I've had a great track record with various Linux distros until I used the RHEL IBM edition. I've been plagued with problems and crashes on it. Don't know if they distributing a special OSX IBM edition or not.
Yeah, skip the RHEL version unless things have changed. I recall a very old kernel, terrible driver support and ancient Gnome desktop. However, using the extra-non-supported IBM Fedora builds worked really well and the packages for the IBM apps worked very well. Lotus Notes was actually usable on Linux. THat said, I still needed to use VMware/Windows for Visio and the proprietary Word templates that GTS uses.
When I worked at JPM in the late 90s the whole shop was Apple. Ironically, they gave them up just as Steve Jobs was coming back. Doesn't really answer your question directly but it does show that Apple as a mainstream corporate platform can be viable (IBM had them for more than a decade and gave up mainly because AAPL was looking like it might go bust).
Funny, I had JPMC in mind when I was reading this article. They're already relatively bring-your-own-device friendly and supply dumb terminals with virtual desktops at the moment, which is probably the best and most cost effective general solution, but I wouldn't be surprised if many business units, especially on the customer facing side, would find this IBM+Mac offering very appealing.
I'm also at JPMC and (at least in my department) it's definitely not bring-your-own-device friendly - and as someone who wholeheartedly prefers using a Mac, I feel like I had to bend over backwards to get my PC in a state to where I was halfway efficient and comfortable developing on it.
When they started disabling USB ports, and then I had to fill in forms for some IT dogsbody to install R for me ("open source....oooooh dunno about that! - will have to apply to Compliance for approval")... that's when I decided my days were numbered on the sellside (this was Barcap btw).
Nowadays, in all domains of sellside finance, compliance completely rules the roost, and is snuffing out all initiative.
Well, it's bring-your-own-device friendly as far as you can run the thin client on your own device, to your virtual Windows desktop. I don't develop on my Mac, I prefer to do development for Linux and UNIX servers on a Linux development server or image anyway, so it suits me.
Google - They had to write (And open sourced) their OS X Deployment tool: https://github.com/google/simian. Although not sure if they have over 10,000 OS X instances.
Its a growing trend though. Go to almost any university, and 90% of the people there will have a Macbook out. Employees are increasingly going to start demanding them, and it makes sense for IT to find solutions for it. IT's purpose isn't to dictate, but to respond. An organization will run more efficiently if the employees are more comfortable in their computing environment.
It is neither. Its mission is to advise on technology solutions to help an enterprise meet its budgetary and operational goals, to engineer the systems selected to meet those goals, and then support those system.
Insomuch that you can get "random employee comfort" on management's list of top priorities, I suppose an IT department could end up in a primarily reactive/responsive role, as non-IT employees demand implementation of whatever solutions they dream up. That's likely to be an expensive and painful way operate a company, though!
My comments are about NORMAL businesses with NORMAL margins, not the Google's of the world operating at 60%+ margins with the ability (and a need due to taxes) to burn cash.
> Employees are increasingly going to start demanding them
Employees who demand that a NORMAL company pay 10x for a computer are not employees. They are babies who have not a clue as to how business runs and don't care to burn cash in exchange for zero returns. They either get fired or not hired at all.
> An organization will run more efficiently if the employees are more comfortable in their computing environment
Well, how do you explain the fact that PC's running various versions of Windows grotesquely dwarf Mac installations in companies of all sizes around the world?
Want them to be more productive? Buy them a second monitor. A Mac is going to do exactly zero.
BTW, I am not a PC or Mac fan-boy. We have large numbers of both platforms, with PC's running Windows or Linux depending on usage. However, we have them for a reason and not because we like one or the other. In the case of Macs the only justification we've been able to find so far is working on iOS apps. Other than that engineering, business, graphics, etc. can be done equal to or better than on a Mac on PC's running Windows or Linux.
NORMAL businesses can't justify paying 10x for computers just 'cause.
Let's put it this way. Money isn't infinite. NORMAL company:
A CEO decides to allocate $200K towards buying a bunch of Macs ('cause they are cool) instead of spending $20K for an equal number of equally capable (in a business context) PC's and allocating the remaining $180K towards sales and marketing efforts.
Again, money isn't infinite.
Do you know what you are looking at in this scenario?
A CEO about to be fired by the board.
One of my standard interview questions is: If we hire you, what kind of a computer do you need?
You can learn a ton about a person from the answer to this question. Some will say "anything will do". Some will say "I have to have a Mac". Yet others will ask pointed questions about the tools we use, how we use them, how the various teams work and what the various business processes require. The last group are the keepers. And, you know what, in a lot of cases the right answer turns out to be that they need one of each, or even three computers. The point is that they UNDERSTAND these are tools that have to exist in the context of a business process, not on a teenager's desk at home to watch YouTube videos and be cool at Starbucks.
So IBM, one of the biggest consulting companies in the world, is rolling out Apple Macs to 50-75% of their workforce because they want their employees to be cool at Starbucks? I’d suggest you’re missing something in your analysis.
Fabricating a conclusion from something I did not say is remarcable but nothing less than utter nonsense. You went from me talking about an inmature engineer wanting a Mac for the wron reasons to claiming I said companies deploy such technology to have employees look good at Starbucks.
And that's exactly the problem: People are in love with Apple and the ability to reason goes out the window.
Again, read the first fucking line.
99% of businesses in the world are NOT IBM. They simply cannot spend 10x on hardware that buys them exactly nothing for the money or close to it.
The myopia that exists around Apple is truly infuriating at times. It is completely irrational by almost any metric. The evidence is in the tens of millions of businesses world wide who do not use Apple computers and never will. Because it makes no sense whatsoever from a purely objective point of view.
Fair point, I’d forgotten the first line by the end of your comment. Mea culpa and I’d give myself a downvote if I could.
