Don't know about the stats, but this has definitely been the case for me. My late 2010 MBA worked for 5 years then broke one day. Apple fixed it in under 24 hours for $304.80 (that's with 8.75% NY tax) and I'm typing on it as we speak. PS the thing is basically indestructible... I have no excuse not to buy another some time in the future. Can't wait to try the 12" MB.
I love my 2013 MBA, but I feel like switching between its screen and my MBP's Retina Display has been a significant factor in my deteriorating eye health.
I own a 2013 MacBook Air (13″), and the screen is definitely its worst feature. It's not even that it's not retina (the screen on my desk is just a 23″ 1080p monitor), but something about the vividness and viewing angles is straining on my eyes over long periods.
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's metal screwed into plastic. The cheap plastic casings wear down, discolor, and crack as you touch it. The trackpad wears down because it's plastic. The logic boards stress with the constant heat flux and end up breaking. Macs don't often suffer from that.
MacBooks aren't indestructible in any way. They're just built to a higher standard so they can withstand daily use. It's kind of sad that our bar is set so low, but many other laptops can't withstand daily use for years on end. Even Thinkpads, I've had the hinge areas crack because it's metal hinges screwed into a plastic chassis.
> 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.
> How I would describe a MacBook is "quality". It's not especially durable, it just doesn't break down over time.
I've definitely noticed the same thing. Almost every laptop (and computer, for that matter) has broken down within a year to a year and a half for some random dumb reason. Two of my laptops died due to messed up power supply connections on the motherboard, two others died due to the hinges completely snapping off, and another died because the hard drive failed - and that one was an aluminum iMac that I pawned off to my friend, who replaced the HDD and it works just fine still.
I've had my current MBP since 2012, and it's chugging along just fine - except for the hard drive, which I replaced with an SSD and have no problems with, and ironically enough the hinges, which totally cracked. I had to buy some replacement hinges off of iFixit, which I'm waiting on delivery for today.
Apple computers have by far been the longest lasting and least likely to crap out on me that I've ever had. I'm very happy with my old MBP, and the only reason I'm considering upgrading to a newer model is because I can tell this one might be on its way out in general.
The one thing stopping me is the price point... $1600+, yikes.
> Almost every laptop (and computer, for that matter) has broken down within a year to a year and a half for some random dumb reason.
Consumer hardware is crap because the market doesn't want to pay for anything above crap. The laptops break after a year because that's how long the warranty is, and the manufacturer is counting on you to come back and buy next year's cheapest model when your laptop breaks.
Go look at enterprise quality PC laptops, they cost as much as a Mac does, but they last just as long.
I can tell you stories of ThinkPads which I have personally seen run over by cars, and while the LCD is broken and the body is a bit scuffed, they still work with an external monitor.
> The one thing stopping me is the price point... $1600+, yikes.
Yup, and if you buy mobile workstations, you're going to pay that much. The great thing about PCs though is that they don't retain their value like a Mac does.
This is why whenever someone asks me for a laptop recommendation, my first pick would be a 2-3 year old enterprise laptop. You can pick them up refurbished for around $300, and they'll easily last you another 3.
The only disadvantage is that companies are afraid to innovate their business laptop line, so in a lot of cases you're stuck with laptops that have a 1366x768 screen while everyone else is running around with a $2000+ extremely fragile ultrabook, which has a 3K display.
Some time ago, a coworker of mine was in a terrible car rollover accident. He escaped without long lasting injuries, but the car was totaled. His Macbook Pro was loose in the car and it got bent in the middle.
Amazingly, only the DVD drive was destroyed. Everything else continued to work.
The Dell Precisions that are just rebranded Dell XPS laptops. They're nice at first but get annoying after a while. That said, the 5510 feels a heck of a lot more durable than the m3800 I used to have.
Flip side of the coin here, My personal HP laptop was bought on special as Windows 8 was just coming to market and the store wanted to get the older stuff with Win7 off the shelves. That would put it around late 2012, so almost 4 years old. I was getting fed up with the Win 10 upgrade and decided it was time to go full time Linux, I replaced the old drive with a SSD, not because the drive failed but because I wanted to, plus as a safety net I could always put the Windows drive back in. Sure I'd like to buy a new laptop, and am leaning toward System76, but as long as the one I have is still working I can't really justify it.
The first few months I owned this MBA, I was still getting used to having a computer so thin and small. One day as I was packing up, I closed the computer and tossed it into the air, setting it rotating on its axis, as one might do with a notebook or folder. Immediately shocked by what I had done, I froze and watched it rise into the air and then fall. In full rotation, one of its corners impacted my Ikea desk. The desk had a 3/4" wedged dent. The MBA went on to work for another five years before the above-mentioned failure.
Why not ever airborne, mine has been trodden on. The lack of a glass screen is very helpful. Fantastic machine. My only wish is that the power button wasn't by a useful key.
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 camping events and have yet to kill one there. Surely at some point I will, but so far so good. But this is just my set of datapoints. My partner's older Macbook Pro just died for apparently no reason at all while using it at home last week, and she treats her much better than I treat mine. No manner of boot key pressing could get it to even bring up anything past the Apple logo.
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".
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.
I really really hope that Tesla does to the automotive market what Apple did to the laptop market when it introduced the unibody (ALU) Macbook design. It's a design that has withstood the test of time.
I'm still using a circa-2010 Thinkpad W-series (purchased refurbished in 2013). Needs a new cooling module (starting to overheat occasionally), and it's been through a couple battery packs and a keyboard replacement, but those are essentially wear items and it's otherwise still going strong.
So far I've actually stepped right flat on the screen once (it fell out of bed while I was in the bathroom and I couldn't see it under the covers) and I'm going to need to unlearn the habit of picking it up by the screen since other laptops aren't going to tolerate that. The T- and W-series are incredibly, incredibly durable pieces of hardware (note: the new Edge, Yoga, etc series are built much more lightly).
Previously I had a Fujitsu Lifebook T4220 convertible tablet from 2007. That was also very durable. It was built quite lightly but ironically the convertible screen would tend to pivot out of the way when you dropped it, which prevented damage, and since it was so light it tended not to pick up a lot of momentum. One day it just stopped powering up, probably some kind of electrical problem. Happened early 2013, so I got about 5 solid years of daily use from it. I have a broken T4200 I picked up for parts, I've been thinking about trying to troubleshoot it one of these days.
In contrast my fiance had a unibody MacBook Pro (Core2Duo I think, probably circa 2008?) in college and I wasn't nearly as impressed with the design there. The emphasis on passive cooling and having as few fans as possible tended to lead to overheating. What finally killed it was the screen cable going funky (I think). Could probably be replaced, but eh, I'm tired of repasting the damned CPU every 6 months when the overheating dries it out. She has a Thinkpad just like mine now.
The 3K screens are seriously drool-worthy. I don't have a really pressing need to upgrade, but that 3K screen has gotten me wistfully playing with their laptop builder a couple times. It's literally quadruple the real-estate of my current screen (1600x900).
