Considering that Steve Jobs had the courage to admit that "AppleTV 1.0 was not what people wanted", why can't Apple do the same when it comes to their Mac computers? But instead of admitting that the Mac Mini was not what people really asked for, Apple will try to spin it as "we made the Mac MIni and people didn't buy it, which 'proves' that nobody wants a Mac minitower".
The Mac mini is a great computer, and I'm sure they sold a ton of them. Where are you getting your information?
And although Symantec can detect the virus, it can often do nothing to quarantine, delete or in any way prevent the infection.
I've seen viruses and trojans making their way through gateway, mailserver, AND desktop scanners from time to time. That's several situations where a group of major enterprise antivirus vendor failed to detect an infection which required a custom AV definition to fix. Every single time that occurs it sets the whole IT unit on alert and causes major overages - staff time and $$$. That's just to keep the threat contained. Ergo just to maintain normal service functions.
The products in question still successfully caught the other 900 or so new infections that we never saw, but when simple small SINGLE failures have such a large impact there is indeed a fatigue factor that the IT establishments may see mitigated by a move to heterogeneous desktop mix - including Macs for general Office productivity and creative users.
Consider now the insanity of having windows users "self support" or be left "on their own" by IT - even a CIO. Once the mac users start to become more than a tiny fraction within the user community do you think they'll remember that they were left "on their own" but pay for new support services? Do you think that senior management will forget that they didn't require as many IT support staff to cover? Or for that matter none? Senior managers think in gross generalizations and believe you me the idea of self-supporting clients will NOT be forgotten when negotiating that new budget.
IT support staff should see the need to support everyone, and I see a day coming soon where Mac-friendly IT staff will be asked to manage an enterprise desktop rollout of "those crappy" macs. I don't think they'[ll be so keen to involve their Mac-agnostic (whatever the hell that would mean) peers in the development plans. In fact it's a good way to finally take back from desktop support services from all those windows admins pretending that Macs were "toys" - while sitting next to their AIX boxes, sheesh.
I sense a conversion of the masses when jobs are at stake. It'll be interesting to watch.
important: I USE A MAC AND AN IPHONE AND LOVE THEM. EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE THIS PERFECT COMPUTING PLATFORM.
im am a realist, unfortunately.
and reality does set in.
first:
hittrj01:
base mac pro (lowest cost mac with easily changeable parts and no monitor):$2299
cheap 20" monitor:$220
office 2008(standard):$399
1 year warranty
total:$2918
dell optiplex 330 (standard business machine)
includes microsoft office
adobe acrobat 8.1
20" monitor
3 year on-site service
total: $998
this will not be used in the discussion
Wyse Viance:
20" monitor
keyboard and mouse
centralized citrix server
complete centralized management
total (for 20 including server cost): $1150
ok, lets buy 20 of em....
this means either an smb gets all new ones or an enterprise gets them for payables at the main office.
should i, as a business owner/cfo pay $58,360 or $19,960?
you can pay the computer guy easily for $38,400.
or even buy a new kick-butt phone system.
serviceability and interchangeability means everything in the enterprise market. it means the system is either up or down. a low cost employee is $150/day and downtime is lost money.
os x is the best os out. i am a huge apple fan. in order for apple to be adopted in the enterprise they must be able to justify the cost. they cant support thin client. as a business owner, im not paying an extra $1920 for everyone to experience os x.
as a cfo, i'm not authorizing it.
why? because mas 250 runs fine on my windows machine and what is good enough for me is good enough for you.
don't even bring up service. apple does not provide on-site service and that is crucial. no company is going to make a trip to the apple store when dell will come to you.
if your company has money to burn (as most do )....buy the mac pro. it is a much better computer.
That is not my point though....
second:
Active Directory
I shouldn't have to say more. but i will for all the people out thre who do not manage networks for a living.
there is no better way to manage computer users available.
Holy cow, this just in! Apple has made available a computer that has ALL of these features readily available! Can you guess what it is?
.... It's called a Mac Pro.