Either way, let me give you the reasons that Macs were cost effective from the point of view of a small (20 person) agency I recently worked for:
* primary development of the web stack we worked on was on Macs. Windows PCs were difficult to get running properly, and Linux while generally OK often had smallish bugs unless you were using LTS releases which quickly became outdated.
* Our designers used Photoshop and other Adobe products and helped out with front-end dev so they were stuck on Mac full-stop if they wanted one machine.
* We had an Apple store 5 minutes walk from our office, so hardware support was immediately available if required.
* Standardised hardware on the Mac platform meant standardised connectivity: everyone had a Mac charger at their desk, mini-DP screens, AppleTVs in the meeting rooms to stream your desktop to etc.
* Clients that were buying design services felt like they were getting their money’s worth if they walked into a room full of people with beards and Macs (I know you’ll hate that point, but that doesn’t make it less true).
* The PCs we had in the office on average had more hardware problems and needed to be replaced more often than the Macs.
People weren’t forced onto Mac hardware (we had Linux users too) but objectively it generally made more sense for my company for the reasons above.
In your case the decision to go with Macs was absolutely justified. I would have done the same.
BTW, Adobe products run just fine on Windows --we do it all the time. And everything else you do can be done on a PC just as well.
Frankly, we've been using PC's and Macs since, well, they came out eons ago. Starting with the original IBM PC and the first Macintosh. Hardware and reliability problems are exactly the same on both platforms. In the early years of "pc clones" there were lots of problems with crappy third party hardware. Today you could blindly purchase anything at a place like Best Buy and walk away with a reliable and very capable machine.
It's the same with cars. Thirty years ago buying car was almost a lottery outside of premium models and brands. Today you can blindly buy anything in the US and walk away with a car you can easily drive 200,000 miles without problems.
So, why did I say your decision was justified when most of your points might be of questionable merit from a "parts and features" perspective?
Well, for one thing, yours is NOT a normal company. Your metrics are very different from those of the average small business anywhere on the planet. That is probably the case for any company that deals in knowledge or information products rather than physical goods. It is likely that your computers represent the single largest capex item in your books. You don't have inventory, raw materials, warehousing, regulatory/recycling concerns, etc. Your margins are likely far larger than normal businesses.
Yet there is one item in your list that justifies the decision far better than anything else: Your client profile.
Presenting the right image to clients and customers is of paramount importance. Nobody wants to walk into a dirty restaurant. You have to communicate the right message to your clients the minute they walk through your front door. A huge portion of the impression we develop of someone or something happens visually.
When they open that door and walk into your lobby they have to see elegance, sophistication, inventiveness, creativity or, depending on your niche, an out-of-the-box and maybe even extreme sensibility. When walking into the conference room, same thing. While doing a tour of your working space they need to have the same message communicated over and over again.
This is a case where Apple has done an amazing job of communicating technical and aesthetic sophistication, creativity and a whole list of qualities that absolutely speaks to your clients like almost nothing else could. If you had beautiful tables and conference rooms with amazing PC's on them you would probably be missing that extra element. This, despite the fact that the PC's could do absolutely everything you are doing for a lower capex cost.
Having Apple products throughout makes that lobby, desk and conference room far more valuable as a marketing and positioning tool than anything else you could showcase anywhere in your company. You could have a bunch of Teslas outside. If they walk into your creative space and see a bunch of PC's you would have made a huge mistake. The same would not be true if you were running a garment manufacturing business, a food co-packer or dry cleaner. In that case the Apple hardware would say nothing and provide little value.
So, yes, I agree, not for all of your reasons but for perhaps the most important one: Positioning.
Company X has Problem Y that can be solved with technology. Company X feels they don't have the know how to do it so they pay IBM to help them do it.
IBM has a suite of products/services that have been put together to speed this process up, but they will also put together custom products/services (for a handsome fee).
Mainframes. If you're a bank or an enterprise of a certain size, then a chunk of your annual IT budget goes right to IBM for mainframe maintenance and licensing every year.
Absolutely. I was at a local university, in April, where IBM had donated a mainframe. While the university wasn't sure what to do with it, it was spectacularly iconic, sitting in its own glass walled 200m2 room.
After a while, it had the effect of making students getting interested in banking and transaction orientated software engineering, completing the cycle, joining internship programs and maintaining the mainframe paradigm for the next couple of generations.
Wouldn't you? A massive mainframe you can play on as a student, no need for a VM, just log right in!
In 2012, The Economist reported that mainframes accounted for about a quarter of IBM's revenue and about half of its profits. [0] [1]
IT budgets for large banks and financial firms usually dedicate something like 20% their budget to mainframes, but it usually accounts for about 80% of the firm's workload/processing.
They provide services. You are a big company and need a software system that can manage your oil refinery or factory - they make it. They do hardware, but much less than before. Their DB2 database is a big competitor to Oracle db. They do cloudlike services, but not as a public service available to anyone.
Their competitors are Oracle, SAP and big consultancy firms. Think big budgets.
To me this sounds like the final step to the end of Big Blue's organisational culture and corporate identity.
Sold off most of their manufacturing and now becoming one more "service provider" - classic setup: 6 overhead / 1-2 delivery (1 Programme Man, 3 PMs, 1 engagement & liaison man. - 1-2 tech staff doing the implementation). Target task: sell more IBM services to the client.
Or maybe they want to live off their vast patent portfolio - when will we start to call them a non practicing entity?
Their transformation to being primarily a service provider happened more than a decade ago. Is them helping clients deploy Apples instead of Lenovos really that much less "IBM"?
When I start a business as a hardware manufacturer, and then the industry margins become lower than the expectations of my shareholders, then I need to exit the business. Selling off Lenovo provided a huge cash injection that funded a major deficit in their pension plan funding and a few years later tablets killed any hope of making decent margin, so the time was at least lucky. I wasn't a big fan of Sam and he certainly was at the helm when they missed the cloud. Ginny wasn't handed the best cards, but I like how she is playing them. For the future, IBM as a leading integrator of Apple technology into enterprises is clever, and the acquisition of Softlayer and building of mobility services is well aligned to the market. I agree with another poster about IBM being a finance company at its core. Ultimately, the value I see in IBM is one MSA (Master Services Agreement) as the contractual framework for a multitude of cloud services. Have you ever seen lawyers on a cloud agreement? It can take a year to negotiate. A schedule in an MSA is signed quickly. It's a great business with recurring margin from a recognized name and financially stable company. Just some thoughts.