I replaced my bricked early 2011 MBP with a Lenovo laptop with a 4K screen at the end of 2014 (with pretty top end specs for ~$1200 CAD), so they've been doing it for a while.
On the downside, I got a consumer grade Lenovo, which meant free spyware and a less sturdy chassis than my MBP. Of course it was less than half the price of new similarly equipped Macbook Pro at the time.
Needs a new cooling module (starting to overheat occasionally)
I've disassembled more than a couple of laptops, cleaned out the continental-crust-thick wall of dust from the cooling fins, and replaced the thermal paste on the CPU.
See if you can find a disassembly guide for your machine and give it a go, it's fairly straight forward.
Everyone has their own anecdotes. I've owned 1 Toshiba (5 years), 2 Vaios (both still work, one from 2000, the other from 2006), 3 Macbook Pros (2008, 2012, 2014). Of those only 1 broke. The 2nd Macbook pro about 2 years in the GPU died. I didn't buy the service contract and Apple told me my only option was to buy a new one full price.
my gpu was failing and they did a full replacement of the motherboard and replaced the battery because it was out of spec for 300$ 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 I have owned over the years which last about 3-4 years as my daily drivers.
Because new MBPs have their RAM soldered and instead of SSDs weird NVMe sticks which you can't just put into an old Mac Pro/iMac and keep on working (or trivially upgrade). Oh and you can't just simply swap the battery (I needed < 5 minutes). Oh, and the new ones don't have basic stuff like Ethernet connectors, DVD drives, Firewire connectors or connectors in general. I don't want to carry around a box of flimsy adapters!
Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick to my trustworthy Fall 2011 MBP.
>> 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).
In theory that $300 was a fix and then business as usual. Ignoring the cost of a new machine, time to sell + buy + setup may cost far greater than $300.
My own issues with my mid-2012 Unibody MacBook Pro: I've had to replace the main SATA cable twice for about $60 each time.
Also, a couple years ago updating to a specific version of OS X while LaTeX was installed caused the update process to freeze indefinitely, forcing you to reinstall everything. I had everything backed up, but it was a pain and could have easily caused me to lose important stuff if I was just a little bit lazier.
Still, everything runs smooth and great. Actually noticeably better than the 2015 hp ZBook I use for work.
My old Macbook Pro was very good. I had it for 5 years, and it was hard-wearing and reliable. I'd probably still be using it, only it turns out that, while durable, it wasn't splashproof.
Most of the "savings" for me over that period came in terms of reduced hassle and bother. OS X proved reliable and low-maintenance, minimizing the amount of time I had to spend playing IT man. And, unlike Windows, it didn't fuck up over time, even proving resilient to upgrades (I did every step from Leopard to Mavericks), so the regular reinstalls that I was used to doing weren't necessary. (And, unlike Windows, it had a decent backup tool supplied, so when I bought an SSD, which was the closest I got to needing to do a reinstall, I had to do little more than leaving it running overnight, unattended, once.)
Of course, things progress, and Windows vs OS X is moving closer to parity... thanks to efforts from both companies. But I replaced my soaked Macbook Pro with a new one anyway, on the basis of my experience - it certainly wasn't the sticker price, that's for sure - and it's working out OK for now.
On the other side, my macbook is the worst notebook I ever own. Faulty SSD (replaced by warranty, but still 1 month downtime because of terrible service), faulty battery after 3 years (which can't realistically be replaced), non-working audio port and speakers (I'm using USB headset), faulty keyboard (half of keys don't work as I'm typing it using Keyboard Viewer), 1 failed charger (worked 2 years), 1 charger will fail soon (cords are peeling off). There were various issues with Asuses, Lenovos I owned, but never so much. I used to own 25-year old BMW which was failing every month or two, so I had to constantly repair it and always guessing which part will fail next. I have the same feeling about Macbook, I never had so unreliable device.
>My late 2010 MBA worked for 5 years then broke one day.
I had the same experience with the 2011 model. About 6 months ago the motherboard went, computer is non functional. And yet...I have 13 year old Gateway laptop (first laptop I ever owned), and a 10 year old Dell that both still boot without a hitch. And that Gateway has some miles on it (bought it to play World of Warcraft).
But, as someone else here said, the "quality" difference between the Apple and PC products is immense.
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 expired and forced me to buy another laptop, which was not a Mac).
No, but the anecdotes of thousands of other Macbook Pro users does. If you're going to say that the MBP is a bad laptop based on that one thing, then you're going to have to rule out every other laptop manufacturer on earth, as they've all had issues with specific models.
But I never said that. I just countered an anecdote with a different anecdote. In the absence of contradictory anecdotes, people reading the thread would be left with the false perception that Apple doesn't produce the occasional lemon.
I'm citing a fairly well publicized incident that affected a significant number of Macbook owners - and these models were the top end 15" MBPs with quad core i7s with discrete GPU models - among the most expensive of Apple laptops, I might add - that Apple completely dropped the ball on. And this is coming from someone who recognizes that Apple historically has the best build quality and customer service.
There was a massive thread on the official Apple support forums on this problem that spanned a couple of years and a few hundred pages. Tens of thousands of posts without a single official peep from Apple. There were plenty of articles written about it on Mac sites and other tech sites like Ars Technica. It took Apple over a year to even acknowledge the issue. By the time Apple did issue the Repair Order (recall), a lot of people wrote off or sold their laptops at a loss and had no recourse.
So this is a little different from other laptop manufacturers having issues with a specific model. Before the Repair Order was issued, the official fix was to replace the logic board with a fresh logic board that had the same defect (most of the people who had their logic boards replaced got the same problem within a few months, including myself). Great if you had AppleCare, but a $500+ fix if the AppleCare had lapsed or if you didn't have AppleCare.
Am I bitter? Of course I am. I bought a relatively top end laptop from a company that had a reputation for treating their customers way better than their competitors. And I happily paid the premium (maybe 1K more than a similarly spec'ed Windows laptop at the time) with the expectation that I would be taken care of in the unlikely chance there was something wrong with my MBP. And that didn't happen. I was just lucky that I kept my bricked MBP around so that I could get it fixed when the recall finally came around. At least then I could get some salvage value out of it.
That depends on what your own time is worth to you. I mentally (but inexactly of course) price my spare time quite high. I have a PC for gaming that I use occasionally, and a mac for work that I use a lot, and yet the PC sees more maintenance than the mac per time unit used for its actual purpose. That's my personal ROI calculation, and I get that others may see it differently.
The only reason I keep the PC is because I still find macs to be suboptimal for gaming, and PCs to be easier to keep current by switching out the GPU or adding more storage or RAM. Given a mac with a more open-ended upgrade path, I would probably throw it out.
What are you doing that the pc needs maintenance? I just install Steam, Chrome, and whatever IDEs I want and my computer pretty much just works until there are some hardware failures or a couple times where I had driver issues.
I can't compare Windows and macOS, but I can compare Windows and Linux.