Do you believe that businesses are going to buy $2,800 Mac Pros by the bushel? If Apple is serious about catering to corporate I.T. departments, they need to offer them an expandable version of the Mac Mini at a price no higher than a Mac Mini.
Which kind of business really requires such customizable machines? Replaceable video card? Are you talking about part by part upgrading?
Not part by part upgrading, per se, but corporate customers generally want to be able to easily replace a failed hard drive or add a PCI card to a desktop computer. Although the Mac Mini is elegant and has adequate performance specs for basic office applications, it is not designed to be opened, modified or upgraded.
When South Park was criticized for having poorly drawn content and cheap toilet humor, the South Park creators responded to the critics by introducing Terrence and Philip, who are even more poorly drawn and even more crude. In the same way, the Mac Mini is Steve Jobs' own Terrence and Philip. The Mac Mini was created out of spite, and not really meant as a serious effort to address people's demand for a Mac minitower. The Mac Mini is Steve's way of saying "Fuck You" to all those "minitower whiners".
Steve: "You guys want a minitower? Here's something that I pulled out of my ass. I call it a Mac Mini. Take that!"
Not part by part upgrading, per se, but corporate customers generally want to be able to easily replace a failed hard drive or add a PCI card to a desktop computer. Although the Mac Mini is elegant and has adequate performance specs for basic office applications, it is not designed to be opened, modified or upgraded.
Even Apple's "professional" laptops require total disassembly just to replace basic parts like a hard drive or dvd drive. Right now, IT departments who have no Mac experience are thinking that Macs can be taken apart just like any regular Dell PC. But if businesses start buying more Macs, then the IT departments will see what a pain Mac repairs really are. When Mac users start complaining about long repair times and technicians start complaining to IT managers, it will give the IT directors and CIOs even more reason to not support Macs. They will use every excuse they can find, and they have the power to carry out their anti-Mac agenda. And Apple will have only itself to blame.
Apple has the potential of grabbing the IT industry by the balls if only they make the platform more dependable, provide bug-fixes on time, and provide arrogant-less support.
I work at a software company and we are thinking of replacing all the sales and training people's laptops with Macbooks. I really hope that soon after that, we can start getting some Xserves in here to replace our Dell servers.
If Apple cares to be a serious contender in corporate I.T. departments, they ought make an expandable Macintosh that suits the needs of business users. Such a Mac would be designed to permit easy replacement of the hard drive and video card, provide space for one or two PCI cards, and not have a built-in screen. Essentially, this would be an expandable Mac Mini. (Remember the design of the IIci and IIcx machines?).
To the naysayers who cry "but there's already the MacPro". I can tell you, while the MacPro is a fantastic machine, it's complete over-kill for a lot of users. It's also physically HUGE and expensive. Most users simply do not need the expansion capabilities of a MacPro. Actually, the sheer SIZE is the biggest issue. For me, there's simply no room for a MacPro in my office.
As far as headless Macs go, there's a gaping chasm between the Mac mini and MacPro that could easily and profitably be filled.
The Mac mini is a joke. The iMac is too limited and glossy screens in a graphics intensive environment doesn't work. The MacBook Pro isn't flexible enough (that's my machine).
Basically we're talking about Half a MacPro with 2 PCI slots, 2 internal drive bays (RAID?), same processor and number of RAM slots and less than half the size (or smaller).
Apple would absolutely benefit from a machine of this class in it's lineup. The Mac IIcx and Mac IIci are the perfect example! A compact and powerful machine that will fit ANYWHERE. And it's not just in corporate business. There are many designers and design studios who would LOVE a machine of this caliber. Switchers would gobble these things up. Speccing YOUR choice of video cards and monitors would be fantastic. Upgrading the video card isn't the point, it's SPECCING the card of your choice when you buy the machine that's most important.
Anyway, it's an old saw, but I'd love to see Apple offer something of this nature.
Even Apple's "professional" laptops require total disassembly just to replace basic parts like a hard drive or dvd drive.
