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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

#131

Post by tibbon »

freehunter wrote: post #128
tibbon wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 marke…

I think moving to fewer moving parts helps for some things. I no longer worry about magnets, hard drive heads, removable media, or even fans on some machines. So it feels overall that things are getting better, but I've been on Apple hardware for 15 years now.

I agree, things should be a bit better. I'm hoping that some of the IP67 dust/water resistance from phones trickles over to laptops soon.

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

#132

Post by slantyyz »

greedo wrote: post #83
stirner wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And there's a Mac version distributed for OSX/macOS by Microsoft that's arguably superior to the Windows client. But I understand the RDP protocol. In a decent corp environment with a gigE LAN, the data compression benefits of RDP compared to TeamViewer or Apple's Remote Desktop aren't that necessary.

>> In a decent corp environment with a gigE LAN, the data compression benefits of RDP compared to TeamViewer or Apple's Remote Desktop aren't that necessary.

The performance gap is very noticeable even on GB LAN, especially as the screen resolution goes up. There were a couple of products on Mac that were almost as fast as Windows RDP, but they weren't cheap, and one of the two major companies (iRapp from CodeRebel [1]) went out of business earlier this year. I can't remember the name of the second company, but I think it came from an academia background.

1: https://www.coderebel.com/about/

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

#133

Post by disposablename »

vram22 wrote: post #123
stirner wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Remote Desktop passes draw calls from server to client instead of screen-capping and sending bitmaps. Similar to remote X11.

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

#134

Post by slantyyz »

rbritton wrote: post #71
WayneBro wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are definitely other biases. Macs simply can't do as much as Windows can in a business setting. That's why companies like Disney and Google have to build their own systems management tools. I could not imagine running a financial services house, an insurance company or a warehouse without Windows. Even simple software like remote desktop does not exist on the Mac. Yes the Mac has screen sharing but it is nowher…

There's this[1] or are you looking for more functionality than it offers? [1]: http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/

ARD is functionally the same as RDP on Windows, but if you're used to the speed of RDP, it can be painful to use ARD even on a fast network.

There aren't many things that Windows does better than Mac, but in my opinion, RDP is definitely one of them.

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

#135

Post by weaksauce »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #68
weaksauce wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my gpu was failing and they did a full replacement of the motherboard and replaced the battery because it was out of spec for 300$ flat-fee out of warranty repair. Not sure what the conditions of that were, maybe it required to have a bootable mac. The few times I have needed to repair my macs it has been quite painless.

I had the gpu die in my 2011 MBP about 12 months ago, and they even waived the $300 when they fixed it (and replaced the battery). It had to be gone long enough that I ended up purchasing a new MBP (I'm a freelance dev and couldn't afford any down time), but it came back a-okay. I dunno the whys and hows of getting them to do that kind of thing, but I'm still using the computer. Which is way better than the toshibas…

That particular time I had to pay it but there was a recall on them later and I got my money refunded a year or so later so that was nice.

I imagine you got that fixed during the time the recall was active.

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

#136

Post by salamisultan »

jakobegger wrote: post #110
talmand wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I hear a continual litany of woe and despair from our helpdesk about drivers, and anti-virus, and AD issues etc ad infinitum Sounds like human error to me. My two young children seem to handle Windows just fine without me having to constantly monitor their machines. Edit: what? my anecdotal evidence isn't as good as everybody else?

You should know that anecdotal evidence is frowned upon on Hacker News when it doesn't support conventional wisdom.

Shutup you dirty nigger

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

#137

Post by busterarm »

dwidget wrote: post #56
busterarm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always. One of the software/hardware architects at D.E. Shaw Research (with a Ph.D. from MIT) was _legendary_ among our support team for filing and expecting followup on scores of internal support tickets for minor and often non-reproducible issues like the behavior of his laptop touchpad buttons or weird one-off website behavior. He filed tickets for everything and almost always for things we couldn't do anythin…

He probably just figures it's delegating minor roadblocks so he can get to the 'important stuff'. If I could get a whole team dedicated to smoothing the highway in front of me of every little thing I probably would stop differentiating what was a pebble vs a tack. If he's the source of enough funding to pay for more than all of the man hours then it's more or less justified even if frustrating/frivolous. He's a cog a…

I see and considered the exact argument brought up, but he also wasn't unaware of the fact that we had an entire 1200-person staff to support on 4 continents. He filed at least three new support tickets like this _per day_.

His group was also the company's moonshot offshoot project -- not bringing in the bread and butter of the business.

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

#139

Post by walshemj »

grumblepeet wrote: post #102
walshemj wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managed to get macs working with share point yet

I'm a SharePoint architect and developer. I work with SharePoint Online every day, create forms and workflows, as well as use it for document management and lists. I have a MacBook Pro and everything just works. SharePoint now works seamlessly with Macs.

Natively? how did you manage it

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

#140

Post by slantyyz »

eosrei wrote: post #112
rdtsc wrote: post #20

OS licensing is probably cheaper as well come upgrade time. I understand macOS license is tied to the hardware so for a new version don't have to pay? With hundreds of thousands of machine that can add up.

Windows 10 is effectively now the same as MacOS, but with rolling updates: http://www.winbeta.org/news/windows-10-last-version-windows-...

>> Windows 10 is effectively now the same as MacOS

MacOS has one big thing going for it that Windows doesn't - there is only one desktop edition. None of that "Home" and "Pro" crap.

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