Macs End Up Costing 3 Times Less Than Windows PCs Because of Fewer Tech Support Expense, Says IBM's IT Guy (yahoo.com) 524
An anonymous reader shares a report on Yahoo (edited): Last year, Fletcher Previn became a cult figure of sorts in the world of enterprise IT. As IBM's VP of Workplace as a Service, Previn is the guy responsible for turning IBM (the company that invented the PC) into an Apple Mac house. Previn gave a great presentation at last year's Jamf tech conference where he said Macs were less expensive to support than Windows. Only 5% of IBM's Mac employees needed help desk support versus 40% of PC users. At that time, some 30,000 IBM employees were using Macs. Today 90,000 of them are, he said. And IBM ultimately plans to distribute 150,000 to 200,000 Macs to workers, meaning about half of IBM's approximately 370,000 employees will have Macs. Previn's team is responsible for all the company's PCs, not just the Macs. All told IBM's IT department supports about 604,000 laptops between employees and its 100,000+ contractors. Most of them are Windows machines -- 442,000 -- while 90,000 are Macs and 72,000 are Linux PCs. IBM is adding about 1,300 Macs a week, Previn said.
And the devs and engineers... (Score:2)
Were the users randomized? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, I'm sure our Linux users overall require the least tech support. But that's a function of who they are more than what they're using.
I don't doubt that Macs require less support, but 40% vs 5% says that something else is going on - and I doubt that sort of ratio will hold once people are converted in bulk.
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Re:Were the users randomized? (Score:4, Insightful)
But likely to be self-selected sample.
So it's going to be mostly mac enthusiasts. Similarly, the Linux users are self-selecting. If a random person is there and is given a random laptop, they are probably given Windows.
Re:Were the users randomized? (Score:5, Interesting)
They're not self-selecting at a rate of 1300 people per week...
The IT dept is migrating them.
Don't act like you have more insight into IBM's support issues that the head IT guy at IBM.
Re: Were the users randomized? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was at IBM until recently. There's some things you need to keep in mind.
One, the Linux numbers are *all* elective. There's almost as many Linux users as Mac, which means the Mac sample is largely being reported based on the people who explicitly requested it. They may have embarked on forced migration after I left, but the numbers are based on an opt-in pilot that was available when I left the company for greener pastures.
Also, ibm had long been using their internal IT as marketing collateral. When IBM had a big deal with Toshiba in selling their retail store business, they forced their users to start using Toshiba laptops as part of that arrangement.
Recently they've partnered with apple and microsoft is a bigger rival than ever. So their IT is tasked with supporting that partnership in technical and marketing capacities.
When dealing with any of these big companies, there's always an agenda that taints the messaging. It's really frustrating bring in this industry knowing that 99% of endorsements carry huge caveats and are motivated by marketing motives target than technical merit.
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Not when you have a selection bias, it isn't. If your sample selection is consistently biased, no sample size will be large enough.
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Not when you have a selection bias, it isn't. If your sample selection is consistently biased, no sample size will be large enough.
Agreed, but outside math class you have to look at the percentage and make an educated guess about how special they realistically could be. If you have a thousand employees your number one is probably a genius and your very worst a moron. The 10th from the top is also probably pretty smart and 10th from the bottom pretty stupid. The 50th smartest isn't aren't all that special though, if he can be more efficient with a Mac well it seems worth trying the top 100 or 200 too. It could of course theoretically be
Re:Were the users randomized? (Score:5, Insightful)
No.I'm sure he's correct. I use a Mac at work in a Windows environment. If I have a question, I get 'duh, we don't know, we don't support Macs, figure it out by yourself'.
So I do. Costs the system a lot less.
Macs for the win!