You sound like a total stupid idiot, I just upgraded the disk drive in my laptop by taking out the battery, removing 4 screws, sliding out the old drives rack, replacing it with a 250 gb that I picked up at Micro-Center, and put it back together.
I used free software from the internet, to back the entire old drive image onto a USB drive.
I rebooted from the USB external drive after the new drive was inplace.
I then copied the image from the USB external drive onto the new internal drive.
Then I rebooted from the internal drive and my Leopard is completely functional without even reinstalling the OS!
Took one screw driver and about 5 minutes to replace the drive.
I don't know just how little you know about Apple products PC-Fanboy.... but it's clear it's so little that it can't be measured.
When South Park was criticized for having poorly drawn content and cheap toilet humor, the South Park creators responded to the critics by introducing Terrence and Philip, who are even more poorly drawn and even more crude. In the same way, the Mac Mini is Steve Jobs' own Terrence and Philip. The Mac Mini was created out of spite, and not really meant as a serious effort to address people's demand for a Mac minitower. The Mac Mini is Steve's way of saying "Fuck You" to all those "minitower whiners".
Steve: "You guys want a minitower? Here's something that I pulled out of my ass. I call it a Mac Mini. Take that!"
If you really think a MAC mini is such a failure, go try to buy an old one on eBay.
You will pay more for a 2 year old mac mini than you can buy a much more powerful brand new PC. The point is, the mini is built better, has a better OS, and is desirable enough for people to pay up to get it. The fact that you want to put a card in it to do something is silly. The average corporate company could take 1000 small dell boxes and replace'em with mini's. Keep the monitor, keep the mouse, plug the thing in and go. The small number of people that need to do the custom video card crap just shows a lack of understanding of the business world in commenting about it.
The fact of the matter is, the one area in business that the MAC is actually dominant, are functions that are heavily graphic in nature. Instead of adding a better graphics card to a DELL, what they REALLY do is get rid of the dell and us a real graphics machine.
Comments
Considering that Steve Jobs had the courage to admit that "AppleTV 1.0 was not what people wanted", why can't Apple do the same when it comes to their Mac computers? But instead of admitting that the Mac Mini was not what people really asked for, Apple will try to spin it as "we made the Mac MIni and people didn't buy it, which 'proves' that nobody wants a Mac minitower".
The Mac mini is a great computer, and I'm sure they sold a ton of them. Where are you getting your information?
Maybe someone could mention that Snow Leopard is scheduled to have Exchange support - which is probably 90% of what these business want no?
90% of businesses want that, but it's not 90% of what businesses want.
And although Symantec can detect the virus, it can often do nothing to quarantine, delete or in any way prevent the infection.
I've seen viruses and trojans making their way through gateway, mailserver, AND desktop scanners from time to time. That's several situations where a group of major enterprise antivirus vendor failed to detect an infection which required a custom AV definition to fix. Every single time that occurs it sets the whole IT unit on alert and causes major overages - staff time and $$$. That's just to keep the threat contained. Ergo just to maintain normal service functions.
The products in question still successfully caught the other 900 or so new infections that we never saw, but when simple small SINGLE failures have such a large impact there is indeed a fatigue factor that the IT establishments may see mitigated by a move to heterogeneous desktop mix - including Macs for general Office productivity and creative users.
Consider now the insanity of having windows users "self support" or be left "on their own" by IT - even a CIO. Once the mac users start to become more than a tiny fraction within the user community do you think they'll remember that they were left "on their own" but pay for new support services? Do you think that senior management will forget that they didn't require as many IT support staff to cover? Or for that matter none? Senior managers think in gross generalizations and believe you me the idea of self-supporting clients will NOT be forgotten when negotiating that new budget.
IT support staff should see the need to support everyone, and I see a day coming soon where Mac-friendly IT staff will be asked to manage an enterprise desktop rollout of "those crappy" macs. I don't think they'[ll be so keen to involve their Mac-agnostic (whatever the hell that would mean) peers in the development plans. In fact it's a good way to finally take back from desktop support services from all those windows admins pretending that Macs were "toys" - while sitting next to their AIX boxes, sheesh.