About a year ago my employer forced me to use a Windows machine. Fortunately, I have complete control of it (it's not managed by my employer); unfortunately, that doesn't matter. It's a complete cesspit: updates are horrible; the pre-installed crapware from the manufacturer is horrible; the pre-installed crapware from Microsoft is horrible; the interface is horrible (just trying to navigate around prompts and windows is … miserable). There is literally only one good thing I can say about Windows: the background and lock screen images are really, really nice (awesome, really; just beautiful).
In every other way using it has made my life measurably worse.
Meanwhile, I continue to use Linux on my personal machines. It Just Works™, and really well. It's reliable, fast, easy to use, pleasant to use: every time I log onto my personal Linux machine I breathe a sigh of relief.
Yes, some of that delta is due to greater familiarity with Linux, but a huge amount is due to this simple truth: the Linux interface is better than the modern Windows interface (which is, itself, worse than Windows 7 was). Linux feels like it was built by developers who use what they develop; Windows feels like it was built by a marketing department who use Macs.
> user who knows their way around a Windows machine
Perhaps, but that's just the best case situation. I know my way around Linux, and that's cheaper than Windows on the individual level, and far far far cheaper than Windows on the enterprise level. All it takes is users that know their way around Linux, right?
The real determinant though will be the cost averaged out over skill levels and prevalence of skill levels.
I'd like to know what percentage of help desk calls are related to hardware vs OS vs software.
I can believe that the Mac hardware is more reliable. However, a lot of help desk calls I remember making were because some legacy software wasn't working which wasn't directly related to Windows, e.g. I can't read my lotus notes mail because there's a problem with my remote mailbox configuration. I'd like to know if those calls get marked as a PC problem.
I'm sure much less of the legacy software runs on Mac and therefore they get fewer help desk calls related to it.
There could be other biases too. For instance, if the Mac users at IBM were in largely technical roles (e.g. working on their MacOS integration service) vs large non-technical departments working on Windows machines (e.g. HR and accounting).
It wouldn't be very surprising that technical departments had less help-desk complaints than non technical departments.
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 anything about.
I'll never forget his name for that reason alone. He was, and I imagine still is, a serious drain on the support staff.
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 and tripping up the workflow costs money.
Idk, I've seen a lot of dev guys try a lot of fruitless troubleshooting on systems when it would have been better to blow away the entire install and load up only necessary components...the troubleshooting cost a lot more because of the disparity in their paycheck and the revenue they brought in vs. the IT departments. The IT department should want calls since it reduces the disparity in earned department revenue, better showing the value of IT staff. Unless there isn't interdepartment accounting, in which case 'screw those time wasters, lol'.
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.
It really depends. Developers may have better skills, but also have bigger needs, in terms of software we need to use on daily basis. And with things like proxy servers, ActiveDirectory, group policies, or antivirus softwarem which you cannot reconfigure or turn off, working on Windows can be real pain in the ass.
Realistically though those are organisational decisions not requirements of the Windows platform. there's nothing that mandates that a windows environment must have AD/Group Policies or Anti-Malware software, you can configure a stand-alone windows 10 PC quite happily without any of those. Personally I work in a Windows environment but don't sign into a domain.
It's more that organisations demand that windows, which they understand, be configured in a specific manner.
Some might say "ah well you've got to have A-V on windows or you get malware", but at actual technical level there's not a lot of reasons that MacOS is less susceptible to malware than Windows, and indeed its rise in popularity has seen more emerge
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 nowhere as good as remote desktop.
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.
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.
OK you can focus on the little nuances of whether RDP is better or not on Windows or Mac. The fact is that becomes built into windows where is you have to buy it for the Mac. You also cannot RDP from windows to a Mac. And team viewer is ridiculously expensive.
Please ignore the other fact that I stated about how big companies have to build their own systems management frameworks for the Mac though. And I think you probably know that there is a ton of other software that just does not exist for the Mac. So you're going to end up writing your own and that is definitely not cheaper than buying it off the shelf and many many many cases.
Large corporations generally use JAMF Pro for managing fleets of Macs. It makes it pretty trivial compared to the hassles of using SCCM/SCOM for Windows desktops.
You can always use VNC to connect to a Mac, though that's not the best tool. If you're deploying and managing more than 10 or so Macs, the price for JAMF or other tools isn't an issue.
>> 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.
> The performance gap is very noticeable even on GB LAN, especially as the screen resolution goes up.
I find that hard to believe, I can play games like Rayman (that require reflexes and a low latency) over my steam link on a 100mbit network. Surely on a GB LAN there shouldn't be noticeable latency?
I've played games via VNC, but only visual novels. In all cases i've known real games require special transmission protocols, which operate in a specific domain, and are a lot faster than RDP, which operates in a broader domain, and is faster than VNC, which is the most general solution.
I'm not sure exactly how it works, as far as I am aware it streams video and sound, and sends back input, but I'm not sure about the underlying protocol. I think the resolution is 1080p. But regardless of the underlying technology they use, they've clearly proven that you can get a great remote desktop experience on a sub-GB lan without using RDP.
Ah. May make a lot of difference - or would it also partly depend on whether the data (e.g. args sent with the calls) was raster or vector? Think I read recently that some versions of OpenGL do the same or similar. Not an expert here, but interested in the concepts and techniques.
It only works from Mac to Mac though. You cannot do remote desktop from Windows to Mac. That's typical Apple bullshit that will not fly in the enterprise. RDP also comes built into Windows where is you have to buy this from Apple.
Also for anybody suggesting team viewer… Come on that's a ridiculously expensive package that does not even work as well and it's not ubiquitous.
TL;DR: Turn on the built-in open standard VNC server on the Mac, use a VNC client on Windows:
Mac OS X actually comes with a built-in remote management feature that allows other computers on the local network to access the Apple computer using the Apple Remote Desktop which we mentioned earlier. However, there is a setting where you can allow third party VNC viewers to connect and control the Apple computer. First click on the System Preferences icon at the Dock and click on Sharing. Click on the checkbox for the Remote Management to turn on the service.
Click on Computer Settings button. Tick on the “VNC viewers may control screen with password” and type in a password. Click OK to save the changes...
Apple hardware has been designed on Windows PCs (at least until the last time I read about it a few years ago). This is because the (best) software for electronic design has only been available for Windows, and the developers refused Apple's terms and conditions (despite being directly approached by Apple for a port). This was the cause for some embarrassment for Apple by people in the electronics industry.
It's also about how much 3rd party software is installed and how many complex features like Domain integration etc are used. I am fairly certain if you were to keep your usage limited mostly to browsing and email the support differences between Macs and PCs would be non existent.
Trouble is your typical Windows PCs have a whole lot more 3rd party software (AV, Encryption, r likes of tanium , firewalls you name it.) And they do more too - whether or not the employees actually need that stuff. Most support calls are direct result of stuff like that - firewall blocked my program, AD password issues, antivirus causing CPU burn etc.
10% hardware vs 70% software and 20% OS for my case supporting user in MNC.
Most common: Printers, VPN, windows updates glitch could cause hours to reverse. Symantec AV is still unreliable or broken that it didn't update it definition and apply different access permissions to network drive/software take hours to approve.
Included hardware faulty and seriously parts can drag from days to months due to shortage.
