I’d like to know what portion of the population finds themselves in the same situation as me…
The company I work for is basically a large corporation in terms of the bureaucracy involved. I work within a group of tech people on computers every day. Our business is in copying and analyzing computer hard drives both in the lab and in he field all the time. We have many machines on our desks - most of them the latest and greatest in terms of hardware. In our server room we have a set of 28 dual processor HP blades that we remote desktop into to do much of our technical computer analysis work. The current trend for the desktop is to buy those small but powerful Shuttles with 24″ monitors as the shuttles are portable. We are in a Windows dominated world at work because the upper management has the final say on what kind of platforms we buy, and we have “always used Windows”.
At home, I have over the last year become a Mac fan - to the point where I bought my own 24″ iMac and for the most part went cold turkey from the Windows and Linux OS’s at home (See one of my previous articles here). One of the realizations I have made is that Apple actually does make excellent hardware and it’s pretty comparable in price to plain vanilla hardware when similarly equipped. I tried to look for a generic PC with a similar form factor to the iMac and it was very tough to find. What I did find was elevated in price to be as much or more than an Apple, plus, it just simply wasn’t as elegant a device as the iMacs. At work I have two Dell 24″ widescreen monitors side by side. For those that don’t know, the 24″ iMac is as thin as those monitors! You gotta give those Apple engineers credit.
Anyway, back to the work rant - the bottom line is that my work to date won’t buy Apple products rather than PC’s. What can I do to convince them? In preparation for any arguments to the contrary, I fiddled with Boot Camp on my iMac at home. I practiced the installations and found that except for the EFI vs PC BIOS issue, there are no differences in booting any of the Windows or Linuxes on the Apple hardware. I now have Vista and Linux triple booted with boot camp at home and they both run flawlessly. For a proof of concept test of functionality, I gave the Vista Paradox thing a try and fully activated I encountered no problems either. Of course a work PC/Mac would have a valid copy of the OS installed. All applications that I require for work (Office, Acrobat Pro, others) run great on the Core 2 Duo processor. The iMac 24″ is an excellent Vista workstation! I also prior to my Vista install had run XP without any issues either.
I guess the bottom line here is given the quality of hardware we currently buy, why would we NOT make a switch over to the Apple hardware for at least some of the staff that are willing to take the plunge? Support is great, hardware quality control is high, and Apple isn’t going to go away anytime soon. Apple makes as good a Windows (or Linux) workstation if not better than any other major PC manufacturer.
The answer, as far as I see it, is this. The reluctance to invest in Apple hardware within our company is linked to the history and reputation of the Mac. I had to make it about the HARDWARE, not the software. Why? because now I could. Now they are simply newer, better PC’s than PC’s are. The challenge was in convincing our managers not that OSX is some magical pill to cure all OS woes, but rather that for roughly the same amount of money (ok a little more) we can purchase better engineered hardware that is very well supported. In addition, it is about the only real solution out there when looking for a quasi-portable computer that can be deployed in the field with an integrated standard very large hard drive (500-750GB) and display for field acquisitions of other computers. Any custom solutions I have seen that are marketed for professionals such as us are literally double the cost of an iMac.
So get your rationales together and make it about the great Intel HARDWARE, and make the side benefit the fact that now you can run OSX - IN ADDITION TO - Windows XP or Vista or any Linux. It worked for me - I hope this helps someone else…
2 Comments
Great argument for the bosses, seems like so many IT people are still fixated on the PC, it is changing! More and more IT and Geeks alike are starting to take a good look at the Mac and once they get on board and many already have it will act like a wave in Apples favor…
http://www.switchingtomac.com/
Thanks for the comment. As one Digg commenter pointed out, this is (or should be) obvious, but in my experience management is slower to understand new trends in the industry and we need to explain it like they are a 3 year old. I too feel that many many geeks are turning to Apples where they didn’t before. I see tons of that in my enterprise’s (human) network across the country. It’s very interesting…
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