Mac sales in the enterprise during Apple’s last fiscal quarter grew a whopping 66 percent, significantly outpacing the rest of the PC market, which grew just 4.5 percent in the enterprise. The data from Apple’s previous fiscal quarter was highlighted on Friday by analyst Charlie Wolf with Needham & Company. He said though he originally viewed success in the enterprise as a “one-quarter blip,” it now appears to be a “durable platform” for Apple.
I work with a lot of Mac Addicts (the sort who will advocate and defend Apple to the death), and they are slowly but surely moving into decision making positions.
There’s nothing _wrong_ with putting Macs on desks in corporate offices. Just think of them as high-quality PC’s with a slightly different OS.
On the one hand, you could buy a $500 Dell, loaded up with MS Office, and give it a 2-year useful lifespan.
On the other hand, you could buy a $1000 iMac instead. You’ll get more memory, more hard drive, a faster CPU, and a 4-year useful lifespan.
It’s basically a wash on price, except that you have to replace the Mac half as often. (Migrating files to a new Mac is also easier, but I’m assuming that user files are stored on a server, so that doesn’t matter.)
Macs are not the savoirs of the corporate desktop. For non-developers, basically any computer you can buy right now is overkill. Hell, an iPad would be overkill. But you have to give them _something_, and a Mac isn’t a bad choice. It might even be a morale boost for some, feeling they’re special getting a cool-looking Mac on their desk instead of some ugly plastic Dell.
This is not how corporate workstation work. A corporate desktop is not like an home PC. It is not a single entity. It is a node in a bigger picture. It is connected to a domain, share folder using that domain, have a domain connected mail client and is usually using a standard disk image that can be replaced remotely. If the corporate Network use a full Microsoft stack (Active Directory, SharePoint, IE6(…), Windows Server) and Windows applications, making a transition to the Mac take a -lot- of IT resource for what it worth. By a lot, I mean 3000+ person-hours, so around 65000$ not invested anywhere else. If this is not done, the Mac will have limited integration and will probably run Windows is Parallel Desktop or VMware for most tasks. Even there, it will still be an alien.
Mixing -workstation- type is usually not cost effective. Mixing servers is fine, but not workstation.
I guess the fact that more and more applications are web-based helps a lot in that regard.
Also, dropping some Microsoft solutions in favor of web-based ones might save a lot of licensing cost over the long run.
Only to a limited extent, in that it moves the problem from “out of the question” to “expensive.”
This isn’t a problem unique to Mac OS. Similar problems are holding Linux back as well.
While I agree that it would be a big effort for some IT infrastructures, Mac integrate with Windows pretty well. At my work, I use a Mac for development and my macbook pro is joined to the Active Directory domain, using all the standard Microsoft tools with few issues.
Yes, but in most organizations in standard roles, management wants to limit what a user can do. This to avoid maintenance nightmare. Many companies where there in the 90ies when Windows did not provide so much maintenance functionality. OS X is, in this respect in the position of Windows in the 90ies. Of course, on company laptops, or as developer machines, OS X works fine (outside some compatibility problems).
If one were to evaluate Macs on the current state of Mac OS X then in all due respects it isn’t ready given the iffy Windows integration but that will hopefully change in lion with the ground up writing of a smb2 stack.
As for Microsoft, I don’t think they care because ultimately if you want to communicate with the rest of the world you need Microsoft Office which means they’re still making money off you somewhere in the equation.
I don’t know where you work, but where I work, the desktops have a much longer lifespan than 2 years. Heck, we’re still running some pentium 3 desktops that are probably close to 10 years old.
This. Your company must be very rich to throw good computers away after 2 years. Everywhere I’ve ever went, it’s possible to see lots of machines being 5-years old or more, and I can guarantee you that they were not worth $1000 (no serious GPU, 512MB or 1GB ram…).
Unless, of course, you think that to be usable, a computer must run the latest release of the OS you put on it. But if we forget for a moment how disputable this is (fixed purpose machines which work well in their current setup only need security updates, not feature updates), I’ve heard that Leopard was not exactly light on resources at release time either. More like competing with Vista for the title of most bloated OS of these times
So it’s likely that lots of macs were not able to run it.
Plus, in terms of upgradeability, Linux and BSDs used in combination with the right software beat them all by a large margin.
