by yearly cost, they're comparing by upfront hardware cost and ignoring all the Windows subscription, CALs and other turds Microsoft's enterprise licensing flings at you each year.
Very many years ago when Microsoft was still quite small, and I was sufficiently important to be taken out for a nice lunch by our MS Rep, a colleague asked him “What’s Microsoft’s slogan? IBM’s is THINK. Our "tired and emotional’ Rep said that he didn’t know that they had one, but he remembered that Bill had said "One hundred dollars a year from everyone". I believe it, as that seems to reflect their practices ever since…
What convinced our management to start up with Apple gear and stay with it (Linux on the server) was the TCO. The thing you can really annoy an MS sales rep with when they start talking about TCO is ask if they include staff time wasted during updates and general lesser usability.
The nice thing about Apple gear is that we're set up in such a way that a user can basically wander into any Apple or hardware shop, grab a new device and after a small download we can basically build it over VPN via the hotel WiFi while they go for dinner - profile based containers rock. We're still investigating the business buy functionality, but we started small and this worked well so we stuck with it (correct me if I'm wrong, but I think these are country-specific - you can't have a global business procurement ID). It meant no cupboards full of spares, no global support contracts - we have some devices spare but Apple and hardware stores effectively form our global backup.
As I said elsewhere, we were looking for an MDM but the two main players (JAMF and Snow) could not be used in our business. If Snow had not needed a Windows Server they could have had a foot in the door, but we're now looking at possibly writing our own.
License management was indeed also a consideration - I think one of top guys once had a visit from FAST. Unsuccessful as it was, it appears to have annoyed him so much that any company playing games with licenses has a hard time selling us anything because such dependencies weigh very heavily in the project and procurement approval process.
We purchased Mac Mini Server a decade ago with Server OS X Leopard directly from Apple Business. I made the case to management regarding the server features as opposed to the cost of separate hardware (various decent brands) and licensing of our then (and current) MS applications.
We loved that we could run our own mail server as part of the application (with some other nice features), and a few other useful bits like shared folders, nothing particularly complicated or highly technical as we really didn't need much more.
After some testing and learning in IT, we were ready to deploy for user testing for a period of parallel running.
There was an apple OS update that we applied as advised to keep "secure" against new threats, the next day on switching on, all the "server" functions had gone. Just like that.
Enquiries revealed that despite purchasing the OS as part of the unit, it was no longer supported, we could re-purchase the "app" for a tiny sum but no guarantees from Apple that it would remain supported or not be withdrawn at a later date (and in fact all the useful features such as mail server have since been removed from later versions). They were very coy about it but had a compensation scheme to give you back the value of the app ($20) but only if you were registered in the US. UK (and presumably other) customers were very much "not first class citizens".
Had we gone live, been through the testing period and completed the transition it could have wiped us out as a small company.
Their attitude was that we could now purchase the functionality from 3rd party vendors, putting us back to the sort of costs we had with MS, and a complete inability to do this in-house.
Caveat Emptor
(We'd have purchased about 30 seats of hardware, along with portable devices in varying numbers had this worked, plus another several hundred seats after a later takeover that expanded our footprint considerably, along with other hardware, but I guess that's still not even small beer for them. Users still resent the windows phones forced upon them later....)
We purchased Mac Mini Server a decade ago with Server OS X Leopard directly from Apple Business.
Really? How did you do that when Leopard was end of support in 2011?
There was an apple OS update that we applied as advised to keep "secure" against new threats, the next day on switching on, all the "server" functions had gone. Just like that.
No surprise, as by 2012 your Leopard installation was without support and 2 or three generations behind the curve.
In addition, Mac OS changed from a dedicated Mac OS Server version (which did cost around $600) to a server app which is less than $100.
Enquiries revealed that despite purchasing the OS as part of the unit, it was no longer supported, we could re-purchase the "app" for a tiny sum but no guarantees from Apple that it would remain supported or not be withdrawn at a later date (and in fact all the useful features such as mail server have since been removed from later versions). They were very coy about it but had a compensation scheme to give you back the value of the app ($20) but only if you were registered in the US. UK (and presumably other) customers were very much "not first class citizens".
This isn't really surprising. If you buy Windows Server 2012 R2 (which is supported until 01/2023) today then in less than a year it will be out of support and if you want a supported OS version then you have to pay.
Your story is more of a warning against letting people who don't know what they are doing making IT purchasing decisions.