Re:Were the users randomized? (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that not everyone is you. At a former job I supported PCs and then the director of marketing decided that he liked Macs so he unilaterally switched his group to Macs. Anecdotally I'd say the users had just as many problems that needed my help as they did when they were on PCs, and in addition had additional problems they needed sorting out in the first couple of weeks following the switchover due to their lack of familiarity with OSX. Most of their day to day problems were software related, so the underlying OS didn't factor into that one way or the other, and these peoples' self troubleshooting skills were practically nonexistent so it meant just as much work for me, and in some cases more as I was also then tasked to find them alternate software to do a given task.
For the average users, once you get past the enthusiasts skewing the numbers the IT savings will probably not be as significant as this article makes them out to be. People are still going to be having trouble mapping a drive, sharing a folder, logging into an SFTP site on Windows or OSX.
Hardware wise, the Macs generally use decent hardware that lasts, but also charge a premium for that. If offices used PCs that weren't the cheapest thing that fell off the turnip truck they'd see as good or better failure rates than the Macs. And Apple hasn't been 100% immune to shitty hardware slipping out the door so spending more on the Mac isn't a bulletproof guarantee either.
Re:Were the users randomized? (Score:5, Interesting)
That actually costs your company a lot more, then, not less.
The trick, of course, is that it's a hidden cost that is virtually impossible to tally on a spreadsheet: your productivity is lost while you fix that problem. Did it take you an hour, where a tech might have taken 10 minutes? Did it take you several days when a tech might have had it cleared up in an afternoon? Who gets paid more for their time, you or the tech? That's a cost that's really hard to quantify, and so gets completely ignored.
My favorite example of this is when I worked as a hardware depot manager for one site of a huge global corporation. IT management issued a mandate that said hardware depots could only keep X amount of stock on hand at any given time and could only order new stock when it was gone. New stock orders also required the personal approval of the #3 guy in IT management.
I regularly went through my stock in about a week, week and a half, and it would take two weeks or more to receive a new pallet of computers to refresh my stock. Furthermore, as you might expect, the #3 guy in IT is a pretty busy guy, so he would sometimes take up to a week to approve my stock orders.
In the end, IT saved millions globally because their stock orders were drastically reduced, yet on the local level you had engineers being paid upwards of $1000 a day to twiddle their thumb while they wait for their $500 computer to arrive. But IT doesn't see one dime of that cost. In fact, unless a department gets hit with a flood of new hires who need new computers, it's likely none of the local departments will see a big enough impact on their budget to formally complain to IT about the process. Yet the company's cost saving methods caused a $500 computer to cost upwards of $20,000, and all of it is hidden from the bean counters.
Re:Were the users randomized? (Score:5, Insightful)
My first thought, as an IBM employee, is that the users that moved to Mac are probably the ones smart enough to know that calling the IBM helpdesk is utterly pointless.
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By that logic, close the help desk and let everyone figure out everything for themselves, you'll save the company even more!
You're hired! (We've been look for a CIO.)
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In the world view of CxOs wanting to outsource IT everything ... we're experiencing an issue with a couple of our vendors who are under a DDOS attack and nothing is working. Their 99.9xx% uptime promise is long gone at this point.
Oh wait, they are up, we just can't get to them, so .. their service level agreement is fine.
With proper IT infrastructure, this can be mitigated against.
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Re:Were the users randomized? (Score:4, Informative)
Of course numbers will hold up, facepalm.
Why the funk should a Mac need tech support in the first place?
I never had a Mac that magically forgot where the printer is, lost its IP adress, forgot how to connect to the DSL modem, refused to boot and waited 45 minutrs until it gave up to find its 'domain controller' (what is that actually?)
Sorry, unless a user needs to configure something, and does not know how to do it: a Mac does not need tech support.
I owned over the years like 15 Macs, the only tech support they got was replacements of harddrives, and in one case a motherboard (to a newer/faster one).
I'm speaking as someone who manages IT... (Score:3)
...at a medium sized company that supports Windows, Mac, and Linux desktops. I'm more on the programming side, but I stay on top of the support issues for various departments. Macs need tech support largely for the same reason Windows users do: because most users aren't terribly computer savvy, aren't confident enough to just try plugging things in, make dumb mistakes, and generally don't know where to find easy answers.