Self services software is a good features which windows does not provide except 3rd parties.
This isn't just for technical people. IBM has been talking about this for a while and giving updates as the deployment proceeds. Machines are cheap enough that TCO is dominated by other factors so even a 50% reduction in support requests can save more money than the cost of the machine.
Until 2015 the vast majority of Macs at IBM were BYOD, largely driven by the EOL of that last generation of "our" Thinkpads (T6X series was the last IBM design) drove a lot of technical IBM'ers to buy their own Mac. All of the Mac support was an internal forum created by advocates and a small IT team. VM's for Windows were common and remain for a few old legacy products that are too complex to port.
Separate from the Mac stuff, the IT folks were working on web/app based solutions (web email access vs notes, etc). So that has softened some of the transition headaches. If some mac notes fix breaks, you've got the web and smartphone reader backups.
All that got formalized into a "real" organization but it was really several years of trench Mac advocacy + webification that makes the numbers look so good now.
"Yeah I was wondering about the Linux base. I was denied a Mac when they introduced this policy as I was what they call a privileged user (most sysadmins will be)."
"Previn says that while a Mac initially costs anywhere from $117 to $454 more than a similarly configured Windows PC, over four years IBM saves between $273 to $543 per Mac compared to a similarly configured Windows PC."
Its late over here, and I could be misinterpreting this, but this feels like meaningless clickbait. 3 times cheaper to own is based on 117 * 3 ~= 543? Taking the extreme low end of one value and the extreme high end of the other feels dishonest.
Perhaps a more appropriate title would have been "In the long run, you'll probably save about $25/year by buying a Mac."
Are those savings already including the fact that "a Mac initially costs anywhere from $117 to $454 more than a similarly configured Windows PC"? Looking at it again, its not entirely clear from the way that its worded.
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.
It's because most PCs people use are bottom of the barrel cheap. If you compare similarly priced PCs to Macs with similar business class builds (keyboards for laptops, etc) I highly suspect everything will balance out, at the very least be minimal.
But they could well be comparing a new BYOD MacOS environment to a old corporate legacy windows setup, which isn't really comparing the performance of the OS so much as comparing BYOD with old-school centrally managed windows domains.
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.
This. The only person I still do tech support for is my dad, who is on Surface/Windows 10. My mom got an iMac about 10 years ago and now uses an iPad and iPhone. She set up Facebook, gmail, etc. by herself and never calls me for help.
And you know, fixing, helping, is fine to me, even regularly, but Windows problems are such fake ones. I stopped using Windows for a while, was cringing on linux papercuts and lack of skilled GUI, but the minute I had to use windows, bloatware jumps at your throat and you regret it right away.
Chromebooks have a similar experience is you want an even cheaper alternative. Applications beyond the browser are more limited (photo management is awful on Chromebooks) but it's hard to beat the price and functionality for most users.
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.
I'm in the same boat, and a couple weeks ago an acquaintance who runs an art gallery asked me to come out and help her reconnect her computers after a relocation. I didn't think to ask if they used Macs, and am now neck-deep in Windows hell for the first time in, yeah, about seven years.
Nothing has changed. Disregard everything you've heard about Windows 7 and Windows 10. It's just XP and a half inch deep slap of new paint.
Ex-IBMer here: until 2015, Macs weren't an option for people upgrading their PCs. They're deploying new Apples as laptops age out, and employees will then have a choice of a MacBook/MacBook Pro (depending on job role), a Lenovo laptop (configured for job role), or for the special snowflakes with sufficient budget, some custom configuration. BYOD is alive, well, and encouraged at IBM.
Most IBMers with Macs were using their personally owned hardware (as was the rare IBMer using a Microsoft Surface). Early adopters (before the end of 2014) were supported internally through the community, and starting in 2015 we were required to install a configuration program that would add an IBM app store and configure the machine so it complied with the internal security rules. Many of the day-to-day headaches on the Windows machines (e.g., printing) were eliminated with the IBM development Mac tools, but other things were impossible or required a VM to do, like using an IBM internal SOCKS proxy application to connect to customer sites.
IBM has a very active and dedicated Linux community as well. I can't speak to support numbers, but the tooling was more mature and more tools were available on the RHEL distribution.
Institutional computer usage seemes designed to cost the institution money. I have to log jobs for basic installs, have 2-3 follow up calls and emails to clarify what I want. Then I wait for the team who install that category of software to be free (usually the person I need is on leave). It's easier to find a workaround, even if it makes the job take hours rather than minutes. Random machines can't access the internet for updates even if the admin password was available - internet access is an attack vector to be minimised. Maybe other large institutions are better. I see the odd Mac user and I'm sure it's cheaper for the department as Mac users get an admin password and a "dunno how to help you, youre on your own". I want this too.
Sorry, but Apple still needs a dedicated docking station solution provided by them. It can simply connect through a single port (USB3/Etc/Etc). I use my current work laptop for home and work and have full setups at each and its a simple one step to activate it all.
Now what I am curious about is being able to do pushes that are corporate team just loves to do and ease of connection to to z, i, and p, systems. IBM recently moved 5250 emulation to a pure JAVA solution that works on Mac/Linux and I am sure z 3270 has its solution too. A lot of IBM system admin tools have been moved to JAVA just so it would be platform independent
The Thunderbolt Display acts as a dock; it currently requires two cables but there may be a new USB-C version next week that uses one cable. Third-party docks also exist: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TCDOCK11PSG/ Just don't expect IBM to buy one for you.
my first reaction is to not accept this and share anecdotes of my experiences, but maybe he's right. I don't run an IT dept. I've not done any cost benefit analysis. I just know my second hand thinkpad was cheap, works well and I won't trade it for a mac any time soon.
Maybe if I was loaded I'd buy my folks and siblings macbooks, but I'm not, and I'm happy enough to fix the odd issue on their cheap windows laptops. one or two reinstalls a year while I watch some TV in the background beats convincing them to spend money they don't really have on top of the line hardware
but like I said, different story if you're making financial decisions for a big Corp
for sure. there's a huge spectrum between a person and a small business and then massive IBM.
for IBM it's three times cheaper.
for me, it's probably cheaper to use debian on a raspberry pi than debian on a free second hand desktop that originally came with windows xp or vista, just based on electricity cost.
My own little anecdotal experience... I'm a producer at a small agency of ~30 employees. In addition to my more than busy schedule producing interactive content I also manage the Mac hardware/software for our team. I wouldn't consider myself much more than a Mac hobbiest at best, but I rarely have an issue I can't figure out. I was a PC/Windows guy that switched to Mac in college when I was doing a multimedia degree. So by no means a Mac expert and probably about as much experience with Windows at this point. That said, one thing I'm certain about is that there is no way I would take on managing a Windows network for ~30 people in addition to my fairly non-related position at the company. It's honestly very rare that I have to mess with anything with our network, computers, server etc. after having set everything up initially. This has been over the past 6-8 years.
... that's because of the cheap second hand thinkpad, which is a marvelous piece of engineering, and probably the best the Windows/Non-Mac world has to offer in competition to Macbooks.