So you're equating their decision to let employees chose Macbook's over Thinkpads (which have deteriorated in quality over the years) is somehow an indication of their decline? More large companies should give their employees a choice.
Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac is awesome! It is actually currently available and has also been freely downloadable in a preview edition for about the last six months or so. Note that it requires OSX 10.10 now, unlike previous versions which were more flexible.
However, I believe (would obviously need to verify the published specifications) that it's pretty much at feature parity with Ofice for Windows. I'm not sure about scripting features, and some of the more esoteric stuff, but I use Excel, Powerpoint and Word regularly, and it's great to have the same familiar look and feel across platforms. Certainly better than the previous edition for OSX and I expect that's what you were thinking of; it was Office 2011 before.
The fact that one has to struggle to name companies with large Mac deployments is a sign of the reality of Apple's ecosystem: It's a premium (and expensive) device that can hardly be justified for the average mid to large business.
Of course, there are industries and use cases where they just make sense. Web development being one of them, mainly due to it's unix underpinnings. Although I have to argue strongly that Linux is a far superior choice. We deploy on Linux and it just makes sense to work on Linux. In terms of web development there's nothing whatsoever on a Mac that provides an advantage over, say, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
The CAPEX side of the equation is i portant for most companies. We can't compare a Google or Facebook to a car dealership (even a large one), a fulfillment center or a manufacturing operation.
As one small data point, I just bought two brand new HP laptops for my kids. They have 15.4 inch screens, powerful quad core processors, huge hard drives and tons of memory. Quality is excellent. Cost? $249. These would be perfectly good business machines.
To a business this is huge. A Mac laptop of the same screen size starts at $2,000. You can buy excellent computers for EIGHT PEOPLE for the cost of a single Mac. Or, you could buy a few less and outfit each one with a second monitor, something that is absolutely proven to increase productivity by a significant margin for certain use cases.
And so, when faced with having to outfit 100, 1000 or 10,000 desks one cannot ignore a CAPEX differential of 8x to 10x.
Support. It is a myth that PC's require an innordinate amount of support. Before having my own business I worked for companies with deployments of a couple hundred Macs and lots of PC's. The support nightmares were there just the same simply because most issues were "operator error" rather than issues inherently related to the computer hardware or OS itself. In fact, it was weird to see Mac users (people who used them at home and work) drown in relatively minor problems while PC users typically needed help with higher level issues. The typical user at this company was a graphic artist (stills, video, animation, 3D modeling).
I could not imagine most businesses being able to justify such CAPEX decisions. The Google's of the world get away with it because their profit margins are huge and there's a culture to support. At the opposite end of the scale is the owner of a chain of restaurants operating at 5% margin. That's probably closer to where most of the businesses in the world exist.
The down votes are not because the opinion is unpopular, it is because it is so easily demonstrated to be incorrect. The rehash of the "mac tax" arguments (e.g. claiming that a $250 HP laptop is in any way equivalent to what you could get for $2K at Apple), misunderstanding how enterprises discount capex, anecdotes about support requirements, etc. The companies that are mainly Mac-based know what they are doing and what works at scale.
>> (e.g. claiming that a $250 HP laptop is in any way equivalent to what you could get for $2K at Apple)
If you're focused on specs, build quality and performance, etc., of course they are not equivalent.
On the other hand, if you look at how they are to be used in the real world (i.e., a typical staffer who primarily does e-mail, Office and accesses web apps), they could be equivalent in terms of end-user effectiveness/productivity. A lot of people use computers that have too much capacity for their daily tasks.
Absolutely, but it is incorrect to cast that as a problem of the units being overpriced. I don't need Teledyne-LeCroy's 100 GHz oscilloscope at work, so if I bought one anyway when a 1 GHz unit would do, it'd be hardly fair to claim they overpriced it. I'd just be an idiot for buying a machine far more powerful than I can justify.
I'm sorry, but this sort of thing can only come from people who are religious about their computer rather than practical.
A $250 HP laptop like the one's I just bought my kids is just as capable and useful than a $2,000 Macbook Pro.
Let's see, can it be used to log onto something like SalesForce by sales people, assistants, managers and other workers to manage customer leads and the sales process.
YUP.
Can it be used by various people to do email, browse the web, produce Word and Excel documents, make Skype calls and run other business applications.
YUP.
Can you use it to make presentations?
YUP.
Large display?
YUP.
Edit videos?
YUP.
Edit sound?
YUP?
Run Photoshop, Illustrator?
YUP.
Can it be used by software developers to maintain the company's website/s.
YUP.
Can it be used by graphic artists to work on brochures, images, pamphlets and other printed and web-based sales materials?
YUP.
Can it be used by engineers to run SolidWorks, AutoCAD or an EDA tool like Altium Designer.
YUP.
Embedded development, Keil?
YUP.
Run Eclipse?
YUP.
NetBeans?
YUP.
PyCharm, etc.?
YUP.
Can it be used to SSH into a server to run, well, whatever?
YUP.
Oh, let's see, can you run a virtual machine with Ubuntu Workstation?
YUP.
Can you run a VM with a Linux server?
YUP.
Multiple instances?
YES!
...and the above list is not complete.
Well, then. What, pray-tell, do you get for $2,000 that you cannot do with a $250 machine?
