Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Personally I think this is big, and now even bigger then I thought.

The largest Enterprise they had was only 25,000 Macbook a year. And IBM is 10 times the size of that order.

Most of the Enterprise I know, big or small are still very much Window based. The way Mac are getting in right now are through BYOD. However, most CIO see this as additional burden with Apple devices, and therefore most planning are still based on the Windows world.

CRM, ERP etc.. lots of business class things still are not available on Mac. Although there are alternatives, no business wants to try.

Hopefully IBM and Apple could use this chance to smooth out the quirks rolling Apple devices in Enterprise. And more company to follow.

Dont get me wrong, this isn't about getting rid of Windows. I am sure there are lots of people who enjoy Window 10. But when our company tries to switch over to Mac, we have had very little support and real world cases to based on.

P.S - Most of you working in the I.T / Computer Industry would have no problem doing so, but there are lots of industry out there who cant risk to switch even if they wanted to.

How will this boost your business' bottom line, and boost it more than alternative investments?

Remember the costs: Not only buying new computers but buying some/many new user applications, retraining users on the OS and applications; rebuilding systems that integrated with the old platform and apps; replacing or rebuilding IT management systems that manage testing, deployment, configuration, patching, and support of thousands (or more) of computers and users; retraining or replacing much of your IT staff; testing and deploying all these things (with newly trained staff using new tools); and all the costly downtime that results from the inevitable bugs of new systems, greatly compounded by deploying all these new systems together: e.g., Why can't they print? The new OS? The new printer driver? The new printer config? The new application? The new user errors?

What does the business gain? Instead of clicking an icon on the Windows desktop, the employees click one on the Mac desktop. Then their application or browser opens and they do the same thing they did last week (except for having to be retrained to do the same task in a new way).

Exactly.

The popular thing to do right now is for businesses to move away from platform locked software completely. So instead of it being a "Windows Vs. Mac Vs. Linux" battle, all internal software is on the web and the desktop only runs Office/browser/email client, etc.

Now, sure, there is some software that cannot be run in a browser. But that list of software shrinks more and more as additional browser functionality is added and libraries make it easier to do complex things.

So the question is: How does this expensive Mac migration pay for itself in the short, medium to long term? And are there other avenues, like web-migration, which could have saved more?

If it's a question of software: IBM is a Linux shop and OSX would seem a questionable plan B after platform agnosticism in the event of a massive retooling due to its BSD lineage and proprietary fiddly bits.

Please list enterprise-class software titles that are Windows only and impeding a corporate IT switch. I'm looking for some incumbents to slay. :-)

If someone came up with a way of doing large scale fleet management of Mac devices (software installs, updates, rights management et al) in a vaugley similar way to the way Windows env (eg point and click) they'd make an absolutely fortune.

Apple does have tools for imaging/managing Macs - a combination of Profile Manager and Remote Desktop.

Also, if you have system administrators for OS X machines who need a point-and-click interface for everything, you need to take another look at your hiring practices.

Edit: oh and for the initial imaging you need to use NetInstall and System Image Utility, but they're not separate products still.

Apple doesn't sell any hardware that you can put in your data center, so you can't run those tools by most definitions of Enterprise Grade.

Sure they do, just throw in some Mac Pros or Minis in rackmount enclosures :-p

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/adapters/index.html

There is a datacenter in Las Vegas with a great number of rack mounted MacMini's.

I would imagine even the new mac pro's can even be rack mounted if necessary.

MS Project

SQL Server (and client tools). Sharepoint. Active Directory.

Serious question, since I'm decades out of date with corporate IT:

Are these considered problems or solutions? AD solved problems for the last company I was at, but only for the minority of machines running Windows.

For the majority of businesses that are running all Windows computers? Yes, these are solutions. Otherwise they wouldn't be billion dollar businesses for Microsoft.

My employer just switched to an Office 365 solution for Sharepoint (Sites), Email, Word, Excel, etc. It runs on anything with a web browser. No Windows required.

I'm just curious why you wouldn't simply install Windows on Apple hardware.

In IBM's case it's because they want to reduce their reliance on MS. They have suites of IBM packages that can be installed on top of Redhat, SuSE, Ubuntu or Debian to make IBM-styled linux.

But they also have Notes etc for Mac OS now, so no need to shy away from it.

Because osx is better than Windows 10?

Every version of Windows is better than running an OS that locks you into one brand of crappy, featureless overpriced hardware. Speaking on the software itself though, Windows certainly has got better, more logical window management and better tools built in for multi-display. Windows also has a logical and consistent keyboard acceleration system compared to the ridiculous hidden functionality that plagues OS X. Pretty much the only good thing about OS X is that it's Unix. Otherwise nobody around here would be using it.

Because Apple's drivers are insanely terrible.

Windows runs well in Parallels, but fortunately when you run Parallels you're also running either generic drivers or drivers developed by the Parallels team. Thus the experience is solid.

When you run Windows using Bootcamp you're forced to run Apple's own drivers to power a lot of things. But Apple has left their drivers buggy, unoptimized, and just bad. I think Windows has shown that with good driver support you CAN get solid battery life, but on a Macbook/Pro/Air you get terrible battery life because Apple doesn't support their own hardware going into lower power states.

I've tried to run Windows in Bootcamp, I honestly wonder if the people who constantly tell others to do so actually ever have themselves? The experience was most unpleasant, even graphics switching wasn't supported, the touchpad broke every few weeks, it ate through battery life, got extremely hot, and Apple's updates to the Bootcamp drivers took months.

I'd happily recommend running OS X and Parallels w/Windows. I'd still warn caution if your productivity relies on Bootcamp working and working well.

I didn't get too specific because it didn't seem the how was relevant to the idea of using Apple hardware with Windows, but I do have experience doing so with VMware Fusion. I had no idea about the problems with bootcamp, good to know!

As a boot camp user (only for PC gaming) for the past 3 years, I'm inclined to agree, actually. I just upgraded the boot camp installation on my retina iMac to Windows 10, and it went off without a hitch except for the AMD drivers, which aren't supported.

Except AMD doesn't ship the drivers for it, Apple does. So I have to wait for Apple to ship Win10 compatible drivers for AMD's card, and who knows how long that'll take. Meanwhile this is my primary gaming box (yes, it actually is quite a nice machine GPU-wise) so I guess I can say goodbye to PC gaming until Apple is gracious enough to provide me with an updated driver. (The last driver they shipped was in December 2014, it's been total silence since then. Who knows if they'll ever update it? Maybe El Capitan will have new drivers as part of an updated Boot Camp Assistant? Do they even care?)

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