Even though there have been some questionable redesign approaches and a slight (perceived) slump in QC in recent years, Thinkpads IMO are still THE best machinery out there to just get stuff DONE.
They are reliable, full Linux compatibility, easy to service and have the best non mechanical / Notebook keyboard out there.
Tbh the only thing I envy the Macs for are their brilliant screens. But we have red nipples on our keyboards, so yeah...
The company I work at is small, at 32 employees. We standardized on macs in the mid 00s for the exact same reason: maintenance costs. Being a consultancy, the ROI calculation also included hours lost due to malfunctioning hardware or software problems, and it became very easy in the end to justify the initially higher expense of giving someone a mac instead of a PC.
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 ad infinitum.
Fortunately for me, my only interaction with the "Windows" environment is via SMB to our fileservers. This works reasonably well. The rest of our applications are either Java based, have a web interface, or use a console. My immediate coworkers are all sysadmins with years of experience, and even they still have to cope with BSODs, crashing applications, and all the usual crap that Windows users continue to put up with.
It's sad; they actually think it's normal. I run into the same issue when they talk about Windows server issues (I admin the *nix systems). They don't believe me when I say I don't run into issue xyz...
I thought his anecdote was the conventional wisdom?
It lines up pretty perfectly with my experience swapping in Ubuntu for Mac OS. When I have a problem I can troubleshoot it down to a specific line of code or piece of hardware, on windows.... well, I would rather not troubleshoot anything on windows.
Do you have corporate issued/managed anti-virus, threat detection, disk encryption, VPN, fileservers and managed printers? If so, your kids are well equipped for life in the corporate IT world.
You mean every person on here that's doing the usual whining about computers being hard fits that description? Seems to me there's just a lot of complaints just aimed at a specific OS for reasons.
Also, I'm fairly certain drivers and anti-virus is not exclusive to the corporate environment.
Or more simpler yet, Active Directory? My brother works with Macs as a sysadmin of a university and there are constant issues getting them integrated with the rest of the PCs in their AD. They even discussed buying Apples OD to integrate with.
All of our Macs authenticate with AD. Pretty simple, especially since the last two versions back. We even have our Linux systems authenticate via AD using Quest. That can work with macOS as well, but we haven't found a need to use it.
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.
What I would say however is that some of those issue you mention are more about how organisations typically manage Windows systems than they are about Windows itself.
Active Directory is a good example, there's no necessity to add a windows system to an Active Directory, and if a company is going down a less centrally controlled model, which includes things like MacOS systems, it would make sense to not force the Windows boxes to log in to AD.
Personally, I've run Windows/MacOS and Linux for a reasonable number of years and I wouldn't say that one was necessarily vastly more stable that the others (assuming current software)
What I do see is that a lot of "traditional corporate" systems get loaded down with additional layers of software which can cause issues, remove that and I think you have a less crashy experience, regardless of the underlying OS.
The NT kernel has always been rock solid -- so long as it's unmolested. Microsoft made some deliberate decisions in the 90's in the name of performance that made it much less stable. They spent several OS versions working past that, and past some other unpleasant things about the Windows ecosystem.
What I've found over the past 18 years is that Apple is the best at creating an environment where I can install dev or media artist stuff, keep up to date with the latest software and OS, and it all just works -- no WTF moments or frustration. (With the one stark exception of Apple's CoreStorage volume management system.)
That said, Apple's OS has also been getting less dev friendly and more consumer oriented in recent years.
Sure I'd say that both Windows and MacOS are getting less Dev friendly, but that's inevitable I'd say as their main perceived market is consumers and really to operate safely in todays environment you either have to be technical or let the OS take control of more aspects of your computing experience.
My guess is that most consumers will end up running and iOS like managed environment in the next 5 years or so and more technical people will end up running Linux.
The idea of running a decently sized corporation without AD is a non-starter. Fileshares alone would be unmanageable. I'm not talking a 50 person shop, I'm talking an enterprise with multiple locations and several thousand desktops. As much as I dislike having to use and manage Windows when it comes up, AD is an essential tool.
In an enterprise sure you need it for rights management, but then that's not really related to what the client OS is, you can run MacOS or Windows clients largely equally well if you're not using AD to centrally manage them.
nor am I :) I'm suggesting that one of the perceived advantages of MacOS is that it's not tied to a heavyweight arduous Active Directory installation and that, in my book, there's not reason not to run Windows in exactly the same manner.
My point being, I don't think it's so much a difference between the Operating systems but how they're operated.
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.
I wish I could talk more about this but I'm not sure I can go into detail today. But I can say:
- Part of the reasons macs are cheaper is that they're massively less instrumented than PCs.
- Most orgs have not migrated to Win10 because they're totally convinced they need that instrumentation on windows.
- But they don't need that instrumentation on OSX, so it calls the entire premise into question.
It's also the case that people negotiate cheap block sales of SKUs from "trusted" partners to help pre-bundle all that instrumentation. But as this data shows, it turns out that buying less customized devices with better overall specs is actually a cost savings and per-unit cost.
Finally, I'd argue that employee satisfaction is almost directly a result of not having a heavy-handed and almost entirely arbitrary series of mandates forced onto their computer.
I won't talk about my employers efforts, but I know OTHER people (friends in IT) who are experimenting with mass deploys of Win10 and Surface books with a "let's throw EVERYTHING out and pretend these are a new platform" approach, and they tell me that they see benefits. As the conversations are casual, I cannot go further.
It's sort of amazing what happens to overall cost if you accept the premise that the vast majority of IT tooling and monitoring is in fact bad, wrongheaded, and not fulfilling real security and auditing requirements.
This very much chimes with my experiences of enterprise IT. The change is in throwing out the new platform and putting in a new one, not in what they old and new one actually are.
I'll be interested to see if the waves of BYOD and lightly managed systems give way to a return to centralisation again, when people realise what they don't have any more, or if it turns out, as you say, to be that they never really needed it in the first place.
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 that the PC's are far more heavily modified with crapware/bloatware than the macs were. Usually because having checkpoint/norton/whatever was an absolute requirement from a security perspective on the PC's but apparently the MAC's didn't even need disk encryption enabled much less virus scanners...
> 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.
> I never heard someone building an image for a mac for example.
This happens where I work. Amongst other things it:
1) Set the hostname of the machine.
2) At one point, changed the timezone to one of the US offices (I work in Europe).
3) Prohibited upgrades to newer versions of OS X until they were approved by the IT staff.
4) Forced reboots for installation of security updates (happened to everyone in the office at the same time, with a few minutes warning and no option to cancel).
and some other annoyances. I needed at one stage to reinstall OS X (my fault, as opposed to something wrong with OS X), and this got rid of the issue.
I was informed by a colleague that if you reinstalled OS X while connected to the corporate network, that it would install OS X from the company's IT servers instead of Apple's ones, thus pulling down the corporate image. I can't 100% verify that claim, but it sounds true what I have seen when people reformatted in the office.