Please don't say quality. That's nonsense. Yes, Apple machines have great design and quality. That is true. However, the $250 machine isn't crap and easily outlives it's useful life (meaning, you'll replace it with a new model way before it fails) and it offers just as much utility and functionality as the $2,000 Mac. Yes, some are crap. The beauty of the PC ecosystem is that you get MULTIPLE choices at every price point from a multitude of manufacturers. We've had good luck with HP, Sony and Acer. YMMV. And, when we buy laptops, we test the hell out of one for 30 days and then buy a dozen of them if they do well. You can nearly buy a dozen great PC laptops for the price of a single Macbook Pro. You can outfit an entire small company for the same money as one computer. That's saying something.
And, frankly, the vast majority of the machines you see at the store from major brands are really nice machines. If you want to splurge and get a monster of a machine, spend $500.
BTW, we have both Macs and PC's. Most of our engineering machines (either type) cost $10K to $50K by the time you account for the software and hardware installed in them. The point is that we are not delusional about why we have the machines we have. They are tools for a job.
We would have no use whatsoever for Macs if it were not to work on iOS projects. Everything else, including web development can be done on any one of a horde of excellent PC's running Linux or Windows.
Even commodity computers today are grotesquely over-powered for the vast majority of applications normal and not-so-normal businesses typically run.
Look, wanting to buy a Ferrari is OK. Pretending it is a sensible solution when you commute on the 405 on a daily basis is delusional. Yet, if someone truly wants to drive a Ferrari and they can swing it, it's OK so long as they don't start to believe that this is a reasonable decision for everyone else out there.
Please, answer my question:
What do you get from a $2,000 machine (beyond above listed utility) that you can't get with a $250 machine?
It's lighter, has better hardware specs, a better screen, an incredibly well thought out operating system, better support by far, its a far more fair comparison to compare a rMBP to a ThinkPad, or an HP EliteBook, than it is to the 250 dollar HP you can buy at Walmart or Best Buy - yes, they do the same thing, but they are not the same thing.
When compared to a comparable product in the market, the product Apple sells isn't merely the hardware, its the total package, the support offered, the ecosystem, and honestly a certain amount of brand name snobbery - the big thing that impressed me about my Mac versus the 4 ThinkPad's I had was that everything "just worked" right out of the box, no full day customizing, and applying windows updates.
Instead I was able to start work immediately, yes, I installed some software, and a better text editor, but that was not due to deficiencies with the built in software (as in it wouldn't work at all), but that I had certain work flow preferences that required something more advanced.
I loved my ThinkPads, yes, they're expensive, but incredibly well built machines, but I always was having some sort of Windows related issue - or worse, when I got my last TP in 2010, I installed all the updates on it, and the BIOS update deleted the SLIC (the BIOS based windows activation) and the only repair was a new machine or a planar (system board) replacement - so they replaced it, and extended my warranty for 6 months - but I had other issues that required Depot Service, bad Lenovo packaged nVidia drivers that caused me to only get 16 bit color (they replaced the screen and system board under warranty), a RAM issue (intermittent of course), 5 replacement keyboards, and so on, and while I have no issue with the quality of the support I was offered, I paid 2000 odd dollars for the hardware, it shouldn't need depot service in the first year really of ownership, yet it was in the shop twice in the first year.
I've had my rMBP for a year, and other than perpetual issues with time machine backups (largely because I'm using netatalk) its been completely trouble free - I'm not saying Apple products are perfect, they just require less effort on my part to keep working - and when you spend all day long troubleshooting other peoples problems, the last thing you want to do is come home and fix your own tech.
I don't care about the down-votes. They don't change reality.
This is to be expected on HN. A good number of people here have never run a real business yet think they understand how things work.
Mark Twain:
"A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way"
The corollary to that is "A man who has held a cat by the tail can spot one who hasn't a mile away".
I remember the era of the dot-com boom. Everyone had to have masseuses, incredible desks, thousand dollar chairs, insane office architecture, an on-site chef and all manner of other inconsequential crap. And, eventually, reality hit and businesses learned the hard way that spending extravagantly doesn't make your business successful.
I don't have a problem with Macs. We own a bunch of them. Expensive ones. Fully loaded. And for the right reasons. Suggesting that a restaurant chain, health club, bakery chain or other average businesses are justified spending 10x on computers that deliver zero value when compared to a $250 computer can only happen in the context of having no idea how an average business with normal margins runs.
I'll go further than that. As an employee, throwing a fit if you don't get your toy is not only juvenile but a sure sign that someone isn't connected to reality and does not care about the success of the enterprise. Businesses with normal margins need to be brutal about managing those margins. I'd rather pay people $1,000 more a year than throw it into a computer that is not going to add any real measurable value to the business.
No. Go run an average business and see how impossible it is to make decisions that increase CAPEX by a 8 to 10 times without a really, really good value proposition attached.
In other words, you'd have to be able to show how your 10, 50, 100 or 1,000 employees are going to be 2x to 10x more productive by adopting a technology that costs up to 10x more than some other technology.
This ain't rocket science. This is simple arithmetic. But you have to understand how a businesses make such decisions without injecting emotion or platform preference into the equation.
The owner of a small 5 or 10 person company can make the decision to spend 10x more for computers for her employees just because she likes Macs and feels they are great. And that's OK. You start to grow a company in scale and numbers start to add-up. And, if you introduce shareholders into the equation you, as CEO, now have to provide pretty solid justification for spending 10x on computers without a significant and measurable benefit on the table.
Again, I am speaking about average companies here. I am NOT talking about SV or other tech shops where there's culture, familiarity, tools and massive profit margins that might very well justify handing every employee not just one, but two Mac, desktop and laptop. That is NOT the world as seen by the vast majority of the millions of businesses around the world, far from it.
An employee doesn’t need to be 5X more productive with a computer that costs 5X more to break even. If you’re paying your employee $100k and a Mac costs $1k more than the equivalent PC they need to be 1.01X more productive with a Mac to break even.
Answer this question: How much should an employee make a company in order to be able to justufy HIRING her and paying her $100K per year. Remember hiring cost money beyond the obvious, there's everything from opportunity cost to up to $25K headhunter fees. Same for wages, it doesn't stop at $100K.