From my experience, Macs need very little tech support when we give them to, say, the
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I mean, I'm sure our Linux users overall require the least tech support. But that's a function of who they are more than what they're using.
I don't doubt that Macs require less support, but 40% vs 5% says that something else is going on - and I doubt that sort of ratio will hold once people are converted in bulk.
I see you don't have a computer-using parent. I put my foot down about 10 years ago and told the parents that one of two things was going to happen:
1. The get a Mac
2. They quit bugging me about computer issues
There was no third option. They chose #1. The ratio of problems before and after is far larger than 8:1, probably more around 20:1. You think 8:1 seems like a large ratio - I'm wondering why IBM isn't seeing an even better average. My guess is it's because they already have a significant firewall/
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Yes, I'm sure the 100,000 users at IBM fit perfectly into your binary selections.
There is something to that... (Score:5, Interesting)
I supported her for several months on a weekly basis because of her virus woes and constant update and install issues. I was noticing that her computer was getting old and dated, and suggested for her to get a new computer. I suggested an iMac. (And interestingly enough, Im an Apple hater, I really hate macs!).
Why did I then suggest her one of those overpriced thingies? The darn thing cost her 2500 USD and didnt even come with an SSD in 2016. But the thing was, I knew she wouldnt get more worms and viruses...because Mac is like 10 percent of the worlds PC sales, and the viruses usually dont survive that far when the percentage of ownership is that low, so I thought...that ought to get her off my support case...
The only thing she ever contacted me about after that, was the bluetooth keyboard running out of battery juice after 3 months of not being plugged in, we fixed that and she was back to happy.
See the picture here? PC and old people = trouble because of the numerous technical issues, updates, plugins, viruses, worms etc...with her Apple...all she had to do is
Me? I still prefer PC, and I still hate the Apple company with a passion...but at least they got their audience right, idiots that cant figure out the slightest thing, and they pay the premium for it too!
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idiots that cant figure out the slightest thing, and they pay the premium for it too!
Because of this, PCs continue to race to the bottom and are a source of trouble even for expert users and will never get better because those users suck every dime from system vendor margins. Mac's make Apple some money because, as long as they "just work", they can charge a premium and be part of the food chain.
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To be fair, some of us like Macs because it's a super-easy way to get a smoothly operating unix laptop. The hardware is generally within +/- 10% of equivalent Windows gear - though that calculus got difficult for a while when Apple fell behind the Intel upgrade curve. I run Linux all day, every day, but it's in a VM, so at the end of the day I don't really care what the underlying OS is.
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Next time you do that, save everyone time and money and get grandma an iPad (or Android equivalent, it really doesn't make much of a difference). Back it up to iCloud (well, the iPad, Android users have to let the NSA do it). About the only thing you're going to have to worry about is replacing the power cord when it gets lost.
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I have seen a lot of PCs hooked up to scientific equipment go down because a windows update failed, anti-virus soft
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Isn't it a complete waste of mental and emotional energy to hate something that leaves you completely alone?
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but at least they got their audience right, idiots that cant figure out the slightest thing, and they pay the premium for it too!
Or smart people like me who realize that they have better things to do than fuck around with cleaning up viruses...
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So... a product that doesn't require knowledge of the underlying system and just works smoothly and quietly while the user can just focus on what they actually bought the product for? Yeah, those Mac users are real suckers--I can't believe they actually think that sort of thing is worth paying extra for!
Less sarcastically, if I buy a car, I don't want to have to learn mechanic
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Yes, this is best thing to do with old relatives. My Grandmother now spends like every other day in a Apple Genius Bar trying to figure out how to use her computer, but that is what they are there for.