Edited 2011-05-22 07:28 UTC
+1. Average corporate IT policy is PCs are upgraded once every 4 years. 3 years is a very good place to work for a dev. Usual in software development is 4 years, considering you’ll get RAM upgrades and maybe HDD/SSD upgrades.
For regular users – until it becomes unusable.
Heck, I still use my old development machine(replaced last year after 4 years) at home for development work.
I do most dev on a Pentium III with a 1GB of ram on Windows 2000/XP … Legacy Code.
The reason 3 years (or sometimes 4) is very popular is due to corporate accounting. You can amortize the cost of a new desktop computer over a 3 year period in the US, so in many shops they will use a 3 year replacement path regardless if the old PCs are working or not (and why I can find some fantastic deals buying off-lease used corporate PCs at very low prices). Combined with the speed increase of CPUs and memory size/cost over a 3 year period, its generally assumed that a replacement computer (say, $1500) will bring much more value to the business if the individual using it (with, say a $50,000/year salary) will be more productive.
2 years!? I wish.
In all the companies I worked so far, the PC were used until they died, without any chance of possible recovery.
Even then, their working parts were used to keep other of the same age running.
This comparison is, of course nonsense. E.g. our university has many ‘ancient’ HP desktop machines that have been running at least 5 years. The actually rarely break, and are usually replaced by faster machines. I am a Mac user and enthusiast, but I have seen far more Macs that required repair than HP business machines.
$500 Dell will serve 4-6 years with no issues. I’ve had done application development on 5 y/o Dell Optiplex and those machines are still going to be in use for at least 3 years.
My desktop is 4 y/o and I am still doing heavy Java development on it. Average users don’t even need half of what I have. And I have an energy efficient setup with an underclocked CPU.
If you are a larger client with Dell, HP or Lenovo, you’ll get a service contract that will b**chslap AppleCare. I go for Lenovo, for their global warranty and subtile design.
Eh, Our experience would beg to differ. We’ve had a a few dell’s just flake out for no reason at a high error rate, thankfully Dell’s SMB support is pretty good at replacing them when they kill themselves.
That is assuming they buy them where as most organisations I know tend to lease them and let EDS, HP or IBM Global Services take care of the details.
The one’s that I worked on were in property of (Finnish company HQ’d in Espoo) and that’s Global Technology Services(for the BigBlue)
I imagine it is the same company I worked for in the last years.
The reality is that more powerful computers really don’t help most users. A few, like developers, can benefit, but most peoples computing needs were well met by 90s computers. New convenience features might require more resources and those features might be helpful to productivity for some users but in the majority of cases any computer produced in the last decade running an appropriate set of software for its specs will be sufficient for almost every user.
What drives workstation replacement is maintenance costs. How much to get spare parts? How often does it break? Do we still have an image for that? Can our management software still manage it? As long as we get get parts cheaply and it doesn’t require constant attention and we can still reimage and manage it, it stays.
Yes. from selling 100’000 Macs to corporations to 200’000 is not big news.
I bet most of them ended up in the iOS development department, not on the tables of regular back-office employees.
The reason for Mac surge is quite obvious. The whole iPad/iPhone development toolchain requires a Mac. Apple may think that the iPad creates a halo effect somehow, and it may be true: as long as the development market for iPhone & friends grows.
Edited 2011-05-22 06:08 UTC
I would vote +10 if it was possible, lot of people are neglecting the aura effect of iDevices (developing for iDevice requires a OSX system, developping a .Net application doesn’t anymore require a windows compatible system). Pretty much like blackberry’s were surfing on the exchange wave.
But as discuted in this thread OSX is incompatible with some of the enterprise wide tech, and most system administrator lack OSX expertise (if any can be acquired, as they “just work” and most of their owner rely on Apple store genius to solve their issues).
And I would add that OSX would be a security nightmare (not as much as windows though) for security administrator (some of the high security firms block USB usage, comes only with wired connection, I’m am not knowlegable enough on Mac OSX to block usb port and the access point function of mac osx). Plus the built in backup system is pretty much only compatible with time capsule (without resorting to unreliable hack) which are individual backup devices and not enterprise wide ones.
Let’s face it: A sixty percent jump in sales of Macs to enterprise is not so difficult when you only sold ten Macs to enterprise last quarter 🙂
Having said that, it’s probably to do with iPhone and iPad development.
While it is true that PCs tend to be on the cheaper side, if you are developing with C and C++ then actually Macs are cheaper then a PC + MSDN license.