Feel free to take 90 day, 6 month, 12 month and 5 year views.
If you can't answer this question with a simple mental calculation and need to do a bunch of research and calculations you really don't understand business.
Oh, yes, you should immediately ask a few questions: Type of business? Number of employees? Business phase/stage? Average profit margin? Country, city, state/province? Average overhead? Capex? And more?
Feel free to answer these and other questions to create a business profile and then answer the question about hiring a $100K employee.
Apple had the opportunity to take on all the workloads people used to use Unix workstations for, because a modern Mac is a Unix workstation. For better or worse, they ceded that market almost entirely to Windows NT and its successors. On the other hand, being a consumer company has been wildly profitable for them. But those workloads do still need to be run.
>> It's a premium (and expensive) device that can hardly be justified for the average mid to large business.
In all fairness, this does not apply to just Apple. It applies to the higher end Lenovos and Dells too (which are in the same price bracket as Apple's stuff), so let's not make it specific to a particular platform.
Not everyone needs to buy premium computers for their business. If they choose to, more power to them, especially if it makes their employees happier and less likely to leave.
You are not going to find premium devices at most companies because they answer to the same metrics. In that sense you are absolutely correct.
That said, this thread is about IBM developing enterprise deployment tools for Macs, hence the focus on that platform. So, they develop tools for a platform that few can justify deploying at scale due to the inability to justify the value proposition of an 8 to 10 times multipler in CAPEX. You gotta wonder.
Re: justifying the CapEx, over a three year period your computer is going to cost say between $300 and $3,000 and the person using it is going to cost say $300k. Any changes in productivity dwarf the cost of the computer. As to whether people are more productive on one or the other I'm not sure.
Sorry, it doesn't work like that in real companies outside those with margins that allow them to spend money like drunken sailors.
In the vast majority of companies, spending eight to ten times more for anything means cash isn't available for something else. In some cases this can be as important as having cash reserves for when things don't go so well or being able to hire more people.
Cash is like the blood that runs in the veins of a business and is pumped around to make it run. The cardinal rule is: You NEVER waste it. And that is certainly true for what I am going to call "real" businesses, in other words businesses that are representative of the vast majority of companies in the world.
Again, we are NOT talking about tech giants with 70% margins and money coming out of their pores. Companies like that exist within a different ecosystem. This is about what is far more common in business around the world, narrow margins that require management to be very careful about costs.
It is very typical to see opinions on HN that quickly reveal the poster has zero experience running a real business or have only run a software consultancy or something, SaaS or something of that ilk with huge margins. In other words, businesses you could run out of a Starbucks with a laptop, a co-working space with a few laptops or a small office with desks, a microwave, refrigerator and a ping-pong table.
Most businesses around the world are NOT like that. They are far from it. Want to open a fast-food joint? A million bucks to get started. And you better have a high net-worth. And, of course, your cash-flow will be significant and your product is perishable. Want to do a hardware startup as I have done more than once and manufacture your own electronics, mechanical components, service, etc. You need 10,000 square feet, half a million to a million dollars in equipment, insanely expensive software...and you haven't even started to develop your product yet.
So, no, most businesses won't pay ten times more for a computer that offers nearly zero added value because it would be utterly irrational and irresponsible to do so.
76 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadThe right amount of money to pay this company for their software is ZERO
Nowadays, in all domains of sellside finance, compliance completely rules the roost, and is snuffing out all initiative.
Facebook also has 16000 Managed Macs. I think they're the biggest users right now.
It is neither. Its mission is to advise on technology solutions to help an enterprise meet its budgetary and operational goals, to engineer the systems selected to meet those goals, and then support those system.
Insomuch that you can get "random employee comfort" on management's list of top priorities, I suppose an IT department could end up in a primarily reactive/responsive role, as non-IT employees demand implementation of whatever solutions they dream up. That's likely to be an expensive and painful way operate a company, though!
> Employees are increasingly going to start demanding them
Employees who demand that a NORMAL company pay 10x for a computer are not employees. They are babies who have not a clue as to how business runs and don't care to burn cash in exchange for zero returns. They either get fired or not hired at all.
> An organization will run more efficiently if the employees are more comfortable in their computing environment
Well, how do you explain the fact that PC's running various versions of Windows grotesquely dwarf Mac installations in companies of all sizes around the world?
Want them to be more productive? Buy them a second monitor. A Mac is going to do exactly zero.
BTW, I am not a PC or Mac fan-boy. We have large numbers of both platforms, with PC's running Windows or Linux depending on usage. However, we have them for a reason and not because we like one or the other. In the case of Macs the only justification we've been able to find so far is working on iOS apps. Other than that engineering, business, graphics, etc. can be done equal to or better than on a Mac on PC's running Windows or Linux.
NORMAL businesses can't justify paying 10x for computers just 'cause.
Let's put it this way. Money isn't infinite. NORMAL company:
A CEO decides to allocate $200K towards buying a bunch of Macs ('cause they are cool) instead of spending $20K for an equal number of equally capable (in a business context) PC's and allocating the remaining $180K towards sales and marketing efforts.
Again, money isn't infinite.
Do you know what you are looking at in this scenario?
A CEO about to be fired by the board.
One of my standard interview questions is: If we hire you, what kind of a computer do you need?
You can learn a ton about a person from the answer to this question. Some will say "anything will do". Some will say "I have to have a Mac". Yet others will ask pointed questions about the tools we use, how we use them, how the various teams work and what the various business processes require. The last group are the keepers. And, you know what, in a lot of cases the right answer turns out to be that they need one of each, or even three computers. The point is that they UNDERSTAND these are tools that have to exist in the context of a business process, not on a teenager's desk at home to watch YouTube videos and be cool at Starbucks.
Fabricating a conclusion from something I did not say is remarcable but nothing less than utter nonsense. You went from me talking about an inmature engineer wanting a Mac for the wron reasons to claiming I said companies deploy such technology to have employees look good at Starbucks.
