Agreed. Ever since IBM sold their PC division to Lenovo, the quality has become junk.
And Lenovo makes customizations such that Windows won't run well without Lenovo-proprietary device drivers and applications installed. Given how much the Chinese government micro-manages Chinese corporations, and that they're pretty much spying on everything, that really bothers me.
You mean worse than that system-clogging clusterfrack that has been every version of Windows for the last 10 years?
People look back and reminisce about Windows XP and 7 as if they are so great and wonderful, but they forget that they were a nightmare when they first shipped. People only like them now that they've had years of patches, and that the hardware has improved by orders of magnitude since then.
Of course, a new PC is going to ship with Windows 8 or 10, so we're back to pointless bloatware all over the place.
There are some efficiencies of scale coming into play here.
If IBM is really going to order 150K units of the same model every year, then Apple can afford to make a custom spin. Much like how Dell and HP will produce custom variations for large customers.
And it will cost Apple less. Apple won't be fielding support calls for those 150K systems. All the tech support will be going through IBM's IT department, with Apple only being contacted by the IT department for the really nasty problems. So they can afford to charge less than what they could afford to charge a retail customer.
It would be, but I'm sure IBM is using their own big iron for their servers. After all, their main product lines these days involve data center equipment, cloud computing, Linux clusters, etc.
Those of us who developed software for OS/2 know that these performance problems were because the OS did a whole lot more than the contemporary Windows (3.1 and 95).
Remember how, at that same time, the Windows fanbois were slamming Windows NT (3.1 and 4.0) because it also performed worse than Win95. And for the same reasons - it was doing more, providing more useful system services, and had protection around critical system resources.
And, of course, both of these advanced OS's (OS/2 and WinNT) were running on the same hardware that home users were running DOS and Win95 on. (486 or Pentium, maxed out at 16MB of RAM.) Given the same hardware, the OS that has the least capabilities is going to run your apps faster, especially when we're dealing with apps that expect direct access to the lowest levels of the hardware.
To a certain extent. A corporation won't buy the cheapest computer they can find, because they know that those computers tend to be flaky and they aren't powerful enough to run corporate-standard apps all day.
Any reasonable IT department measures total cost of ownership (TCO). In addition to the price of the hardware, they need to evaluate how often it will need to be replaced, the cost of repairs (even when covered by warranty, repairs are costly, because the user is without his computer and therefore can't do as much work), the performance of mandatory software packages, the amount of calls to the IT support help desk, etc.
I have a few friends who work in corporate IT support roles and they always point out that the Mac users create far fewer support calls per-capita than the Windows users, and that they need hardware replacement less often. This cost savings is known to IT departments that bother to do the research, and it can easily offset a higher up-front cost for the hardware.
Maybe. In the 15 years I've been working with PCs at my desk, the IT department has never upgraded my RAM or storage, and they've only issued me a new battery once. And we typically keep our systems 3-4 years before they are swapped out (and when that happens, it is mandatory - we're not allowed to keep old equipment, because it becomes a support nightmare.) This is with Dell and HP laptops (high-end mobile workstation models).
I think RAM and storage won't need to be upgraded if the IT department does its job and specifies enough to cover employees' needs for the lifespan of that system (3-4 years where I work). As for battery replacement, by my experience, most people won't need it within that lifespan. And those that do can have it replaced by an IT tech (much like how they swapped out my CPU heat sink and cooling fans one one PC a few years ago.)
These are probably the things that IBM will negotiate with Apple. How to specify the system requirements, and training IBM's IT people to be certified Apple repair techs so they can order parts and do the servicing that would otherwise require sending equipment to Apple.
You can't use experience with personal or small business purchases and apply that to massive corporate contracts. There are things that IBM can (and almost certainly will) do that you and I could never consider, simply by virtue of the fact that they want to buy 150K systems every year.