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because Mac is like 10 percent of the worlds PC sales, and the viruses usually dont survive that far when the percentage of ownership is that low
That has zero to do with the relative dearth of malware on Macs. (Pausing for a moment for a pedant to point out the one or two Mac bugs they've read about. Yes, we know. It's still proportionally much less than Mac's market share so move along.) Macs are initially more expensive, but that also means there owners tend to have more money and therefore the machines are more valuable targets. There are also still tens of millions of Macs out there in the wild. Even if there are more PCs, there are still a hell
Tech poser (Score:2)
Just because someone doesn't want to waste their time debugging some piece of shit PC doesn't make them an "idiot", it means that they value their own time enough to not want to waste it. I spend my time doing deeply technical work during the day, I don't want to spend my off hours debugging my home computer, or my wife's computer, etc. So I use a Mac at home and I encourage my friends & family to do the same.
And so do you--but not without chuckling to yourself first about what idiots those people are.
R
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He mentioned iMac - not MBP. He also mentioned a specific sum and that this configuration didn't include an SSD. SSD stands for Solid State Drive, it doesn't imply a specific interface. So no, the MBP doesn't have a superior storage solution compared to SSD - it uses an SSD with PCIe connection (hopefully NVME - but Apple likes their "special sauce"). A solution which also is available in less costly PCs.
So how is this in any way relevant?
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PCIe is a connection/connector standard.
Not a storage technology.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:easily made up in peripherals. (Score:4, Informative)
if things ever get too hairy for a dell, your restore process is entirely automated in windows or linux. restoring a mac is nothing short of corporate witchcraft.
To backup: buy a Synology NAS. Enable the Time Machine service. Configure your Macs to back up to it. Voila, done.
To restore from scratch: hold down Command-R when booting a Mac. Tell it to restore from Time Machine. Wait an hour. Voila, done.
Well done (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad he made a point of saying Windows PCs rather than just PCs, as the world in general tends to do.
I've always hated Windows and found it far more awkward, unfriendly and non-intuitive to use than literally any other OS I've ever tried (which after 35 years of software development is a LOT). Windows started out as a messy compromise (anyone else remember yield()? )and has only gotten worse over time. It truly boggles my mind how most corporates and their IT departments still continue to push its use over other OS's.
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It truly boggles my mind how most corporates and their IT departments still continue to push its use over other OS's.
Why? It's easy to explain. Imagine you are the CIO and your importance depends on how many people you manage. You can either go for Macs and have a small department, or force everyone to use Windows PCs and have a big department. Easy choice, right?
That has worked in almost all big organisations. Generally, people who get promoted to the CIO level are not driven by helping others, but by gaining more power. They couldn't care less that your user experience sucks. All they care is that they have more powe
Two factors in effect... (Score:2, Insightful)
One, the Linux and Mac users are probably ones explicitly asking for it, meaning they care enough to request it specifically. Compared against the general population, the subset is going to be more experienced enthusiasts.
Two, one of the biggest enemies of Windows usability is corporate preloads. Botched updates, sometimes 5 or six anti-virus applications and multiple firewall and update managers installed haphazardly.
All that said, I'd still take Linux in a heartbeat, but still Windows to some extent suf
Hoooo boy (Score:4, Funny)
*looks at post*
Get your asbestos underwear! Get your asbestos underwear here folks! Don't get into a flamewar without being prepared!
or maybe... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just think if apple had better hardware how dead (Score:4, Insightful)
Just think if apple had better hardware how dead windows can be.
But right now they have 3-4 year old hardware at new hardware pricing.
No real workstation
No power desktop
No gaming desktop
Well the new mac pro kind of fits the listed rolls but in a poor way with lot's of ext stuff needed to make it full.
No real servers or even a good mini server.
No tough book laptop
No all in desktop with easy to swap hdd's and ram.
No laptop with more then a few ports
No gaming laptop
No Mobile workstation laptop with workstation video and or high end cpus.
No dual cpu workstation.
No os rollback on new hardware.
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I suggest to go to an apple.com web site and check their offers.