And that's exactly the problem: People are in love with Apple and the ability to reason goes out the window.
Again, read the first fucking line.
99% of businesses in the world are NOT IBM. They simply cannot spend 10x on hardware that buys them exactly nothing for the money or close to it.
The myopia that exists around Apple is truly infuriating at times. It is completely irrational by almost any metric. The evidence is in the tens of millions of businesses world wide who do not use Apple computers and never will. Because it makes no sense whatsoever from a purely objective point of view.
Either way, let me give you the reasons that Macs were cost effective from the point of view of a small (20 person) agency I recently worked for:
* primary development of the web stack we worked on was on Macs. Windows PCs were difficult to get running properly, and Linux while generally OK often had smallish bugs unless you were using LTS releases which quickly became outdated.
* Our designers used Photoshop and other Adobe products and helped out with front-end dev so they were stuck on Mac full-stop if they wanted one machine.
* We had an Apple store 5 minutes walk from our office, so hardware support was immediately available if required.
* Standardised hardware on the Mac platform meant standardised connectivity: everyone had a Mac charger at their desk, mini-DP screens, AppleTVs in the meeting rooms to stream your desktop to etc.
* Clients that were buying design services felt like they were getting their money’s worth if they walked into a room full of people with beards and Macs (I know you’ll hate that point, but that doesn’t make it less true).
* The PCs we had in the office on average had more hardware problems and needed to be replaced more often than the Macs.
People weren’t forced onto Mac hardware (we had Linux users too) but objectively it generally made more sense for my company for the reasons above.
BTW, Adobe products run just fine on Windows --we do it all the time. And everything else you do can be done on a PC just as well.
Frankly, we've been using PC's and Macs since, well, they came out eons ago. Starting with the original IBM PC and the first Macintosh. Hardware and reliability problems are exactly the same on both platforms. In the early years of "pc clones" there were lots of problems with crappy third party hardware. Today you could blindly purchase anything at a place like Best Buy and walk away with a reliable and very capable machine.
It's the same with cars. Thirty years ago buying car was almost a lottery outside of premium models and brands. Today you can blindly buy anything in the US and walk away with a car you can easily drive 200,000 miles without problems.
So, why did I say your decision was justified when most of your points might be of questionable merit from a "parts and features" perspective?
Well, for one thing, yours is NOT a normal company. Your metrics are very different from those of the average small business anywhere on the planet. That is probably the case for any company that deals in knowledge or information products rather than physical goods. It is likely that your computers represent the single largest capex item in your books. You don't have inventory, raw materials, warehousing, regulatory/recycling concerns, etc. Your margins are likely far larger than normal businesses.
Yet there is one item in your list that justifies the decision far better than anything else: Your client profile.
Presenting the right image to clients and customers is of paramount importance. Nobody wants to walk into a dirty restaurant. You have to communicate the right message to your clients the minute they walk through your front door. A huge portion of the impression we develop of someone or something happens visually.
When they open that door and walk into your lobby they have to see elegance, sophistication, inventiveness, creativity or, depending on your niche, an out-of-the-box and maybe even extreme sensibility. When walking into the conference room, same thing. While doing a tour of your working space they need to have the same message communicated over and over again.
This is a case where Apple has done an amazing job of communicating technical and aesthetic sophistication, creativity and a whole list of qualities that absolutely speaks to your clients like almost nothing else could. If you had beautiful tables and conference rooms with amazing PC's on them you would probably be missing that extra element. This, despite the fact that the PC's could do absolutely everything you are doing for a lower capex cost.
Having Apple products throughout makes that lobby, desk and conference room far more valuable as a marketing and positioning tool than anything else you could showcase anywhere in your company. You could have a bunch of Teslas outside. If they walk into your creative space and see a bunch of PC's you would have made a huge mistake. The same would not be true if you were running a garment manufacturing business, a food co-packer or dry cleaner. In that case the Apple hardware would say nothing and provide little value.
So, yes, I agree, not for all of your reasons but for perhaps the most important one: Positioning.
Company X has Problem Y that can be solved with technology. Company X feels they don't have the know how to do it so they pay IBM to help them do it.
IBM has a suite of products/services that have been put together to speed this process up, but they will also put together custom products/services (for a handsome fee).
After a while, it had the effect of making students getting interested in banking and transaction orientated software engineering, completing the cycle, joining internship programs and maintaining the mainframe paradigm for the next couple of generations.
Wouldn't you? A massive mainframe you can play on as a student, no need for a VM, just log right in!
IT budgets for large banks and financial firms usually dedicate something like 20% their budget to mainframes, but it usually accounts for about 80% of the firm's workload/processing.
[0]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/09/ibms-mainf... [1]: http://blog.nullspace.io/mainframes.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/17/toshiba_buys_ibm_ret...
Starbucks seems to be in the process of upgrading to newer models, and they say Toshiba on them instead of IBM.
Their competitors are Oracle, SAP and big consultancy firms. Think big budgets.
Sold off most of their manufacturing and now becoming one more "service provider" - classic setup: 6 overhead / 1-2 delivery (1 Programme Man, 3 PMs, 1 engagement & liaison man. - 1-2 tech staff doing the implementation). Target task: sell more IBM services to the client.
Or maybe they want to live off their vast patent portfolio - when will we start to call them a non practicing entity?
Sad story.
I work for IBM Research, but not in hardware.
The hyperbole is strong with this one.
However, I believe (would obviously need to verify the published specifications) that it's pretty much at feature parity with Ofice for Windows. I'm not sure about scripting features, and some of the more esoteric stuff, but I use Excel, Powerpoint and Word regularly, and it's great to have the same familiar look and feel across platforms. Certainly better than the previous edition for OSX and I expect that's what you were thinking of; it was Office 2011 before.
