We completed our corporate switch to Apple.
Anyhow here is what happened, This friday I finally converted my company over to Apple systems (The PO specified Mac Pro towers 2.66Ghz + a ATI 1900XT, 2 or 4GB of ram (Depending on user) and everyone got a 23inch Cinema HD display + 1 copy of Parallels per unit.
The whole process started with myself, when Apple was nice enough to send me an evaluation Macintosh Pro tower with the same specs as above (but 4GB of ram) and Parallels, My company has always used workstations (a few suns but the majority were Dell Precisions) mixed Redhat Linux environment and Windows + Sun OS.
I spent about 45 days evaluating the Mac Pro and I worked with some of the guys to test our internal applications (we recompiled our stuff over etc...) Things worked, I enjoyed working with OS X and Apple was very helpful working with us to help transition over to OS X. I ordered 2 towers before the eval period was over (one for my office and one for home) then a small number of them for the core team which were using them along with the precisions or suns if they had one. Little by little we started to order a few more here and there until finally we pulled the trigger and did the full scale conversion.
We are going to pile up our old hardware in the following few weeks and donate them to charity.
Things that pushed us to the side.
#1 Unified package, I like the fact that with the Apple you get the complete package (ala SGI or SUN) everything from hardware/OS is fully validated and built for eachother.
#2. Price point, The Pros were actually more competitive in pricing over what Dell offered and we wanted a complete integrated package with one number to call for all our support needs.
#3 OS X is a nice Unix derivative, and can run lots of COTS packages that redhat.sunos etc.. could not use and I feel confident that in the long run it will be supported well by Apple.
Then Switch to the Intel architecture was the big clincher in my book, I suspect it is probably helping Apple switch lots of new customers over to the OS X side.
So anyone else here did any major switching over to Apple?
The whole process started with myself, when Apple was nice enough to send me an evaluation Macintosh Pro tower with the same specs as above (but 4GB of ram) and Parallels, My company has always used workstations (a few suns but the majority were Dell Precisions) mixed Redhat Linux environment and Windows + Sun OS.
I spent about 45 days evaluating the Mac Pro and I worked with some of the guys to test our internal applications (we recompiled our stuff over etc...) Things worked, I enjoyed working with OS X and Apple was very helpful working with us to help transition over to OS X. I ordered 2 towers before the eval period was over (one for my office and one for home) then a small number of them for the core team which were using them along with the precisions or suns if they had one. Little by little we started to order a few more here and there until finally we pulled the trigger and did the full scale conversion.
We are going to pile up our old hardware in the following few weeks and donate them to charity.
Things that pushed us to the side.
#1 Unified package, I like the fact that with the Apple you get the complete package (ala SGI or SUN) everything from hardware/OS is fully validated and built for eachother.
#2. Price point, The Pros were actually more competitive in pricing over what Dell offered and we wanted a complete integrated package with one number to call for all our support needs.
#3 OS X is a nice Unix derivative, and can run lots of COTS packages that redhat.sunos etc.. could not use and I feel confident that in the long run it will be supported well by Apple.
Then Switch to the Intel architecture was the big clincher in my book, I suspect it is probably helping Apple switch lots of new customers over to the OS X side.
So anyone else here did any major switching over to Apple?
Comments
My company finally upgraded me to a 3-year old Dell made from spare parts, that likes to shut itself off randmly. They did let me keep my 17" CRT with a large scratch in the screen, and two horizontal lines of dead pixels.
That's ridiculous. I hope Vista addressed this; I haven't used it yet.
Just curious, what type of business does your company do?
What does amaze me is how nice OS X is under heavy work loads. I was watching a large workload consume all 4 cores on the OS X side and the user working on a virtual windows XP session and not notice a performance issue doing regular work while the workstation is hammering away. Amazing what you can do today on a workstation that would have cost millions of dollars on a Cray back in the 80s.