All your claimes what they 'have not' are wrong.
Not a fair comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
Having worked at IBM before, there was a lot of legacy software than ran on PC which would often stop working because of a problem with a remote server. The only way to report such problems would be by calling the help desk. It wouldn't matter whether it was a problem with Windows, or whether you knew exactly what the problem was. It all had to be reported through the help desk.
I imagine that if you use a Mac then it means you don't need to run any of the legacy software. And if you don't need to run the legacy software, there's no reason to ever call the help desk.
I would believe if there were fewer hardware-related help desk calls with the Mac, but I have a hard time believing that PCs require more help desk calls simply because Windows/PCs sucks.
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So much of this! And also, knowing people in helpdesk positions to do extensive tracking of trouble ticket issues in their offices (not IBM, but similar scale corporations), the top support tickets were either account password resets or printers not working or inability to access shared file resources. NONE of these issues had to deal with the local OS whatsoever, but instead had to deal with remote machines. This one particular office used the IBM AS400 server system, and printed reports through it, this w
No surprises here (Score:2)
For years, friends and relatives asked me to help with their Windows problems. After it became unbearable to fix my computers and fix theirs too, I switched to OS X. I told everyone that I no longer had a Windows machine and therefore could not help them. I advised everyone to switch when they could no longer tolerate their PC's behavior. Some people switched, some didn't. Those who switched never needed my help again. Those who didn't were on their own. Ultimately, my pro-bono support incidents drop
Exactly my same experience. (Score:2)
There's just no comparison.
My 'data points' (Score:2)
Y2K remediation, sample size about 50 people. Corporate IT charged 2 hours for PCs, 1 hour (min charge time) for Macs. Most PCs took at least 2 hours, the worst case was the guy who was down for 3 days. Most Macs took less than 30 minutes if Corporate IT did the updates. But most Mac users did this themselves (in part saying, "I don't trust corporate to mess with my Mac.") Most of the required Mac patches were for Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat and other 3rd party products. The required change to Mac
Of course. (Score:2)
Typical corporation lock down Windows PCs so much. No admin rights, no USB thumb drive allowed, custom firewall rules blocking everything but TCP port 80 outbound (and even there, they use a proxy server to block many web sites). When the same corporations get Macs, they leave them alone. So of course the users don't need to call IT to install software, they have admin rights to do it themselves.
needs a real server hardware and software (Score:2)
mac needs a real server hardware and software. Useing a mini was ok but now the mini sucks and the mac pro is a very poor fit for the roll and costs way more then lower end basic server if just for local files / wsus like.
Does mac os have something like
WSUS?
AD?
DFS?
SCCM?
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No surprise here. This is not really news. (Score:4, Informative)
This isn't really news. OS X is a good working unix, it is built and controlled by the same people who build the hardware. It's basically fully integrated into the hardware. It has always had a very clear separation of user and system space and Macs aren't plagued by bloat and shovelware.
You get a mac unpack it, start it and it works. That hasn't changed in decades and holds true to this very day. Not so with a PC. Just watching my colleague hassling with Windows 10 and Office365 at my shop has me stand in amazement over the eternal shittyness of the MS provided solutions that apparently holds to this very day as it did in the Windows ME days. Even today you can't get a basic Groupware from them up and running without a total messy frustration ensuing.
I remember thinking about the brand-new first ever iMac and noticing that you could get one, start it, and didn't even need to adjust the CRT monitor or resolution. A godsend for ordinary users and maintenance personnel. That type of integration and result oriented setup was lightyears ahead of any ugly clunky Windows box. And it still is.
That they are cheaper in maintenance is blatantly obvious IMHO.
A windows PC that doesn't suck is still a rare thing. Probably these surface books from MS themselves are what comes closest to a MacBook.
I've said it in the 90ies and it holds true to this very day: In terms of basic system integrity Windows combines all the disadvantages of Linux with all the disadvantages of a Mac. The only reason ever to get Windows was and still is to run programms on it that wouldn't run anywhere else. And those are pirated software, Games or some obscure CAD program for engineers that don't know anything other than Windows.