But if you are mainly coding in Java, .Net, Ruby, Python, etc, then the price of the included developer tools does not count that much.
It depends on how much of Visual Studio you need. The express edition is free, and provides more or less the same functionality as Xcode. Besides that, most companies do not mind to spend a few hundred dollars on development tools if it makes programmer productivity higher. And if you are targeting Win32, you may be out of luck on OS X if you have to use the Win32 API.
Edited 2011-05-22 08:48 UTC
Is there some written licensing rules that forbid use of the free Visual Studio Express tools for professional development ? They don’t sound so crippled compared to “sell your arm” professional editions.
Edited 2011-05-22 08:53 UTC
Yes there is but who cares?
Then 6 months later.
“Knock Knock”
“The BSA. Open up we are doing an audit”
After they’ve gone.
“Now what idiot persuared me to allowd those Express Editions to be used? You are FIRED”
You can deploy code with the express install … it is only the academic license they don’t allow you to deploy code with.
Nope, but the express edition is crippled though. No openmp, no profile guided optimization and no link time optimization (perhaps there are more features removed but these are the ones I know of).
This crippling is to MS’s detrement. We write high performance multi threaded software on linux and compile for windows using the express compiler. We don’t want visual studio. Any performance hit on their platform is on their heads. That and almost all of our customers run the software on linux anyways. There’s a couple of stubborn ones who have more money than sense.
The professional editions are actually quite cheap.
Only the academic versions of Visual Studio you can deploy production code with.
We had two Copies of VS 2010 ultimate for £100 each. Sql Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition is just over £100.
The most expensive software we use is usually from Adobe.
The professional versions of VS cost around €1000 per seat.
In Germany it is €796,68 actually
http://www.amazon.de/Microsoft-Visual-Studio-Professional-Englisch/…
Not for us it doesn’t … Microsoft quoted us £100. It ultimately depends on your licensing vendor.
Even so … it is still cheaper than the price of an iMac. $1000 is approximately £700
Average core 2 workstation costs about £400 with a Windows License … so even if we take into account the full price with no discount (and they are easy to get), it still comes up to the same price as the iMac.
And you don’t even need a dev copy of SQl Server because they include Express as part of the VS2010 install.
Also where are you going to deploy this code to? Most people have Windows Workstations, if you develop on XCode everyone would have to have a Mac and that would be expensive.
Edited 2011-05-22 10:31 UTC
You get stuck with your current system and a license and the other guy gets a new iMac UNIX system with his dev tools in exchange for the license. I’ll take the hardware.
I use them, but they are quite crippled:
– No ATL
– No MFC
– No ALM tools
– No 64bit compilers (you can get them on the free SDK though)
– No Sourcesafe
– No optimizing compilers
– No VS Plugins
– …
But you can go a long way with the Express editons + Windows SDK.
I was with you until “No sourcesafe” – that’s a GOOD thing.
I’m sorry, you’re comparing VS to XCode? Seriously? Then Eclipse C/C++ on Linux will beat you on price.
In any case, if you’re developing for Windows you’ll need MSDN and Windows, unless OSX comes with MSDN subscription and a Windows license.
You are right in the sense that I was speaking about different target audiences, maybe I should have make it clearer.
I was just discussing it as a concept.
On the Windows world, if you are doing development usually that means buying VS. The free SDK + Express editions won’t be enough if you need ATL, MFC, and many other Microsoft specific tools.
While on Macs the full development environment comes with them.
So when comparing PC with Mac prices this is something that is usually overlooked.
Now, I am a Windows/Unix developer so don’t take my argumentation as blindling defending Apple.
And I agree with the majority here. Most likely those Macs are for developing applications for iOS devices.
In Europe most ads I see for Objective-C developers are for mobile application developers, not desktop.
No you are wrong.
A Mac is about £1100 for the cheapest iMac.
The dev machine I do not use for Legacy development is a Core 2 with 4GB of ram and Windows XP cost the company about £300.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is £100 from our licensing partner, Sql Server 2008 R2 Developer is approximately £100 as well… £600
Only if I was developing on a Mac Mini it would be cheaper.
I don’t understand how you can pay just £100 for VS.
Nowadays I develop mostly in Java, but back in the day I was doing heavy Win32 development, we needed to pay at least €500 per year for MSDN licenses with the volume license programme, if I remember correctly.