Of course, there are industries and use cases where they just make sense. Web development being one of them, mainly due to it's unix underpinnings. Although I have to argue strongly that Linux is a far superior choice. We deploy on Linux and it just makes sense to work on Linux. In terms of web development there's nothing whatsoever on a Mac that provides an advantage over, say, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
The CAPEX side of the equation is i portant for most companies. We can't compare a Google or Facebook to a car dealership (even a large one), a fulfillment center or a manufacturing operation.
As one small data point, I just bought two brand new HP laptops for my kids. They have 15.4 inch screens, powerful quad core processors, huge hard drives and tons of memory. Quality is excellent. Cost? $249. These would be perfectly good business machines.
To a business this is huge. A Mac laptop of the same screen size starts at $2,000. You can buy excellent computers for EIGHT PEOPLE for the cost of a single Mac. Or, you could buy a few less and outfit each one with a second monitor, something that is absolutely proven to increase productivity by a significant margin for certain use cases.
And so, when faced with having to outfit 100, 1000 or 10,000 desks one cannot ignore a CAPEX differential of 8x to 10x.
Support. It is a myth that PC's require an innordinate amount of support. Before having my own business I worked for companies with deployments of a couple hundred Macs and lots of PC's. The support nightmares were there just the same simply because most issues were "operator error" rather than issues inherently related to the computer hardware or OS itself. In fact, it was weird to see Mac users (people who used them at home and work) drown in relatively minor problems while PC users typically needed help with higher level issues. The typical user at this company was a graphic artist (stills, video, animation, 3D modeling).
I could not imagine most businesses being able to justify such CAPEX decisions. The Google's of the world get away with it because their profit margins are huge and there's a culture to support. At the opposite end of the scale is the owner of a chain of restaurants operating at 5% margin. That's probably closer to where most of the businesses in the world exist.
I would have to mostly agree though, maybe besides the HP point. It's not quite a proper comparison.
If you're focused on specs, build quality and performance, etc., of course they are not equivalent.
On the other hand, if you look at how they are to be used in the real world (i.e., a typical staffer who primarily does e-mail, Office and accesses web apps), they could be equivalent in terms of end-user effectiveness/productivity. A lot of people use computers that have too much capacity for their daily tasks.
A $250 HP laptop like the one's I just bought my kids is just as capable and useful than a $2,000 Macbook Pro.
Let's see, can it be used to log onto something like SalesForce by sales people, assistants, managers and other workers to manage customer leads and the sales process.
YUP.
Can it be used by various people to do email, browse the web, produce Word and Excel documents, make Skype calls and run other business applications.
YUP.
Can you use it to make presentations?
YUP.
Large display?
YUP.
Edit videos?
YUP.
Edit sound?
YUP?
Run Photoshop, Illustrator?
YUP.
Can it be used by software developers to maintain the company's website/s.
YUP.
Can it be used by graphic artists to work on brochures, images, pamphlets and other printed and web-based sales materials?
YUP.
Can it be used by engineers to run SolidWorks, AutoCAD or an EDA tool like Altium Designer.
YUP.
Embedded development, Keil?
YUP.
Run Eclipse?
YUP.
NetBeans?
YUP.
PyCharm, etc.?
YUP.
Can it be used to SSH into a server to run, well, whatever?
YUP.
Oh, let's see, can you run a virtual machine with Ubuntu Workstation?
YUP.
Can you run a VM with a Linux server?
YUP.
Multiple instances?
YES!
...and the above list is not complete.
Well, then. What, pray-tell, do you get for $2,000 that you cannot do with a $250 machine?
Please don't say quality. That's nonsense. Yes, Apple machines have great design and quality. That is true. However, the $250 machine isn't crap and easily outlives it's useful life (meaning, you'll replace it with a new model way before it fails) and it offers just as much utility and functionality as the $2,000 Mac. Yes, some are crap. The beauty of the PC ecosystem is that you get MULTIPLE choices at every price point from a multitude of manufacturers. We've had good luck with HP, Sony and Acer. YMMV. And, when we buy laptops, we test the hell out of one for 30 days and then buy a dozen of them if they do well. You can nearly buy a dozen great PC laptops for the price of a single Macbook Pro. You can outfit an entire small company for the same money as one computer. That's saying something.
And, frankly, the vast majority of the machines you see at the store from major brands are really nice machines. If you want to splurge and get a monster of a machine, spend $500.
BTW, we have both Macs and PC's. Most of our engineering machines (either type) cost $10K to $50K by the time you account for the software and hardware installed in them. The point is that we are not delusional about why we have the machines we have. They are tools for a job.
We would have no use whatsoever for Macs if it were not to work on iOS projects. Everything else, including web development can be done on any one of a horde of excellent PC's running Linux or Windows.
Even commodity computers today are grotesquely over-powered for the vast majority of applications normal and not-so-normal businesses typically run.
Look, wanting to buy a Ferrari is OK. Pretending it is a sensible solution when you commute on the 405 on a daily basis is delusional. Yet, if someone truly wants to drive a Ferrari and they can swing it, it's OK so long as they don't start to believe that this is a reasonable decision for everyone else out there.
Please, answer my question:
What do you get from a $2,000 machine (beyond above listed utility) that you can't get with a $250 machine?
It's a very simple question.
It's lighter, has better hardware specs, a better screen, an incredibly well thought out operating system, better support by far, its a far more fair comparison to compare a rMBP to a ThinkPad, or an HP EliteBook, than it is to the 250 dollar HP you can buy at Walmart or Best Buy - yes, they do the same thing, but they are not the same thing.
When compared to a comparable product in the market, the product Apple sells isn't merely the hardware, its the total package, the support offered, the ecosystem, and honestly a certain amount of brand name snobbery - the big thing that impressed me about my Mac versus the 4 ThinkPad's I had was that everything "just worked" right out of the box, no full day customizing, and applying windows updates.
Instead I was able to start work immediately, yes, I installed some software, and a better text editor, but that was not due to deficiencies with the built in software (as in it wouldn't work at all), but that I had certain work flow preferences that required something more advanced.