I wonder whether this is a premature conclusion due to sampling bias. I suspect that the early Mac adopters at IBM were mostly developers and expert users, people that didn't need a lot of support anyway. This makes it look like IBM's Mac users are cheaper to support, when in reality the true support costs won't be known until the user base is more representative of the company as a whole.
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.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadThe switching or the poorer screen of the air?
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's metal screwed into plastic. The cheap plastic casings wear down, discolor, and crack as you touch it. The trackpad wears down because it's plastic. The logic boards stress with the constant heat flux and end up breaking. Macs don't often suffer from that.
MacBooks aren't indestructible in any way. They're just built to a higher standard so they can withstand daily use. It's kind of sad that our bar is set so low, but many other laptops can't withstand daily use for years on end. Even Thinkpads, I've had the hinge areas crack because it's metal hinges screwed into a plastic chassis.
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.
I've definitely noticed the same thing. Almost every laptop (and computer, for that matter) has broken down within a year to a year and a half for some random dumb reason. Two of my laptops died due to messed up power supply connections on the motherboard, two others died due to the hinges completely snapping off, and another died because the hard drive failed - and that one was an aluminum iMac that I pawned off to my friend, who replaced the HDD and it works just fine still.
I've had my current MBP since 2012, and it's chugging along just fine - except for the hard drive, which I replaced with an SSD and have no problems with, and ironically enough the hinges, which totally cracked. I had to buy some replacement hinges off of iFixit, which I'm waiting on delivery for today.
Apple computers have by far been the longest lasting and least likely to crap out on me that I've ever had. I'm very happy with my old MBP, and the only reason I'm considering upgrading to a newer model is because I can tell this one might be on its way out in general.
The one thing stopping me is the price point... $1600+, yikes.
Consumer hardware is crap because the market doesn't want to pay for anything above crap. The laptops break after a year because that's how long the warranty is, and the manufacturer is counting on you to come back and buy next year's cheapest model when your laptop breaks.
Go look at enterprise quality PC laptops, they cost as much as a Mac does, but they last just as long.
I can tell you stories of ThinkPads which I have personally seen run over by cars, and while the LCD is broken and the body is a bit scuffed, they still work with an external monitor.
> The one thing stopping me is the price point... $1600+, yikes.
Yup, and if you buy mobile workstations, you're going to pay that much. The great thing about PCs though is that they don't retain their value like a Mac does.
This is why whenever someone asks me for a laptop recommendation, my first pick would be a 2-3 year old enterprise laptop. You can pick them up refurbished for around $300, and they'll easily last you another 3.
The only disadvantage is that companies are afraid to innovate their business laptop line, so in a lot of cases you're stuck with laptops that have a 1366x768 screen while everyone else is running around with a $2000+ extremely fragile ultrabook, which has a 3K display.
Amazingly, only the DVD drive was destroyed. Everything else continued to work.
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 camping events and have yet to kill one there. Surely at some point I will, but so far so good. But this is just my set of datapoints. My partner's older Macbook Pro just died for apparently no reason at all while using it at home last week, and she treats her much better than I treat mine. No manner of boot key pressing could get it to even bring up anything past the Apple logo.
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".
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.
I'm still using a circa-2010 Thinkpad W-series (purchased refurbished in 2013). Needs a new cooling module (starting to overheat occasionally), and it's been through a couple battery packs and a keyboard replacement, but those are essentially wear items and it's otherwise still going strong.
So far I've actually stepped right flat on the screen once (it fell out of bed while I was in the bathroom and I couldn't see it under the covers) and I'm going to need to unlearn the habit of picking it up by the screen since other laptops aren't going to tolerate that. The T- and W-series are incredibly, incredibly durable pieces of hardware (note: the new Edge, Yoga, etc series are built much more lightly).
Previously I had a Fujitsu Lifebook T4220 convertible tablet from 2007. That was also very durable. It was built quite lightly but ironically the convertible screen would tend to pivot out of the way when you dropped it, which prevented damage, and since it was so light it tended not to pick up a lot of momentum. One day it just stopped powering up, probably some kind of electrical problem. Happened early 2013, so I got about 5 solid years of daily use from it. I have a broken T4200 I picked up for parts, I've been thinking about trying to troubleshoot it one of these days.
In contrast my fiance had a unibody MacBook Pro (Core2Duo I think, probably circa 2008?) in college and I wasn't nearly as impressed with the design there. The emphasis on passive cooling and having as few fans as possible tended to lead to overheating. What finally killed it was the screen cable going funky (I think). Could probably be replaced, but eh, I'm tired of repasting the damned CPU every 6 months when the overheating dries it out. She has a Thinkpad just like mine now.
On the downside, I got a consumer grade Lenovo, which meant free spyware and a less sturdy chassis than my MBP. Of course it was less than half the price of new similarly equipped Macbook Pro at the time.
I've disassembled more than a couple of laptops, cleaned out the continental-crust-thick wall of dust from the cooling fins, and replaced the thermal paste on the CPU.
See if you can find a disassembly guide for your machine and give it a go, it's fairly straight forward.
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 I have owned over the years which last about 3-4 years as my daily drivers.
I imagine you got that fixed during the time the recall was active.
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.
I have one. Still works great.
-edit 13" models did not have this issue
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...
Which would cost way more than $300 and presumably right before it failed it was working fine for them.
Also, a couple years ago updating to a specific version of OS X while LaTeX was installed caused the update process to freeze indefinitely, forcing you to reinstall everything. I had everything backed up, but it was a pain and could have easily caused me to lose important stuff if I was just a little bit lazier.
Still, everything runs smooth and great. Actually noticeably better than the 2015 hp ZBook I use for work.
Most of the "savings" for me over that period came in terms of reduced hassle and bother. OS X proved reliable and low-maintenance, minimizing the amount of time I had to spend playing IT man. And, unlike Windows, it didn't fuck up over time, even proving resilient to upgrades (I did every step from Leopard to Mavericks), so the regular reinstalls that I was used to doing weren't necessary. (And, unlike Windows, it had a decent backup tool supplied, so when I bought an SSD, which was the closest I got to needing to do a reinstall, I had to do little more than leaving it running overnight, unattended, once.)
Of course, things progress, and Windows vs OS X is moving closer to parity... thanks to efforts from both companies. But I replaced my soaked Macbook Pro with a new one anyway, on the basis of my experience - it certainly wasn't the sticker price, that's for sure - and it's working out OK for now.
I've opened up my MBA 2013. It's basically a large battery, smallish logic board, speakers and CPU fan.
I had the same experience with the 2011 model. About 6 months ago the motherboard went, computer is non functional. And yet...I have 13 year old Gateway laptop (first laptop I ever owned), and a 10 year old Dell that both still boot without a hitch. And that Gateway has some miles on it (bought it to play World of Warcraft).
But, as someone else here said, the "quality" difference between the Apple and PC products is immense.
How are Chromebooks for people who have to deal with "family / friends" support issues?
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 expired and forced me to buy another laptop, which was not a Mac).
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...
