Quote:
Originally Posted by starlooker
I wonder why the company went all Mac.
With the Dells, other than the motherboard, any component can be bought of the shelf at any computer store. This would have made maitenance easy and cost-effective.
With the Macs, it's all propriety hardware. There's only one place to buy components - Apple - and they charge $$$, as befitting a monopoly supplier.
|
I'll tell you why
... at least in light of my 30 years-worth in IT as IBM mainframe engineer through to running development and engineering departments for some large corporates.
Currently as IT director for a combined advertising creative firm and software development company working within the newspaper and magazine publishing industry, I've installed Macs for the past 9 years we've been running for everything non-server. All desktop machines are either dual-G5 towers or Intel iMacs. Components? What are they? Macs come fully loaded with everything I've ever required already. I don't ever need to add anything, apart from maybe more RAM on the high-end graphics machines. As far as component replacement, I've never had a Mac fail here. Ever. In any way. They've all (29 of them) been utterly reliable for way past (in some cases) their intended life span. I still have some from when we first started that sit there running backend processes without complaint all day, every day. I'm not just lucky either - it's a common experience within my circles.
My servers (HP, IBM and Sun)? They've generally been OK too, but have had Ethernet cards and other small stuff like that fail on occasion. Never on the Macs for some reason.
OS-related problems? Don't go there. OSX - for my users it's run, enjoy and forget. I sit in my office with a PC. I actually envy my users.
They actually
are great machines. I'm not a starry-eyed Mac user defending my turf as I've been accused of by some with "VAST" experience here before. I couldn't care less what the machine, OS or company behind it was or were - as long as it best performs the task at hand. It isn't "trendy" or "cool" - it's just good business sense. To balance, my servers run either Linux (RHE) or Solaris, and they do admirable jobs as well. They're no where near considered "desktop" ready yet - not in our application environment.