you keep actually bringing in "red herrings" based on incorrect facts
1, I never talked about 32b v 64b. Considering you are 100% dead wrong about i3's being 32bit. they are haswell architecture and feature the 64bit extensions. Not sure what relevance that has, or if you're being purposely obtuse.
2. Best practice is a misnomer and doesn't accurately reflect true business life. I would love to have all my servers, hardware and what not replaced every 1 year, nevermind 3. But business realities are that isn't going to happen. in any enterprise, where you have to weigh cost to benefits, simply replacing hardware because it's 3 years old is a wasteful practice. Any IT guy I have that recommends that just because "its 3 years old" isn't going to last long. if you can't show the cost/benefit on paper, you're wrong.
As for "aren't as usable". Who are you to decide? if a database query on a client workstation is isntantaneous on 5 year old hardware, and is still instantaenous today, why replace the hardware? If there is no tangible benefit to replacement, just because "it's newer", you aren't making a case for yourself.
you can claim "best practices" all you want. Best practices goes out the window the second that financial decisions and actual real hands on practicality comes into play. Simply put, in the OSx world, 3 years has been the arbitrary standard Apple has decided to support their OS. Things don't magically stop working because it's 3 years or older.
our software for example, we only suppot for 2 iterations. Guess what, clients still use 10 year old versions of it, because it works still. That doesn't suddenly mean, "oh its 10 years old, YOU HAVE TO REPLACE NOW!!!!"
Get off the subject of SOFTWARE. PLEASE. I'm NOT DISCUSSING SOFTWARE for this discussion, I was just merely pointed out that XP is DEAD. Officially from Microsoft, there is NOT MORE SUPPORT for XP from Microsoft. NO more security updates, not more NOTHING. A specialized custom app is a totally different issue. COMPLETELY.
Here's what you get with a SUPPORT contract through HP, Apple or any major PC mfg that offers support contracts.
You get phone support and break fix support.
When you contract is up, you lose both of those tied to that computer. So, you have to either find another company to offer the same QUALITY of Phone support and break Fix support that's similar to what you were paying. If you can't get that to extend the life another year, then dump your crap, sell it to a company that will give you some amount of residual value and buy new computers. It's VERY simple.
It's NOT a Red Herring or some other BS that you are conjuring up. With these newer IOS mobile devices, some companies might switch every two years of ownership since that's the length of the AppleCare plus and that will drive the decision making for mobile devices and how long a company will use them.
Now, in terms of OS to run? I had customers that wouldn't switch to the newer version of Windows until after Service Pack 2, which is two years after the OS got announced. Why? They had too much custom software that had to be tested and in their environment, they had to test the software and their standard PC models they chose. Plus Microsoft just simply took a long time to remove the major bugs, typically as long as 3 years until it was stable enough.
Apple has a COMPLETELY different approach to OS versioning. They don't completely change the UI as drastically, so they are TYPICALLY easier and faster to adopt a newer version of OS X, which is why you are seeing almost 90% adoption rate amongst Apple users. Microsoft would give their right testical to have that fast of an adoption rate, but they can't.
In terms of applications and custom applications? That's a whole other examination. Some companies are still running software that's not web enabled, while they might like it, it's still an older business model and some companies just have a difficult time adopting and adapting to how the rest of the world operates, but I would have to examine that aspect of the business seperately.
In the Enterprise Software realm, that's server based software so there's nothing to run on the desktop and that software was typically implemented either on a bunch of 2U servers and they ramped up as needed, or they might get one of these big servers with tons of storage and CPUs and just add more as needed. But that software was specifically sold as a 4 year contract with yearly support contracts, but again, we are talking about an Enterprise based software app vs hardware. We had our own internally produced ROI calculators that were specially written around THIS business model rather than a ROI calculator that was tailored to examining Desktop/Laptop hardware lifecycle.
Let me ask you a question, compared to the rest of the industry, is the company you are with more, less or equal to the rest of your competitors in terms profitability? If the company is more profitable than your competitors that are in essentially the same business, than you're doing fine. If it's the same, then that might be a good signal, and if doing worse, than the business has problems.
I didn't say replace your servers every year, what the best practices ROI calculators would do is they would run the scenarios for what is more COSTLY and it worked out that based on the CUSTOMERS costs 3 years was a typical lifecycle they would have to adopt. If you want to run them longer, than at least look at the actual costs involved, that's why they use these calculators because every business is different, but there are things they can look at when they analyze lots of different businesses and look at the support costs, break fix, etc. It's not a simply calculation.
Have you ever worked with a top IT management company ROI calculator to see what the cost scenarios are? If you haven't, then I highly advise that you do. There are soft and hard costs, but most IT people forget about the soft costs because they are trained in financial analysis. They are trained in how to get sometime up and running or fixed from a software/hardware perspective. But they are rarely trained in analyzing the business aspect of running the IT group.
I would venture to guess that MOST companies don't know how to manage their IT. Why? Because they have been signing contracts with companies like IBM, EDS, HP, and other large consulting companies to take over their IT Help Staff because they couldn't manage it themselves.
