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Macs are 3 times cheaper to own than Windows PCs, says IBM's IT guy

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Re: Macs are 3 times cheaper to own than Windows PCs, says IBM's IT guy

#121

Post by jrcii »

greedo wrote: post #69

I use a Mac at work, and we've started giving managers the discretion to choose a Mac for their employees. I've been using Macs since OSX, so fairly familiar with their flaws in a corporate environment. I have to laugh at anyone who thinks Windows would be comparable or cheaper in cost to a Mac. Everyday, I hear a continual litany of woe and despair from our helpdesk about drivers, and anti-virus, and AD issues etc a…

I love my Macbook Pro, it is great for development. The times I have to work with Windows I'm counting down the seconds until I can finish my task. In all these years I've only had a couple real issues: #1 I don't appreciate Apple updating OS X/macOS with features that send your private, local file search queries to remote servers and #2 it has a hard time dealing with smart cards compared to Windows. In every other way it's simply superior.

Re: Macs are 3 times cheaper to own than Windows PCs, says IBM's IT guy

#122

Post by slantyyz »

sosborn wrote: post #93
slantyyz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick to my trustworthy Fall 2011 MBP. You're very lucky you don't have an early 2011 MBP. Infamously untrustworthy. If I had waited a few months to get your model or the 2012 model, I'd probably still be a Mac user.

> You're very lucky you don't have an early 2011 MBP I have one. Still works great.

15" with Quad Core i7 and AMD GPU?

-edit 13" models did not have this issue

Re: Macs are 3 times cheaper to own than Windows PCs, says IBM's IT guy

#123

Post by vram22 »

stirner wrote: post #77
greedo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're speaking out of ignorance. There are applications like TeamViewer that are cross platform, if you don't want to use Apple's own Remote Desktop...

Windows' Remote Desktop feature is different from regular screen sharing. It's able to transmit data at a lower level than the actual pixels on screen, making it a lot faster.

Any idea how? some sort of compression? other?

Re: Macs are 3 times cheaper to own than Windows PCs, says IBM's IT guy

#124

Post by slantyyz »

st3v3r wrote: post #95
slantyyz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the laptops I've had, and PC laptops vastly the outnumber Macs, I've only had one fail catastrophically. And that is my 2011 Macbook Pro, which failed right after its AppleCare expired. It had already had its logic board replaced once under AppleCare. Thousands of 2011 Macbook Pro owners had the same, now infamaous, problem, and Apple pretty much pretended the problem did not exist (until after my AppleCare ex…

Good for you. I have not had anywhere near that experience. My anecdote cancels out yours.

>> My anecdote cancels out yours.

Sure, but I doubt it cancels out the other 10,000+ owners of defective early 2011 Macbook Pros.

http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/petition-demands-apple-fi...

Re: Macs are 3 times cheaper to own than Windows PCs, says IBM's IT guy

#125

Post by usingpond »

To contribute some anecdotal findings to the larger IT discussion in the thread, a lot of it comes down to this IMHO...

There are three levels of understanding of personal computers and how to manage them:

A) Basic understanding, the vast majority of users/clients B) Intermediate understanding, you often find yourself walking your relatives through setting up their mail client C) Expert understanding, you have deep knowledge of networking and user permissions for each computer on this network. You don't use apps to figure this out, you have set it up, tried it, and are proud of a system you have designed to make it all work.

I've found that many issues arise from folks working in IT whom are B that think they are C, and the frustration from not having Macs work identically as their Windows networking wizards causes friction. I think as people are getting better trained in BYOD, and the fact that there's no way around better IT training to accommodate it, is causing a sea change in adopting Macs.

Re: Macs are 3 times cheaper to own than Windows PCs, says IBM's IT guy

#126

Post by slantyyz »

mschuster91 wrote: post #106
slantyyz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick to my trustworthy Fall 2011 MBP. You're very lucky you don't have an early 2011 MBP. Infamously untrustworthy. If I had waited a few months to get your model or the 2012 model, I'd probably still be a Mac user.

Funny enough, we have about 50 Spring 2011 MBPs in service, no major failures yet except people drenching their MBPs in coffee and letting them fall (disks broken).

I probably should have been more specific, but it applied mainly to 15" Quad-Core i7 with discrete AMD GPUs.

