90% of Windows PCs do exactly the same thing. The trouble is when people buy cheapo PCs and expect the same good behavior as as a $1000 Mac.
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Macs Saving IBM Money on IT Management Despite Higher Up Front Cost
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90% of Windows PCs do exactly the same thing. The trouble is when people buy cheapo PCs and expect the same good behavior as as a $1000 Mac.
The title makes it sound like satire from The Onion but this piece by Philip Elmer-DeWitt appears to be serious. I found the article on Fortune dot com. If I read it correctly, IBM has been "offering Macs to its 400,000 employees" for 3 months!
Did OS X just Win the War?
http://fortune.com/2015/10/16/apple-ibm-helpdesk/
This article describes how Fletcher Previn, IBM VP of Workplace-as-a-Service said that simplified help desk support requirements mean that "Every Mac that we buy is making and saving IBM money".
edit: I noticed that this article is listed at the bottom of the MacRumors front page.
Did OS X just Win the War? http://fortune.com/2015/10/16/apple-ibm-helpdesk/
This article describes how Fletcher Previn, IBM VP of Workplace-as-a-Service said that simplified help desk support requirements mean that "Every Mac that we buy is making and saving IBM money".
edit: I noticed that this article is listed at the bottom of the MacRumors front page.
The title makes it sound like satire from The Onion but this piece by Philip Elmer-DeWitt appears to be serious. I found the article on Fortune dot com. If I read it correctly, IBM has been "offering Macs to its 400,000 employees" for 3 months!
http://fortune.com/2015/10/16/apple-ibm-helpdesk/
This article describes how Fletcher Previn, IBM VP of Workplace-as-a-Service said that simplified help desk support requirements mean that "Every Mac that we buy is making and saving IBM money".
edit: I noticed that this article is listed at the bottom of the MacRumors front page.
Microsoft and IBM are two different companies. Win the war? All OS X versions together have not broken 8% market share. That's just slightly more than Win 10s share alone. Put another way, Win XP, which arrived 1.5 decades ago, has 1.5 times the market share of all OS X versions combined. Moreover, IBM is now largely a service company.
I would say the character issue resides with people who make statements that one could consider offensive aimed at people who may have had misfortune of losing their jobs. Then again, I am not surprised given the current misinformation, lack of compassion and believe in Romney's mythical 47%.
That might be a good partnership. Apple clearly needs help with services and Microsoft needs help with software usability and design. Both are getting better but could use each other's help when trying to take down Google's dominance in the cloud.Now you've got Tim clearly salivating.....
Google's dominance in consumer search, video hosting and maps. With regard to their IAAS service they are way behind.
All good points but...
We know where all of this came from right? There was a time when the XT and AT ruled the roost. Later PCs were called clones and that meant clones of what? Certainly MS and IBM are "two different companies" but some can recall a time when Big Blue staged a Manhattan Project type of crash development program to compete in the new home computer (microcomputer) marketplace. Their main competition (inspiration?) was the popular Apple II computer that was conceived by two guys named Steve. Back then many folks predicted that Apple's days were numbered from the moment of IBM's entry into personal computing.
Now IBM has Apples on the desks of their employees! Quote stats all you want but IBM is out of the PC business and Apple is still selling PCs and creating new markets as well.
If the HW cost is 20% of TCO, why not? That's what this news is about. They're saying money. That's all that counts.
Its not like they're going to buy 1000 Apple machine in the same year, they'll run pilot programs and ease them in.
It's not corporation's money tha'Ts the issue, it is inertia in corporate IT.
PC/Windows is like a very old car that's clunky and worn but hey, you know how to make it run by mcgivering it, making yourself indispensable to your boss.
1All good points but...
We know where all of this came from right? There was a time when the XT and AT ruled the roost. Later PCs were called clones and that meant clones of what? Certainly MS and IBM are "two different companies" but some can recall a time when Big Blue staged a Manhattan Project type of crash development program to compete in the new home computer (microcomputer) marketplace. Their main competition (inspiration?) was the popular Apple II computer that was conceived by two guys named Steve. Back then many folks predicted that Apple's days were numbered from the moment of IBM's entry into personal computing.
Now IBM has Apples on the desks of their employees! Quote stats all you want but IBM is out of the PC business and Apple is still selling PCs and creating new markets as well.
Yes, I'm rather familiar with August 1981 and even that exciting summer of 1977—Commodore's PET, Apple II, and TRS80 were all introduced. The Apple II obviously was an important machine, but there were quite a number of 8080/86 Z80 machines in the business world. Also, remember that IBM remained loose with their patent enforcement and left the PC architecture relatively open. One still wonders why they did what they did wrt Microsoft, rather than negotiating a deal for Kildall's CPM. Even as late as the IBM PC's introduction, few people could envision the breadth and depth of the market for personal computers. But yes, I get the irony of Apples on the desks of some IBM employees, but I do not believe that Apple can get significant penetration in the enterprise aside from mobile and specific niche areas.
I was aiming something at someone eh? I didn't aim anything at anyone. I said "normally" people end up looking for a new job when they get fired, and normally they find one. Again, I didn't generalize, and your hostility is unwarranted. But please, use the internet's anonymity and continue your assault, if that's your thing.
Also, cut the politics. You're lumping me into a group that I don't fit in, and I don't appreciate it.
Again, please just stop being hostile. I will just mute you if you can't have a civil conversation. I have no patience for the likes of you.
EDIT: Actually, why wait? Ignored.