That's why Google is moving into their Groupware and productivity space and Chromebooks, as the poor mans mac, are taking over.
Not that I like the prospect of Big Google watching everything, but anything that removes MSes abysmal model from the body public is a good deed. It's not that MS would be any better. Only with Google at least it works and you don't have to pay for it.
My 2 cents.
Linux is cheapest (Score:2)
My IT department won't support developer's Linux desktops, and we usually end up having to recycle old Windows hardware to skirt around the policies for developers to have two machines.
This amounts to a Linux machine costing the company zero in tech support, almost zero in hardware costs. About the only cost is the electricity.
PS - yeah, I know it's not fair to use my company's braindead policies to win this argument. But sometimes you have to turn your weakness into a strength.
Lenovo Payback? (Score:2)
I'm curious why IBM stopped buying Lenovo systems and started getting Mac hardware. Was it some sort of payback at Lenovo for them getting into the enterprise server business and cutting into their market share?
IT causes the helpdesk requests for Windows PCs (Score:5, Informative)
"3 Times Less" ? (Score:3)
I'm having some trouble wrapping my brain around that. Maybe I'm just tired.
Is '3 Times Less' the same as 'one third'?
I have a recipe book nearby and I can't seem to find any instance where an ingredient should be '3 Times Less'. What, for instance, would be '3 Times Less' than a teaspoon? It's probably just me struggling with the grammar of marketing. I notice that it is popular today to dramatize changes by saying that the (somethingorother) 'increased by 100%' rather then the paltry 'doubled' or 'two times' that just doesn't make a great headline. 1,000% sounds much more impressive than 'ten times', don't you think? It also helps that slashdot gives every word in a headline a capital letter. These are really important headlines!
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why call bullshit? Macs generally require less user intervention to run, and don't have automatic updates to screw things up at inopportune times. Program installation and removal is generally much simpler.
The hardware is also of much better quality than most "enterprise" computer builds, so it would last a lot longer and not have glitches...
The only people who doubt this story are those that have never used both Windows and Mac computers extensively.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
If 40% of his windows machines needed help desk support then his organization is doing something seriously wrong.
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Actually 40% sounds like a relatively low number. ... none of the unixes I work with ever had any
Regarding your argument 'they are doing something wrong', obvioulsy that was ocer the course if a year. So it is completely reasonable that over the course of a year 40 of 100 windows users have issues that require tech support.
I actually allways have a windows issue when I come into a new company and only have a windows machine, so that can add up to 4 - 10 times a year.
No idea why windwos simply does not work
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
What about when it's dumb users who can't even turn the systems / displays on or other stuff like can't work the web and need to call to get basic help?
When I worked at the Google IT help desk, I had to talk a recent computer scientist graduate student through the process of turning on his own workstation since no one was standing around to turn it on for him like they do at the university computer labs.
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what school and wow ITT is better then that.
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what school and wow ITT is better then that.
Stanford. Which is ironic considering that the founders were Stanford CS graduate students and reportedly wouldn't hire Stanford CS graduate students during the early days of Google.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
The only people who doubt this story are those that have never used both Windows and Mac computers extensively.
I'd put one caveat.
*supported Win & Mac extensively.
I worked at a newspaper. We were 2/3 Mac, 1/3 Win. Windows users were at least half the support time, if not more.
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Windows users were at least half the support time, if not more.
Perhaps, but is that because of a deficiency in Windows, or a deficiency in the users?
If the employees were given a choice between a Mac and a WinPC, I think it is reasonable to assume that they would self-sort by IQ.
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They were not self sorted. Computers were assigned by department ie finance, circulation & marketing had PCs, ads, news & prod had Macs. There were strong & weak users in every dept. So user experience is averaged out.
It was the OS.
