I'll specify here that I was talking laptops. All our laptops are now Display port equipped and we use Displayport adapters to VGA/DVI/HDMI all over the place.
The HP EliteBooks are like that now. We deal.
no, HP's have both a reg size displayport AND a VGA Dsub. Of course in addition to USB, esata and garden variety ethernet. I don't like how they look, or how they mount the ram in two different locations on some models. But I can't fault Hp for abundance of ports. That is part of the ugly (along with Thinkpads IMHO). They have every port possible when half as many would do.
Which you can still do with external network interfaces. Heck, my laptop at work has 3 USB ports just on the docking station, 2 on the laptop itself and more if I use a hub.
I guess you aren't familiar with video workflows. USB 2.0 is a not starter. The drives need to connect with firewire, esata or thunderbolt. anything slower won't work, so yes we would need a thunderbolt hub or hope that daisychaining works.
And of course, you'll extend it to buy things that will be more expensive, have less vendor support and that you enjoy supporting rather then what will provide the most flexibility and productivity...
Right...
More expensive? That hasn't been true of Macs in a long, long time. As far as vendor support, in our industry there is no problem with that. We get better support for our software packages on the Macs than most of the stuff we run on PC. And to be frank, I find that people are more productive on Macs. Not because they are better computers or anything like that. But because people actually LIKE their Macs. I have this weird philosophy of IT. I think our job is to make the end user's experience of technology as smooth as possible. All my users get nice keyboards and mice, and I rotate out old hardware as fast as I can so nobody, not even the intern, is stuck with a slow old machine.
I don't want any of my users worrying about how much of teh share volumes they are using, or whether their inbox is too big. You sound liek the kind of IT guy that imposes his will on the users, instead of facilitating their tasks and getting out of the way.
That's what I am, the Unix janitor at work. I clean up after everyone messed up the mission critical stuff.
Oh now I get it, you'd be happier on a 486DX100
And that is why all our work mandated desktops/laptops run a standard corporate image that is identical for every host, on a vendor supported solution (Applecare isn't vendor support) and that integrates well with the infrastructure in place, with LTS contracts.
Well we have an Apple store down the street that so far has given us better turnaround than HP does on it's machines.
We run corporate images as well. Who doesn't? That's like saying "we use coroporate letterhead on all of our outgoing mail". We do have a few systems that run on HP bloatware images, but that is vendor specified by some idiotic companies that will only support their rinky dink video gadget if it's using X hardware with the garden variety HP image. Kind of like back in the day when Digidesign (now Avid) Pro Tools would only support PC users running Intel chips on Intel motherboards.
The MBP Ethernet ports are standard. I don't get where you're going, I've always used RJ45 terminated connectors with my Macs.
Yes they HAVE BEEN STANDARD. I am talking about if Apple ditches the RJ45 ports they are pretty much shutting themselves out of all of the larger corporate campuses.
And again, in corporate IT, we make do. If it means using adapters, we'll use them. Because getting things to work > whining about some missing port. We don't have time to whine like most do here.
No. In professional IT you do not "make do". If someone that works for me thinks that "good enough" is adequate, they need another line of work.
When our main WAN fiber went down due to a fiber cut (construction in the building) I was here for 3 16 hour days in a row, on a weekend, to make sure that not only was the connection reestablished. But also that our SQL database was subscribing, our various web apps were up, and that the remote connections to all of our affiliates were working.
Making do would not have been sufficient in that scenario.
Network connections that do not physically lock are simply unacceptable. Thunderbolt is a non locking connection (like USB or Displayport). A dongle that gets you from TB to RJ45 doubly so. I honestly can't recommend putting them into production environments if the next rev really comes out with no onboard RJ45.