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My experience in a nutshell. Used to have to wipe my family's Windows laptops down to the bare metal every six weeks or so due to bugs they'd pick up (despite many anti-malware utilities). I finally had enough, and we all went Mac. Great decision.
So are you suggesting that all these IBM employees suddenly became more intelligent just by putting Macs on their desks and that's why the company is now saving money on IT support? If Mac users are more intelligent, do they use Macs because they are more intelligent? Or does using Macs make them more intelligent?
They are still around but not seats on the board. They are still shareholders. Mostly connected with phlanthorpy and other Watson Institute work. It's of the reasons their cognitive AI research project is called Watson.
My high end Dell will disagree with this. It reboots itself once a week and for the last three days cannot figure out how to get to my outlook mail, so I've had to use webmail.
Nothing cheapo about it.
IT wants to re-image it now so I'll have to reinstall all my additional apps.
Always owned Macs as personal computers because I don't want to screw with them, I just want to use them. Work PCs are always, and I mean always, requiring IT support.
That is an interesting question sibcc. Just recently that issue came up during a conversation with friends. One of the guys retired a couple of years ago after working for IBM since the mid-1970s. Another friend and I visited the Computer History Museum and the Digibarn Computer Museum during a September trip to Silicon Valley. I came up with a theory but my IBM buddy couldn't confirm it because the PC project was quite remote from his part of the business. My theory is that IBM had a bad case of corporate brain burn from their mid-1960s federal antitrust troubles. The legal actions dragged on until the early 1980s and may have affected their approach to disk operating system software for their new project. Their big computer unbundling strategy coupled with the fact that they were in the habit of leasing (rather than selling) hardware may have made licensing PC DOS from Microsoft seem sensible.
I think that you are right about envisioning the breadth and depth of the market for personal computers. Of course, that comment goes double for software. Just think, before the advent of personal computing the big computers did not run random programs. When a customer leased an IBM 360 they simply ran the software that IBM provided to perform the tasks that the system was intended to handle.
They were minting money for a while there...
This is good news for Apple for sure. The downside I feel with Apple computers from this generation is that they are mainstream. There is nothing wrong with mainstream computers off course. But they do not offer anything serious anymore for the creative users. (Designers, illustrators, 3D content makers, animation, etc etc) Long time ago, there was a warm link between designers and Apple. But if you want serious hardware to do your job, you need to switch to an PC. There is a big gab between the iMac and the Mac Pro. I wish Apple had something in between with hardware that can be replaced / upgraded. I am not interested in an Xeon CPU or Dual ATI gpu's and ECC memory. I am interested in an 6-core i7, SSD disks and 32gb memory and an Nvidia monster GPU. That will help me out big time when i am working in an 1gb photoshop drawing. so.. I am a little bit "mhehh" with Apple *sniff* feels sad..
I'd settle for a quad-core i7 with 16GB of ram, a 512GB SSD and a mid-range Maxwell Nvidia GPU. I'd pay $1200-2200 for something of that nature (towards $2200 if it has Thunderbolt 3 with USB-C ports plus a few extra USB3 ports for easy current connections) and that's without a monitor or any kind. The Mac Pro would be awesome if they simply offered a "Consumer" version with an i7 in it instead of Xenon and an NVidia Maxwell GPU instead of those Pro GPUs and dropped the price towards $2k rather than $3k. No, they want to sell me an iMac instead and I don't WANT an iMac.
As an IBM business traveler I would much prefer a MacBook to this giant Thinkpad anyday. This thing is heavy and there are always issues with updates to install etc.
Moving through an airport with a lightweight MacBook or MacBook Air would be wonderful.
Moving through an airport with a lightweight MacBook or MacBook Air would be wonderful.
It's a statistical thing, not an exact thing, and different for every person. You've learned a lot about using your PC over the years. IT departments have found out that it takes longer for many people to learn much of what you know about doing things on a PC without needing IT help. Less customization means that people, who don't know as much as you do about computers, are less likely to screw up a Mac's configuration, compared to the more (easier but sometimes incorrect) customizations possible on a PC.
Actually, it's easier to set up a Mac (and have it run a long time without a lot of sysadmin help) for grandma/grandpa, or people who have never gone to college nor used a computer before, than with a PC. Macs are easier for less educated and/or non-genius-type people to use (a slightly lower number of dangerous options, etc.)
i have a Mac Pro (early 2008). I've had to have the video card replaced once and DVD drives replaced. Other than that, it works perfectly. Knock on wood. I purchased an HP PC around the same time. It died one year later. Not covered under warranty. The video card and DVD drives, however, were replaced under warranty. I have a MacBook Pro laptop (2009) that works perfectly. I have worked on many Dell, HP, Compaq laptops and desktops over the years. Nothing but trouble.
Says you, and yet this poll of 400,000 computer users found Mac users to be both better educated and consider themselves more computer savvy. In fact, PC users are far more likely to admit they have no clue when using their computers.
Ouch, facts hurt, don't they?
My experience as CTO in several hybrid shops does not agree. We specifically stayed away from white box, no-name PCs and did not buy the bottom end of named PCs and still had more support issues, both hardware and software. I am not talking about home use.
Not sure what part of that isn't believable. PC sucks. Period. Brand new out of the box, a class of 40 new hires, 20 couldn't get internet connection. the other 20 spent an hour. We had IT in the room as well. I got my mac, called help desk for some quick info on VPN. Done and done. 60 days with my macbook, ZERO issues. 20+ days with my Lenovo. It crashed several times, had to hardwire into the network and had unresponsive trackpad.