A friend of mine who had two of the same model also had the same GPU overheating issues.

http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/petition-demands-apple-fi...

Re: Macs are 3 times cheaper to own than Windows PCs, says IBM's IT guy

#127

Post by wott »

rvanmil wrote: post #35

It's only anecdotal, ofcourse, but I used to own Windows machines and as a result so did all my relatives with me being the "tech guy" in the family. Not a week would pass without me fixing a relative's PC. Now, about 7 years later, everyone in my family including myself has switched to Macs and I can't even remember the last time I was called to fix a machine.

You wouldn't have to fix Windows machines either nowadays. 7 is way more stable than 95-98-2000-XP. I am rarely called about it, and when I use it, I don't have any problem. It's not unix-like stable, it starts to decay after 2 or 3 weeks of uptime, but it is a huge improvement over previous versions.

Re: Macs are 3 times cheaper to own than Windows PCs, says IBM's IT guy

#128

Post by freehunter »

tibbon wrote: post #78
freehunter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree but I would strongly hesitate to say "basically indestructible". Macs are incredibly destructible. They have a very thin glass screen, you could bend the chassis with your hands if you wanted to, and they're not even a little waterproof. How I would describe a MacBook is "quality". It's not especially durable, it just doesn't break down over time. Other laptops break in stupid ways. The hinges snap because it…

Anything pushed hard enough can be destroyed. I find the newer Macs to be pretty good partially from their light weight. I literally throw my 13" MBP around the apartment (toss it onto the couch, bed, etc) which I'd never have imagined doing with 10 pound laptops of yesteryear. I've taken my Macbook Pros to Burning Man (and used them while sitting having a drink on Esplanade reprogramming an LED display), and other c…

But going camping with your laptop shouldn't kill it. Dropping it off a cliff should (and would even with a MacBook).

Just because it would have killed a worse laptop doesn't mean the MacBook is especially durable. I'd say the durability of the MacBook is exactly what you should expect from a laptop, and others are just particularly bad.

Which is awful because basically the most durable mainstream laptop on the market meets my definition of "exactly average".

Re: Macs are 3 times cheaper to own than Windows PCs, says IBM's IT guy

#129

Post by freehunter »

mschuster91 wrote: post #27
freehunter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree but I would strongly hesitate to say "basically indestructible". Macs are incredibly destructible. They have a very thin glass screen, you could bend the chassis with your hands if you wanted to, and they're not even a little waterproof. How I would describe a MacBook is "quality". It's not especially durable, it just doesn't break down over time. Other laptops break in stupid ways. The hinges snap because it…

> The logic boards stress with the constant heat flux and end up breaking. Oh no. Macbooks do suffer from this! Remember the NVIDIA lead-free-solder fiasco or the issue affecting a boatload of MBPs with Intel GPUs? At least they fixed my Fall 2011 MBP free of charge (logicboard swap). Getting my old Windows laptop fixed with the NV disaster was a whole other story.

Which is extremely rare. On cheap-ass Windows laptops, it's expected.

Re: Macs are 3 times cheaper to own than Windows PCs, says IBM's IT guy

#130

Post by washadjeffmad »

treve wrote: post #109
StillBored wrote: post #90

Well, if IBM's PC image is anything like it was in the early 2000's probably > 50% of their PC issues are self inflicted by the IT people who built the image. From buggy unsigned drivers, to crapware for security/etc, I stabilized my machine by uninstalling a bunch of things that should never have been in the standard image. If you compare the PC vs MAC images at the last couple companies I worked at, you will find t…

> Well, if IBM's PC image is anything like it was in the early 2000's probably > 50% of their PC issues are self inflicted by the IT people who built the image. I'd argue that most issues people have with Windows PC fall in the category of 'self inflicted', but the point is, is that this is much harder to do on a Mac (apparently). I never heard someone building an image for a mac for example.

Not in the Windows way, but we maintain (read: throw together, once) separate images for fusion drives, on/off domain, and some other minor use and test cases.

But no one here is patching kernels or blacklisting modules to fix hardware issues on Macs, or working around some Intel security technology that disables xhci controllers on Skylake if you aren't on Win10 because the last LCR didn't cull enough of the incompatible hardware to upgrade from Win7. Things like that are why our Mac group can support as many systems as the PC team with 1/5 the staff.

And that's not including Service, who deal almost exclusively with PC issues by volume.

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