I'm citing a fairly well publicized incident that affected a significant number of Macbook owners - and these models were the top end 15" MBPs with quad core i7s with discrete GPU models - among the most expensive of Apple laptops, I might add - that Apple completely dropped the ball on. And this is coming from someone who recognizes that Apple historically has the best build quality and customer service.
There was a massive thread on the official Apple support forums on this problem that spanned a couple of years and a few hundred pages. Tens of thousands of posts without a single official peep from Apple. There were plenty of articles written about it on Mac sites and other tech sites like Ars Technica. It took Apple over a year to even acknowledge the issue. By the time Apple did issue the Repair Order (recall), a lot of people wrote off or sold their laptops at a loss and had no recourse.
So this is a little different from other laptop manufacturers having issues with a specific model. Before the Repair Order was issued, the official fix was to replace the logic board with a fresh logic board that had the same defect (most of the people who had their logic boards replaced got the same problem within a few months, including myself). Great if you had AppleCare, but a $500+ fix if the AppleCare had lapsed or if you didn't have AppleCare.
Am I bitter? Of course I am. I bought a relatively top end laptop from a company that had a reputation for treating their customers way better than their competitors. And I happily paid the premium (maybe 1K more than a similarly spec'ed Windows laptop at the time) with the expectation that I would be taken care of in the unlikely chance there was something wrong with my MBP. And that didn't happen. I was just lucky that I kept my bricked MBP around so that I could get it fixed when the recall finally came around. At least then I could get some salvage value out of it.
The only reason I keep the PC is because I still find macs to be suboptimal for gaming, and PCs to be easier to keep current by switching out the GPU or adding more storage or RAM. Given a mac with a more open-ended upgrade path, I would probably throw it out.
About a year ago my employer forced me to use a Windows machine. Fortunately, I have complete control of it (it's not managed by my employer); unfortunately, that doesn't matter. It's a complete cesspit: updates are horrible; the pre-installed crapware from the manufacturer is horrible; the pre-installed crapware from Microsoft is horrible; the interface is horrible (just trying to navigate around prompts and windows is … miserable). There is literally only one good thing I can say about Windows: the background and lock screen images are really, really nice (awesome, really; just beautiful).
In every other way using it has made my life measurably worse.
Meanwhile, I continue to use Linux on my personal machines. It Just Works™, and really well. It's reliable, fast, easy to use, pleasant to use: every time I log onto my personal Linux machine I breathe a sigh of relief.
Yes, some of that delta is due to greater familiarity with Linux, but a huge amount is due to this simple truth: the Linux interface is better than the modern Windows interface (which is, itself, worse than Windows 7 was). Linux feels like it was built by developers who use what they develop; Windows feels like it was built by a marketing department who use Macs.
You can have that in Linux too[1]. You can configure it to pull fresh images from your favourite sources, including Bing.
[1] https://vrty.org/ seems to be down at the moment
Perhaps, but that's just the best case situation. I know my way around Linux, and that's cheaper than Windows on the individual level, and far far far cheaper than Windows on the enterprise level. All it takes is users that know their way around Linux, right?
The real determinant though will be the cost averaged out over skill levels and prevalence of skill levels.
I can believe that the Mac hardware is more reliable. However, a lot of help desk calls I remember making were because some legacy software wasn't working which wasn't directly related to Windows, e.g. I can't read my lotus notes mail because there's a problem with my remote mailbox configuration. I'd like to know if those calls get marked as a PC problem.
I'm sure much less of the legacy software runs on Mac and therefore they get fewer help desk calls related to it.
It wouldn't be very surprising that technical departments had less help-desk complaints than non technical departments.
I'll never forget his name for that reason alone. He was, and I imagine still is, a serious drain on the support staff.
Totally brilliant though.
Idk, I've seen a lot of dev guys try a lot of fruitless troubleshooting on systems when it would have been better to blow away the entire install and load up only necessary components...the troubleshooting cost a lot more because of the disparity in their paycheck and the revenue they brought in vs. the IT departments. The IT department should want calls since it reduces the disparity in earned department revenue, better showing the value of IT staff. Unless there isn't interdepartment accounting, in which case 'screw those time wasters, lol'.
His group was also the company's moonshot offshoot project -- not bringing in the bread and butter of the business.
It's more that organisations demand that windows, which they understand, be configured in a specific manner.
Some might say "ah well you've got to have A-V on windows or you get malware", but at actual technical level there's not a lot of reasons that MacOS is less susceptible to malware than Windows, and indeed its rise in popularity has seen more emerge
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 nowhere as good as remote desktop.
[1]: http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/
There aren't many things that Windows does better than Mac, but in my opinion, RDP is definitely one of them.
Please ignore the other fact that I stated about how big companies have to build their own systems management frameworks for the Mac though. And I think you probably know that there is a ton of other software that just does not exist for the Mac. So you're going to end up writing your own and that is definitely not cheaper than buying it off the shelf and many many many cases.
You can always use VNC to connect to a Mac, though that's not the best tool. If you're deploying and managing more than 10 or so Macs, the price for JAMF or other tools isn't an issue.
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/
I find that hard to believe, I can play games like Rayman (that require reflexes and a low latency) over my steam link on a 100mbit network. Surely on a GB LAN there shouldn't be noticeable latency?
I've played games via VNC, but only visual novels. In all cases i've known real games require special transmission protocols, which operate in a specific domain, and are a lot faster than RDP, which operates in a broader domain, and is faster than VNC, which is the most general solution.
... at $809 a seat. I mean, just, ouch.
https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/cat/Office-...
> Even simple software like remote desktop does not exist on the Mac.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-remote-desktop/id7...
https://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/
Where on earth did you come up with this belief?
Also for anybody suggesting team viewer… Come on that's a ridiculously expensive package that does not even work as well and it's not ubiquitous.
What are you talking about? Here are five ways:
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/remote-access-apple-mac-os-x-via...
TL;DR: Turn on the built-in open standard VNC server on the Mac, use a VNC client on Windows:
Mac OS X actually comes with a built-in remote management feature that allows other computers on the local network to access the Apple computer using the Apple Remote Desktop which we mentioned earlier. However, there is a setting where you can allow third party VNC viewers to connect and control the Apple computer. First click on the System Preferences icon at the Dock and click on Sharing. Click on the checkbox for the Remote Management to turn on the service.
Click on Computer Settings button. Tick on the “VNC viewers may control screen with password” and type in a password. Click OK to save the changes...
Trouble is your typical Windows PCs have a whole lot more 3rd party software (AV, Encryption, r likes of tanium , firewalls you name it.) And they do more too - whether or not the employees actually need that stuff. Most support calls are direct result of stuff like that - firewall blocked my program, AD password issues, antivirus causing CPU burn etc.
Most common: Printers, VPN, windows updates glitch could cause hours to reverse. Symantec AV is still unreliable or broken that it didn't update it definition and apply different access permissions to network drive/software take hours to approve.
Included hardware faulty and seriously parts can drag from days to months due to shortage.
Self services software is a good features which windows does not provide except 3rd parties.