I sense a conversion of the masses when jobs are at stake. It'll be interesting to watch.
I am GLAD they are not going to a subscription service. I don't buy enough music to make it pay. I'd have to go elsewhere.
1) This wouldn't mean that the sale option would be going away if a subscription model was in place.
2) The rumour that it was coming and this was that it's going away are still just a rumours.
im am a realist, unfortunately.
and reality does set in.
first:
hittrj01:
base mac pro (lowest cost mac with easily changeable parts and no monitor):$2299
cheap 20" monitor:$220
office 2008(standard):$399
1 year warranty
total:$2918
dell optiplex 330 (standard business machine)
includes microsoft office
adobe acrobat 8.1
20" monitor
3 year on-site service
total: $998
this will not be used in the discussion
Wyse Viance:
20" monitor
keyboard and mouse
centralized citrix server
complete centralized management
total (for 20 including server cost): $1150
ok, lets buy 20 of em....
this means either an smb gets all new ones or an enterprise gets them for payables at the main office.
should i, as a business owner/cfo pay $58,360 or $19,960?
you can pay the computer guy easily for $38,400.
or even buy a new kick-butt phone system.
serviceability and interchangeability means everything in the enterprise market. it means the system is either up or down. a low cost employee is $150/day and downtime is lost money.
os x is the best os out. i am a huge apple fan. in order for apple to be adopted in the enterprise they must be able to justify the cost. they cant support thin client. as a business owner, im not paying an extra $1920 for everyone to experience os x.
as a cfo, i'm not authorizing it.
why? because mas 250 runs fine on my windows machine and what is good enough for me is good enough for you.
don't even bring up service. apple does not provide on-site service and that is crucial. no company is going to make a trip to the apple store when dell will come to you.
if your company has money to burn (as most do
That is not my point though....
second:
Active Directory
I shouldn't have to say more. but i will for all the people out thre who do not manage networks for a living.
there is no better way to manage computer users available.
period.
opendirectory? redhat directory service? NIS? OpenLDAP?
are you kidding. microsoft controls this and apple is working on it. they will make an adequate connector.
unfortunately that doesn't help me push a group policy. It does not help enforce my acceptable use policy (EUP).
third:
training.
microsoft made this easy. we have to retrain everyone on office 2007's ribbon interface and vista anyway so this is a wash.
-jdovejr
Holy cow, this just in! Apple has made available a computer that has ALL of these features readily available! Can you guess what it is?
.... It's called a Mac Pro.
Do you believe that businesses are going to buy $2,800 Mac Pros by the bushel? If Apple is serious about catering to corporate I.T. departments, they need to offer them an expandable version of the Mac Mini at a price no higher than a Mac Mini.
Which kind of business really requires such customizable machines? Replaceable video card? Are you talking about part by part upgrading?
Not part by part upgrading, per se, but corporate customers generally want to be able to easily replace a failed hard drive or add a PCI card to a desktop computer. Although the Mac Mini is elegant and has adequate performance specs for basic office applications, it is not designed to be opened, modified or upgraded.
Apple: Just buy Pandora already. Thanks.
YUP. AND MAKE IT WORK outside of the US.
Steve: "You guys want a minitower? Here's something that I pulled out of my ass. I call it a Mac Mini. Take that!"
Not part by part upgrading, per se, but corporate customers generally want to be able to easily replace a failed hard drive or add a PCI card to a desktop computer. Although the Mac Mini is elegant and has adequate performance specs for basic office applications, it is not designed to be opened, modified or upgraded.
Even Apple's "professional" laptops require total disassembly just to replace basic parts like a hard drive or dvd drive. Right now, IT departments who have no Mac experience are thinking that Macs can be taken apart just like any regular Dell PC. But if businesses start buying more Macs, then the IT departments will see what a pain Mac repairs really are. When Mac users start complaining about long repair times and technicians start complaining to IT managers, it will give the IT directors and CIOs even more reason to not support Macs. They will use every excuse they can find, and they have the power to carry out their anti-Mac agenda. And Apple will have only itself to blame.