I loved my ThinkPads, yes, they're expensive, but incredibly well built machines, but I always was having some sort of Windows related issue - or worse, when I got my last TP in 2010, I installed all the updates on it, and the BIOS update deleted the SLIC (the BIOS based windows activation) and the only repair was a new machine or a planar (system board) replacement - so they replaced it, and extended my warranty for 6 months - but I had other issues that required Depot Service, bad Lenovo packaged nVidia drivers that caused me to only get 16 bit color (they replaced the screen and system board under warranty), a RAM issue (intermittent of course), 5 replacement keyboards, and so on, and while I have no issue with the quality of the support I was offered, I paid 2000 odd dollars for the hardware, it shouldn't need depot service in the first year really of ownership, yet it was in the shop twice in the first year.
I've had my rMBP for a year, and other than perpetual issues with time machine backups (largely because I'm using netatalk) its been completely trouble free - I'm not saying Apple products are perfect, they just require less effort on my part to keep working - and when you spend all day long troubleshooting other peoples problems, the last thing you want to do is come home and fix your own tech.
This is to be expected on HN. A good number of people here have never run a real business yet think they understand how things work.
Mark Twain: "A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way"
The corollary to that is "A man who has held a cat by the tail can spot one who hasn't a mile away".
I remember the era of the dot-com boom. Everyone had to have masseuses, incredible desks, thousand dollar chairs, insane office architecture, an on-site chef and all manner of other inconsequential crap. And, eventually, reality hit and businesses learned the hard way that spending extravagantly doesn't make your business successful.
I don't have a problem with Macs. We own a bunch of them. Expensive ones. Fully loaded. And for the right reasons. Suggesting that a restaurant chain, health club, bakery chain or other average businesses are justified spending 10x on computers that deliver zero value when compared to a $250 computer can only happen in the context of having no idea how an average business with normal margins runs.
I'll go further than that. As an employee, throwing a fit if you don't get your toy is not only juvenile but a sure sign that someone isn't connected to reality and does not care about the success of the enterprise. Businesses with normal margins need to be brutal about managing those margins. I'd rather pay people $1,000 more a year than throw it into a computer that is not going to add any real measurable value to the business.
It's all about that damn cat.
Or that companies don't advertize what they run as end user devices, because it's just not that competitively important.
In other words, you'd have to be able to show how your 10, 50, 100 or 1,000 employees are going to be 2x to 10x more productive by adopting a technology that costs up to 10x more than some other technology.
This ain't rocket science. This is simple arithmetic. But you have to understand how a businesses make such decisions without injecting emotion or platform preference into the equation.
The owner of a small 5 or 10 person company can make the decision to spend 10x more for computers for her employees just because she likes Macs and feels they are great. And that's OK. You start to grow a company in scale and numbers start to add-up. And, if you introduce shareholders into the equation you, as CEO, now have to provide pretty solid justification for spending 10x on computers without a significant and measurable benefit on the table.
Again, I am speaking about average companies here. I am NOT talking about SV or other tech shops where there's culture, familiarity, tools and massive profit margins that might very well justify handing every employee not just one, but two Mac, desktop and laptop. That is NOT the world as seen by the vast majority of the millions of businesses around the world, far from it.
Answer this question: How much should an employee make a company in order to be able to justufy HIRING her and paying her $100K per year. Remember hiring cost money beyond the obvious, there's everything from opportunity cost to up to $25K headhunter fees. Same for wages, it doesn't stop at $100K.
Feel free to take 90 day, 6 month, 12 month and 5 year views.
If you can't answer this question with a simple mental calculation and need to do a bunch of research and calculations you really don't understand business.
Oh, yes, you should immediately ask a few questions: Type of business? Number of employees? Business phase/stage? Average profit margin? Country, city, state/province? Average overhead? Capex? And more?
Feel free to answer these and other questions to create a business profile and then answer the question about hiring a $100K employee.
In all fairness, this does not apply to just Apple. It applies to the higher end Lenovos and Dells too (which are in the same price bracket as Apple's stuff), so let's not make it specific to a particular platform.
Not everyone needs to buy premium computers for their business. If they choose to, more power to them, especially if it makes their employees happier and less likely to leave.
That said, this thread is about IBM developing enterprise deployment tools for Macs, hence the focus on that platform. So, they develop tools for a platform that few can justify deploying at scale due to the inability to justify the value proposition of an 8 to 10 times multipler in CAPEX. You gotta wonder.
In the vast majority of companies, spending eight to ten times more for anything means cash isn't available for something else. In some cases this can be as important as having cash reserves for when things don't go so well or being able to hire more people.
Cash is like the blood that runs in the veins of a business and is pumped around to make it run. The cardinal rule is: You NEVER waste it. And that is certainly true for what I am going to call "real" businesses, in other words businesses that are representative of the vast majority of companies in the world.
Again, we are NOT talking about tech giants with 70% margins and money coming out of their pores. Companies like that exist within a different ecosystem. This is about what is far more common in business around the world, narrow margins that require management to be very careful about costs.
It is very typical to see opinions on HN that quickly reveal the poster has zero experience running a real business or have only run a software consultancy or something, SaaS or something of that ilk with huge margins. In other words, businesses you could run out of a Starbucks with a laptop, a co-working space with a few laptops or a small office with desks, a microwave, refrigerator and a ping-pong table.
Most businesses around the world are NOT like that. They are far from it. Want to open a fast-food joint? A million bucks to get started. And you better have a high net-worth. And, of course, your cash-flow will be significant and your product is perishable. Want to do a hardware startup as I have done more than once and manufacture your own electronics, mechanical components, service, etc. You need 10,000 square feet, half a million to a million dollars in equipment, insanely expensive software...and you haven't even started to develop your product yet.
So, no, most businesses won't pay ten times more for a computer that offers nearly zero added value because it would be utterly irrational and irresponsible to do so.