I am IT Admin, my boss is using Windows on MBP (XP to be exact), but still he is not convinced to switch 40 client machines to MAC, or at least MAC MINI on bootcamp Windows, he still thinks MAC is a TOY. on the other hand, he wanted iPad as presentation display for customers, but he thinks iPad is too small, and looking for something like 17" display. Well, all I can say is I am lucky that still keeping myself at work, because if my boss listen to my suggestion, I should be out of job by now.
I've worked with various large corporate resellers and what typically happens is that if a Business Manager is looking for a solution, they typically have problems with IT people because if IT didn't come up with the answer, they hate having someone else tell them what to use (hardware/software). But first you have to look at what are the users going to be able to do their job better? Can they do it better using a Mac vs a PC? Is there a better software package that works on the Mac vs the PC? What does the work flow look like? How much money does it cost to support each platform? There are a LOT of things to analyze, but typically Windows IT people are closed minded because they want job security and they feel insecure when Apple products are preferred amongst the users because they feel threatened by a platform they know little about and they didn't buy into the change. It's an EGO thing.
This is rather funny where apple could advertise "we have custom designed software that runs beautiful on our devices, but it also is rated the best at running windows" so simply it is runs to softwares the best.
But then I saw the iPad in 2010 and was so impressed that I got one.
I was so impressed with the iPad that I soon got an IPhone.
I was so impressed with the iPhone that I then got an MBA.
I won't use the word impressive again to describe how impressive the MBA was. That would be repetitive.
I've been using these three types of devices for over three years now and, when I look back on the fifteen years I've spent providing support in I.T. I kick myself. Hard.
My experiences with Apple has since caused me to quit the I.T. Industry altogether. I just can't be bothered mucking around with that PC bullshit anymore.
There are just better things to do with your life.
Thank you, Steve, and thank you to all the brilliant people at Apple for making my life better, and making me Think Different.
No wonder you always seem to be in a good mood. Liberation can't be overrated.
Can't tell you how many times I have heard this story. Hell I have lived this story. Fought with the company IT guy and even the owners of the company on the whole Mac vs. PC B.S. We were a video post house for cryin' out corn and they wanted us to use Windows! FCP don't do Windows.
Interestingly the company just went of out business yesterday and I am now looking for work. Know anyone in Austin who needs an operations/IT person who specializes in Macs? P.M. me if you have any leads. Thanks.
Well, there's a little outfit opening a branch in Austin called Apple. You could run their support for switchers.
I'm in I.T., and our network administrator is not a happy camper that I'm convincing people here at this company to use Apple machines. He refuses to assist and offer support. I am the one that supports them. Meaning, once I have the machines configured they never need my support. The happiest users are the ones using Apple machines. The admin, along with his assistant do nothing but run around trying to keep the regular Wintel machines from blowing up. So sad.
The admin has always known that Apple machines could run windows, but he hates Apple to the nth-degree and always says downright false claims of the abilities of these machines.
Your last sentence—why PC geeks viscerally hate Apple is THE cultural question of this technical era. Are they just dinosaurs jealously offended by birds evolving right in front of them? Any ideas?
Why anyone would want to install and use a highly defective product like Microsoft Windows on a high quality machine like a Macbook Pro is beyond me I guess the OS brainwash is irreversible.
I find interesting that former Windows users are now singing the praise of Apple and Mac OS X after switching to that platform. What I would like to know what percentage of these people were Apple haters before the switch and who would bash Mac OS and Apple computers in forums like AppleInsider.
Your last sentence—why PC geeks viscerally hate Apple is THE cultural question of this technical era. Are they just dinosaurs jealously offended by birds evolving right in front of them? Any ideas?
He and I both came from the same technical background. I considered myself a "PC Geek" for literally 15 years. Built my own high-end PC rigs, and built them for others. After a while, the aura kind of faded as the one thing in common with those rigs (running Windows) was always its achilles heels. I gravitated towards the software side (I'm a developer) but do spend lots of time on the hardware side to keep my skills honed and to break up the routine. I embraced Apple machines - at first for curiosity - after my last Wintel laptop literally smoked on my lap and never looked back.
The admin at this company though, has such a hatred for Apple products. The company went to iPhones, then iPads for the field, and now (very slowly) Macbooks are entering the network. A lot of those changes were mainly my doing as I showed management precisely what these options can do, versus hearing nonsense faults from the one person that is supposed to offer options. Some people (like me) embrace change others don't. He's younger than me so if anything, he should be more open to more modern alternatives. So I'm not sure what's up.
But then I saw the iPad in 2010 and was so impressed that I got one.
I was so impressed with the iPad that I soon got an IPhone.