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If the employees were given a choice between a Mac and a WinPC, I think it is reasonable to assume that they would self-sort by IQ.
When I did a PC refresh project to replace old Dell workstations with new Dell workstations, quite a few engineers wanted Macs. That drove the Dell project manager up the wall.
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Not sure why you think there is any distinction between patches Windows downloads automatically and the updates IT pushes out automatically.
In past experience, both have broken systems I was trying to use for work.
Basically Windows updates are just not always well behaved to the system; it matters little how they arrive.
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Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Yep still cost less than the wife's 2007-2008 macBook Pro ~$2300.
Within 2 years, the MacPro's headphone line went out. According to Apple, fixing that requires... wait for it... a new motherboard: $500. Anectdotal of course, but three different members of the family have taken Macs in for inspection|repair, and every damned time are told "motherboard" $500+ to fix. In one case all that was *actually* required was a new power supply.
You just explained why Macs cost less (Score:3)
Read your post again. Now assume your time is worth more than $0...
That is why macs cost less.
My own time I defiantly consider to be worth more than $0.
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It takes about 5 minutes to pop out a card or put in a new one.
So that's a 5 minutes of premium billed time for my PC for a problem that will turn a Mac into a doorstop.
In reality, hours... (Score:4, Interesting)
Five minutes to put in a card.
One hour plus to decide which card to buy that will work best with your system and/or local network (and by one hour, I really mean "an entire evening of reading technical reviews" if I'm being realistic).
One to five hours to fix stupid driver issues that arise because of said new card that took only five minutes to put in... for every major OS update.
Sorry man but you can't get that kind of lie past me, I used to upgrade Windows systems also. I got off that damn train so that I could live life, and spend time doing things WITH computers instead of TO them.
And as for the $500 logic board upgrade - that's after three years, otherwise it's free. Or they might just give you a new system instead.
You keep popping cards in there and rooting through your OS though like some kind of animal, if you enjoy it more power to you.
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In which case, $0 is not an unfair estimate of the time cost.>
I'm sorry you hate yourself so very much, but I do not. Like I said, I do NOT consider my time worthless. Nor should you, nor should anyone.
University computer lab (Score:2)
Supported a university computer lab with several hundred mac & PC workstations. The macs took longer to set up, but once done, they required almost zero maintenance. We'd have at least two or three PCs down every week for various OS / virus / hardware issues. And yes, both sides were heavily used. This was roughly 15 years ago - pre-OSX, so I'd imagine they are even more reliable now in a lab environment, as you couldn't lock down anything back then (the PCs were locked-down Win2k boxes)
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...except this is IBM and IBM did not buy 'crap windows machines' when I was there. I'm not even sure what a "crap windows machine" is supposed to be. I've had little trouble from most of the office PCs I've had. This includes crappy Dell laptops that ran Linux very well.
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If you are in an environment where Lotus Notes is mandatory then you have a whole bunch more problems that machine support.
In fact, if the PC is dead, that could well be a feature, not a bug.
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Well, why don't those users modify the code themselves and compile their own version of Linux in order to enable them to complete those simple tasks? /Slashdot
Whole point of Mac Pro is better heat dissipation (Score:2)
As the other responder noted, the Mac Pro specifically does not use hard drives, it's all SSD (as are most other modern macs, with the exception of some iMac models).
But even if it did have hard drives, the Mac Pro design is the way it is to ditch as much heat as possible. It's a vastly better design than a box with a few holes and a fan.
Re:How much of that is entirely Microsoft's fault (Score:5, Insightful)
Who else's fault would it be that Windows requires 3x more support?
Re:How much of that is entirely Microsoft's fault (Score:5, Interesting)
Who else's fault would it be that Windows requires 3x more support?
TFA does NOT say that Windows requires 3x more support. It claims that the TCO is three times higher. That is not the same thing.
Let's do the math:
I buy a low end Mac for $1000 and you buy a low end Win-PC for $500.