Separate from the Mac stuff, the IT folks were working on web/app based solutions (web email access vs notes, etc). So that has softened some of the transition headaches. If some mac notes fix breaks, you've got the web and smartphone reader backups.
All that got formalized into a "real" organization but it was really several years of trench Mac advocacy + webification that makes the numbers look so good now.
TLDR; the study is hardly conclusive and knowing IBM is aligned with business goals.
[1]:https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/58j88j/ibm_claims...
"Yeah I was wondering about the Linux base. I was denied a Mac when they introduced this policy as I was what they call a privileged user (most sysadmins will be)."
Its late over here, and I could be misinterpreting this, but this feels like meaningless clickbait. 3 times cheaper to own is based on 117 * 3 ~= 543? Taking the extreme low end of one value and the extreme high end of the other feels dishonest.
Perhaps a more appropriate title would have been "In the long run, you'll probably save about $25/year by buying a Mac."
The minimum savings was $273/4 years = 68.25/year The maximum savings was $543/4 years = 135.75/year
"Despite a Mac costing anywhere from $117 to $454 more, it's cheaper than Windows."
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.
Not to mention the possible selection bias since people chose a mac themselves and were not randomly sampled.
>Previn says that while a Mac initially costs anywhere from $117 to $454 more than a similarly configured Windows PC,
Nothing has changed. Disregard everything you've heard about Windows 7 and Windows 10. It's just XP and a half inch deep slap of new paint.
in tears
Most IBMers with Macs were using their personally owned hardware (as was the rare IBMer using a Microsoft Surface). Early adopters (before the end of 2014) were supported internally through the community, and starting in 2015 we were required to install a configuration program that would add an IBM app store and configure the machine so it complied with the internal security rules. Many of the day-to-day headaches on the Windows machines (e.g., printing) were eliminated with the IBM development Mac tools, but other things were impossible or required a VM to do, like using an IBM internal SOCKS proxy application to connect to customer sites.
IBM has a very active and dedicated Linux community as well. I can't speak to support numbers, but the tooling was more mature and more tools were available on the RHEL distribution.
Now what I am curious about is being able to do pushes that are corporate team just loves to do and ease of connection to to z, i, and p, systems. IBM recently moved 5250 emulation to a pure JAVA solution that works on Mac/Linux and I am sure z 3270 has its solution too. A lot of IBM system admin tools have been moved to JAVA just so it would be platform independent
Maybe if I was loaded I'd buy my folks and siblings macbooks, but I'm not, and I'm happy enough to fix the odd issue on their cheap windows laptops. one or two reinstalls a year while I watch some TV in the background beats convincing them to spend money they don't really have on top of the line hardware
but like I said, different story if you're making financial decisions for a big Corp
Even though there have been some questionable redesign approaches and a slight (perceived) slump in QC in recent years, Thinkpads IMO are still THE best machinery out there to just get stuff DONE.
They are reliable, full Linux compatibility, easy to service and have the best non mechanical / Notebook keyboard out there.
Tbh the only thing I envy the Macs for are their brilliant screens. But we have red nipples on our keyboards, so yeah...
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 ad infinitum.
Fortunately for me, my only interaction with the "Windows" environment is via SMB to our fileservers. This works reasonably well. The rest of our applications are either Java based, have a web interface, or use a console. My immediate coworkers are all sysadmins with years of experience, and even they still have to cope with BSODs, crashing applications, and all the usual crap that Windows users continue to put up with.
It's sad; they actually think it's normal. I run into the same issue when they talk about Windows server issues (I admin the *nix systems). They don't believe me when I say I don't run into issue xyz...
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?
It lines up pretty perfectly with my experience swapping in Ubuntu for Mac OS. When I have a problem I can troubleshoot it down to a specific line of code or piece of hardware, on windows.... well, I would rather not troubleshoot anything on windows.
Also, I'm fairly certain drivers and anti-virus is not exclusive to the corporate environment.
Active Directory is a good example, there's no necessity to add a windows system to an Active Directory, and if a company is going down a less centrally controlled model, which includes things like MacOS systems, it would make sense to not force the Windows boxes to log in to AD.
Personally, I've run Windows/MacOS and Linux for a reasonable number of years and I wouldn't say that one was necessarily vastly more stable that the others (assuming current software)
What I do see is that a lot of "traditional corporate" systems get loaded down with additional layers of software which can cause issues, remove that and I think you have a less crashy experience, regardless of the underlying OS.
What I've found over the past 18 years is that Apple is the best at creating an environment where I can install dev or media artist stuff, keep up to date with the latest software and OS, and it all just works -- no WTF moments or frustration. (With the one stark exception of Apple's CoreStorage volume management system.)
That said, Apple's OS has also been getting less dev friendly and more consumer oriented in recent years.
My guess is that most consumers will end up running and iOS like managed environment in the next 5 years or so and more technical people will end up running Linux.
My point being, I don't think it's so much a difference between the Operating systems but how they're operated.
- Part of the reasons macs are cheaper is that they're massively less instrumented than PCs. - Most orgs have not migrated to Win10 because they're totally convinced they need that instrumentation on windows. - But they don't need that instrumentation on OSX, so it calls the entire premise into question.
It's also the case that people negotiate cheap block sales of SKUs from "trusted" partners to help pre-bundle all that instrumentation. But as this data shows, it turns out that buying less customized devices with better overall specs is actually a cost savings and per-unit cost.
Finally, I'd argue that employee satisfaction is almost directly a result of not having a heavy-handed and almost entirely arbitrary series of mandates forced onto their computer.
I won't talk about my employers efforts, but I know OTHER people (friends in IT) who are experimenting with mass deploys of Win10 and Surface books with a "let's throw EVERYTHING out and pretend these are a new platform" approach, and they tell me that they see benefits. As the conversations are casual, I cannot go further.
It's sort of amazing what happens to overall cost if you accept the premise that the vast majority of IT tooling and monitoring is in fact bad, wrongheaded, and not fulfilling real security and auditing requirements.
I'll be interested to see if the waves of BYOD and lightly managed systems give way to a return to centralisation again, when people realise what they don't have any more, or if it turns out, as you say, to be that they never really needed it in the first place.
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 that the PC's are far more heavily modified with crapware/bloatware than the macs were. Usually because having checkpoint/norton/whatever was an absolute requirement from a security perspective on the PC's but apparently the MAC's didn't even need disk encryption enabled much less virus scanners...
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.
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.
This happens where I work. Amongst other things it:
1) Set the hostname of the machine. 2) At one point, changed the timezone to one of the US offices (I work in Europe). 3) Prohibited upgrades to newer versions of OS X until they were approved by the IT staff. 4) Forced reboots for installation of security updates (happened to everyone in the office at the same time, with a few minutes warning and no option to cancel).
and some other annoyances. I needed at one stage to reinstall OS X (my fault, as opposed to something wrong with OS X), and this got rid of the issue.
I was informed by a colleague that if you reinstalled OS X while connected to the corporate network, that it would install OS X from the company's IT servers instead of Apple's ones, thus pulling down the corporate image. I can't 100% verify that claim, but it sounds true what I have seen when people reformatted in the office.
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.