On the personal front, decade old Mini's keep running. MacBook Pro's keep working, even after a few battery replacements.
Meanwhile... My one year old corporate issued Dell laptop has busted the touchpad due to an expanding battery.
Shall I mention the countless wasted hours spent re-learning a new OS interface every time MSFT vomits their latest 'innovations' upon us? The constant battle of 'where did they hide that setting' in this every version.
I am actually surprised Apple/MacOS doesn't have more footprint in the enterprise. Obviously more expensive up front, but when all things are considered cheaper in the long run.
This is my experience of Apple Business Support.
A client had previously tried to integrate Apple Business Manager with O365 themselves, but gave up. However, they had managed to partially set things up and register their domain. I did not know this at the time when I was asked to implement the integration (again).
The first challenge was just getting access to ABM. Once this was done, I went through the process of setting things up on the O365 and ABM ends. Documentation was poor so took some figuring out. Finally, everything was setup, I had added and verified the domain and configured all the integration steps. I went to click the switch to enable federation. Only THEN did it tell me that the domain was in use on another ABM tenant. It doesn't tell you this when you add the domain in the first place.
I called Apple support. I was on the phone for several hours being passed round multiple teams, non of which had a clue what I was trying to report. I was eventually put through to someone who had heard of ABM and they logged a ticket. Nothing happened for some time, despite me chasing them up. They eventually got back to me weeks later to tell me that they had resolved the issue. However, I would still have to wait several more weeks before I would be able to enable federation for $reasons.
Finally I get the message telling me I can enable it. I go to turn it on. I am then told that >60 people have personal Apple IDs using this domain that will need to be seized back when federation is enabled. It won't tell me who, but does offer to send them a message on your behalf telling them they have to change their Apple ID within 60 days. The client wanted to know who exactly would be affected, but I am unable to tell them. I am still waiting on their decision as to how they want to proceed.
""There's no question that that system is entirely secure," said Bridge."
That is an... interesting opinion to hold for someone in his position.
Mistakes are made all the time. I can remember factory-resetting an iPhone 7 to eBay it on and getting a message from the buyer to say that half my old SMS messages were still on it. This was a long time ago and presumably fixed, but it's a brave person to claim that something extremely complicated is perfect.
The usual answer is, "Register on the staff wi-fi and then use that to get to AVD, here's a link."
We have 7 MACs in our estate that are joined to the network, all in use by graphical/arty people. Most of the client software in use across the estate will not run on a MAC & no, not everything is available in a browser.
"I must have a MAC!!", the response is usually, "Why?". We are a 99% Windows environment & manage 8000+ PCs/Laptops, we have neither the time or inclination to support MACs.
I imagine that if we were 99% Apple then we would have the same reaction to someone bringing in a Window laptop.
Would that be less resources needed to add MAC support to a fully managed Windows environment with 100s of applications in use across the whole estate?
I don't even know if there is an NHS spine client for a MAC, let alone how we would get any of the other stuff working on one.
I've used Win/OS/Lin, all have pros and cons. Desktop is a desktop, first you need the right attitude.
Worked in IT for decades and the biggest stumbling block to anything is always getting people onboard, people hate change and so many will fight it any way they can. I've never understood that attitude, I got into tech 40 years ago because I love constant change and challenge, not in spite of it.
If you can convince a bunch of over stressed, over worked Ops system admins to take on new stuff and challenges then you're already almost there, tech is tech but changing minds takes a whole new level of management skill.
Worked in IT for decades and the biggest stumbling block to anything is always getting people onboard, people hate change and so many will fight it any way they can. I've never understood that attitude, I got into tech 40 years ago because I love constant change and challenge, not in spite of it.
Same here, love IT and am always looking forward for what's new.
I get that people are generally resistant to change but in my experience t's usually the people who are more into IT that complain the loudest about any change while general users tend to be more accepting.
Bravo-Sierra!!!
Kicking and screaming, I migrated one of my final machines from Win7 to Win10 last week. It took hours to get everything installed and working. I had to fight countless little error messages for stupid problems that were introduced somewhere along the way as a 'good idea'.
Little things...like getting my fully paid and working license Office installed. Of course the OS wants me to enter a credit card number for a O365 subscription instead. After jumping a few hoops I got it sorted. Most non-technical users would roll over and put out their monthly payment instead.
Lots of creative breakage to try and 'monetize the user after the sale'.
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