We don’t require a volume licensing agreement, since there are only 2 people that use VS (one being me and the other being my collegue) and you can get various discounts depending on your organisation’s status.
Ah ok, thanks for clarifying.
No worries.
I do come across pro MS on here … but it normally because I don’t like some of the misinformation about Microsoft … I have made a very good living out of knowing microsoft technology and for me the additional cost of software is very small compared to what I have gained career wise.
I wasn’t specifically having a go at you if you felt that .. since you seem fairly balanced with your opinions regarding these subjects.
Wow you are comparing core 2 system with i5/i7 iMac for the price? And top of that Windows XP? Come on. be serious.
It’s called choice and using the right tool for the right job. If you need nothing more than a core 2, why should you buy an i5 ?
I wonder how many of these new Macs being bought are upgrades over PowerPC Macs with the arrival of Snow Leopard?
Our publications team were all running Power Mac G5s until a couple of months ago when they upgraded to the latest Adobe Suite.
How timely – I received a Mac laptop at my (Fortune 500) corporation a few weeks back as part of a corporate-wide pilot.
Despite some struggles with the Storage Array Network (which uses Windows-proprietary tech), it seems to work rather well – I hadn’t used a Mac significantly since MacOS 2 back in the late 1980’s, and Apple has evolved nicely. No Windows VM – the intent is to do *everything* on OS/X, or go back to the standard Windows 7 machine – I’m still undecided. Though not a Mac fanatic, I can see why some folk are.
I’m also part of a Linux pilot that targets the software development community (different network) – same SAN issues, plus the expected OOo / Office and Outlook compatibility problems, but here we have a Windows VM to work around them. The benefit is gut-wrenching speed – some of our apps run an order of magnitude faster under Linux on the same hardware, and when a run in measured in hours, that’s huge.
I suppose the biggest realization is that many users no longer need Windows as their primary corporate desktop. It’s an opening for alternatives – and the loss of mono-culture is almost certainly a plus from the malware / security perspective.
And for a geek like me, I’m just happy to see some variety for a change! 😀
Let me guess ‘a run’ is some kind of build system for software development ? I’ve always thought creating many/new processes in Linux is much faster than in Windows.
But it is good to see large companies doing pilots like these. This was exactly what Ballmer was afraid of when he said Linux is their biggest competitor.
The biggest fear is if Linux gets a foothold and they don’t buy PC’s with Windows pre-installed anymore.
If Linux is good enough for a companies, it should be pretty easy to replace many systems with it. Because I think there are no per-PC license fees for Linux, just support hours used and similair subscribtions.
The only hurdle is hardware support/drivers (if you have an installed base you probably have older better supported hardware ?). Usually though these companies have a lot of systems of the same brand/model so it should be pretty easy to do.
Maybe it is even possible to keep some of the older hardware in service ? That was the biggest hurdle for a lot of companies to not deploy Vista and stay with Windows XP. Windows 7 in that regard is better.
If Microsoft would mess up like they did with Windows Vista again then I think we would see a lot more of these pilots I think.
Well, cross-compiles for us are certainly must faster on Linux than on Windows – but for targeting Windows itself, nothing we’ve found is faster than Visual Studio 2010. It’s also among the fastest when you’re just trying to “sanity check” a multi-megaSLOC C++ build with no particular target in mind – just checking algorithms and interfaces and such. We haven’t tested on Mac yet, but I don’t expect any speed records there – OS/X is famous for usability more than performance.
The “run” I referenced wasn’t a build, though, but certain in-house “heavy” applications written in C++ and others in Java that implement business and engineering logic. When we get to certain hard real-time environments, of course, Windows is a non-starter, while some Linux products feature real-time extensions such as SLERT (nice!) that for us fit the bill better than embedded environments such as VxWorks.
Even though Windows 7 doesn’t suffer the same insanity that afflicted Vista (sure, YMMV if you’re a Vista fan – but we tested it thoroughly, and it was deployed only very lightly here to this day, so this is not just my opinion), I think we’ll see more Mac and Linux pilots anyway. .Net is very nice, but cross-platform development is now well-understood and very efficient. There’s no reason to enslave your corporate IT budget to Microsoft (or Oracle or Adobe) when you can leverage competition to manage pricing. It’s just… prudent.
Last year you had 2 clients. This year you have 4 clients. 100% growth. “How impressive”. lol