I need $500 worth of support from the Genius Bar, bringing my TCO to $1500.
If your TCO is three times that, then it is $4500, so you needed $4000 worth of support.
That is EIGHT TIMES as much.
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A lot of what you just described are costs required to run the business regardless of platform.
I worked for IBM. My windows laptop was not what I would have preferred but it never gave me any real trouble.
What it cost the mothership to maintain is an entirely different matter. I don't think I ever did anything to maintain or upgrade it.
You have to spend a LOT on other stupid things to just begin to catch up with the cost of an Apple product.
Re: How much of that is entirely Microsoft's faul (Score:3)
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I'm thinking they could reduce this if they stopped pushing people toward things nobody wants.
(Windows after 7, IE, Skype, etc)
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Being inflexible while IT moves forward is not a good solution. Regardless of the tech or problems.
3rd party drivers (Score:5, Interesting)
Who else's fault would it be that Windows requires 3x more support?
The vendors who supply the 3rd party drivers.
Macs are more reliable/require less support because there is very little a corporation or end user can add to it, to customize it beyond built-to-order. I've been building my own PC desktop machines for decades and I have had very few problems because I tend to carefully select the parts and use "better" rather than "less expensive" parts. However my PCs are sort of anomalies in this respect. When helping friends and family "debug" their PC problems the BSOD was usually coming from a 3rd party driver, from a second tier low cost vendor. By maintaining a higher degree of control Apple is less susceptible to such problems.
The secondary benefit of my BYO approach is that I have had very few Linux compatibility problems over the decades.
Oh, and Windows has been running natively (dual boot) very reliably on my Mac laptops for many years now.
Re:3rd party drivers (Score:4, Interesting)
Macs are more reliable/require less support because there is very little a corporation or end user can add to it, to customize it beyond built-to-order.
And just HOW many people need to do that in a typical Office environment?
Honestly, unless you are talking high-end Game development, very high-end Data Aquisition, or a few other highly-specialized trades, there is virtually no reason to need non-typical computing hardware.
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And therein lies the REAL problem with the placement of Macs in the Workplace: Fear of the Computer Priesthood.
The most common compliant I ever got about Macs is the preference file for iTunes becoming corrupt. Deleting the preference file fixes that problem. But I'm also obligated to remind users of corporate policy that they're not supposed to have terabytes of personal media files on their system. However, it's the PC users who screams bloody murder when the hard drive dies and the only copy of their media library is gone.
Do not even try to deny it. I have had more than one Windows Admin. tell me exactly what you said.
The current network I'm overseeing has 80,000+ workstations. Out of a team of 35 people, one
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I have never seen a company so good at breaking functional OS installs with updates.
After installing any new version of Windows, all PC users get used to having a small percentage of Windows Updates fail to install. As time goes on, 'update rot' causes an increasing percentage of updates to fail, always for some reason the user knows nothing about. Windows Update even has a 'hide this update' feature intended to prevent endless attempts to install a failed update.
Eventually, update rot on some PCs eventually turns into total update death, in which every boot of the system begins with the m
Re:My personal Mac anecdote (Score:4, Funny)
Wow, your anecdotal experience from 13 years ago is so relevant today...
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It's a semantics thing, 1/x is definitely better, but most people understand that when someone says "x is 3 times less than y", they mean it would take 3 x's to equal 1 y.
And it does make some sense logically. 1/3 y is still multiplication, so "3 times less than y" is just a slightly odd way of denoting that the multiplication is inverted, saying "1/3 times y". Just like "3 times more than y" is kind of an odd way of saying "3 times y".
Actually saying these things in the most correct way sounds the stranges
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No centralized management = bandwidth issues for s (Score:2)
No centralized management = bandwidth issues for small offices when the mac's all try to pull the same big update at the same time.
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At last, they got their "CHRP"! Albeit it runs Windows NT, Mac OS, Linux and BSD but AIX and OS/2 are nowhere to be seen.