If Apple cares to be a serious contender in corporate I.T. departments, they ought make an expandable Macintosh that suits the needs of business users. Such a Mac would be designed to permit easy replacement of the hard drive and video card, provide space for one or two PCI cards, and not have a built-in screen. Essentially, this would be an expandable Mac Mini. (Remember the design of the IIci and IIcx machines?).
To the naysayers who cry "but there's already the MacPro". I can tell you, while the MacPro is a fantastic machine, it's complete over-kill for a lot of users. It's also physically HUGE and expensive. Most users simply do not need the expansion capabilities of a MacPro. Actually, the sheer SIZE is the biggest issue. For me, there's simply no room for a MacPro in my office.
As far as headless Macs go, there's a gaping chasm between the Mac mini and MacPro that could easily and profitably be filled.
The Mac mini is a joke. The iMac is too limited and glossy screens in a graphics intensive environment doesn't work. The MacBook Pro isn't flexible enough (that's my machine).
Basically we're talking about Half a MacPro with 2 PCI slots, 2 internal drive bays (RAID?), same processor and number of RAM slots and less than half the size (or smaller).
Apple would absolutely benefit from a machine of this class in it's lineup. The Mac IIcx and Mac IIci are the perfect example! A compact and powerful machine that will fit ANYWHERE. And it's not just in corporate business. There are many designers and design studios who would LOVE a machine of this caliber. Switchers would gobble these things up. Speccing YOUR choice of video cards and monitors would be fantastic. Upgrading the video card isn't the point, it's SPECCING the card of your choice when you buy the machine that's most important.
Anyway, it's an old saw, but I'd love to see Apple offer something of this nature.
Even Apple's "professional" laptops require total disassembly just to replace basic parts like a hard drive or dvd drive.
You sound like a total stupid idiot, I just upgraded the disk drive in my laptop by taking out the battery, removing 4 screws, sliding out the old drives rack, replacing it with a 250 gb that I picked up at Micro-Center, and put it back together.
I used free software from the internet, to back the entire old drive image onto a USB drive.
I rebooted from the USB external drive after the new drive was inplace.
I then copied the image from the USB external drive onto the new internal drive.
Then I rebooted from the internal drive and my Leopard is completely functional without even reinstalling the OS!
Took one screw driver and about 5 minutes to replace the drive.
I don't know just how little you know about Apple products PC-Fanboy.... but it's clear it's so little that it can't be measured.
When South Park was criticized for having poorly drawn content and cheap toilet humor, the South Park creators responded to the critics by introducing Terrence and Philip, who are even more poorly drawn and even more crude. In the same way, the Mac Mini is Steve Jobs' own Terrence and Philip. The Mac Mini was created out of spite, and not really meant as a serious effort to address people's demand for a Mac minitower. The Mac Mini is Steve's way of saying "Fuck You" to all those "minitower whiners".
Steve: "You guys want a minitower? Here's something that I pulled out of my ass. I call it a Mac Mini. Take that!"
If you really think a MAC mini is such a failure, go try to buy an old one on eBay.
You will pay more for a 2 year old mac mini than you can buy a much more powerful brand new PC. The point is, the mini is built better, has a better OS, and is desirable enough for people to pay up to get it. The fact that you want to put a card in it to do something is silly. The average corporate company could take 1000 small dell boxes and replace'em with mini's. Keep the monitor, keep the mouse, plug the thing in and go. The small number of people that need to do the custom video card crap just shows a lack of understanding of the business world in commenting about it.
The fact of the matter is, the one area in business that the MAC is actually dominant, are functions that are heavily graphic in nature. Instead of adding a better graphics card to a DELL, what they REALLY do is get rid of the dell and us a real graphics machine.
If you really think a MAC mini is such a failure, go try to buy an old one on eBay.
... the MAC is actually dominant...
Mac is NOT an acronym, it's short for Macintosh.