I was so impressed with the iPhone that I then got an MBA.
I won't use the word impressive again to describe how impressive the MBA was. That would be repetitive.
I've been using these three types of devices for over three years now and, when I look back on the fifteen years I've spent providing support in I.T. I kick myself. Hard.
My experiences with Apple has since caused me to quit the I.T. Industry altogether. I just can't be bothered mucking around with that PC bullshit anymore.
There are just better things to do with your life.
Thank you, Steve, and thank you to all the brilliant people at Apple for making my life better, and making me Think Different.
My story is very similar. But it was Windows and PCs that drove me to try Macs. I got in when OS X had just come out. It was aweful and insulted what the classic os had been. But that changed a couple years later, when I was saying goodbye permanently to BeOS and the Haiku community. I got a MacBook Pro and felt much more comfortable. Far fewer annoyances. Then an iPhone. iPhone sort of saves me on a regular basis. Funny thing is, the maps app was a last second addition to the device and it's one of the most important features to me. I am planning on buying the next iPad. I'll probably use my iPhone and MacBook less for Internet then. My MacBook Pro with Logic is taking over from where I gave up on Sonar on Windows.
I don't run Windows on my Mac. I didn't have enough hard drive space until I replaced the internal drive and Windows is an intolerant inflexible jerk that refuses to work on removable drives without hacking I have zero desire to deal with. I did try Windows on my MacBook once with boot camp, but the trackpad driver was abysmal. I gave it up for that alone. I might have a Windows partition on a future Mac Pro, but I'm really moving permanently away from Windows and especially PC hardware. I'll never go back. Not ever. After building and maintaining many machines, I feel like I wasted so much time and money and effort. I also regret having advised people to let me build computers for them. The costs saved were not worth the frustrations. I wish I'd started my family members on Macs instead. Now they're stuck with Windows (mostly because of fear of change and MS Office). Two of my close friends would change to Mac if not for Access not existing on OS X at all (WINE is not likely a solution I want them to have to cope with).
But then I saw the iPad in 2010 and was so impressed that I got one.
I was so impressed with the iPad that I soon got an IPhone.
I was so impressed with the iPhone that I then got an MBA.
I won't use the word impressive again to describe how impressive the MBA was. That would be repetitive.
I've been using these three types of devices for over three years now and, when I look back on the fifteen years I've spent providing support in I.T. I kick myself. Hard.
My experiences with Apple has since caused me to quit the I.T. Industry altogether. I just can't be bothered mucking around with that PC bullshit anymore.
There are just better things to do with your life.
Thank you, Steve, and thank you to all the brilliant people at Apple for making my life better, and making me Think Different.
I'm not following you.
If you have chosen to make you living by providing IT support, it is in your interest that customers have problems you can address and earn money in the process, both for you and company you are working for. If customers have no problems, you are likely to be made redundant, which is hardly a goal in any chosen profession.
Unless your ideal is job where you don't have to do anything. Let me know if you managed to find one, I'd be interested myself. After more than 20 years in IT, I wouldn't mind some change. But then, I'd expect to have same issues with most other professions.
Re the list, it is a bit odd. First off, computer which costs 30% of MBP13 is almost as reliable. Paying 3x the price to get 0.07 improvement in reliability is a bit of an overkill. Then, as others noticed, why is MBP15 so much lower? what exactly are stats based on, and is each computer's usage taken into account? If MBP13 is used in light scenarios, for Internet, email, social networking, it is very likely it will have less problems than MBP15 which is likely to be more used under heavier loads, for games, photo/video editing etc. And then, what happens with computers known to be reliable, like ThinkPad T series and HP EliteBooks? Are they not on the list because they are much less reliable than number of Acers (hm...) or because they don't cause any problems to their customers, so repair centre simply don't have any stats on them?
So in other words, when you buy anything else, you are paying for an OS with advertising?
You get the ads because you are cheap. You (as in, the general computer-buying public) want the best hardware at the cheapest price, and have put up with getting this bloatware in order to pay $50-$100 less than you otherwise would.
I'm in I.T., and our network administrator is not a happy camper that I'm convincing people here at this company to use Apple machines. He refuses to assist and offer support. I am the one that supports them. Meaning, once I have the machines configured they never need my support. The happiest users are the ones using Apple machines. The admin, along with his assistant do nothing but run around trying to keep the regular Wintel machines from blowing up. So sad.
The admin has always known that Apple machines could run windows, but he hates Apple to the nth-degree and always says downright false claims of the abilities of these machines.
That's cause he know more about networking & management than you do. While pretty stable & easy to configure Profile Manger still has a long way to come before it can match Group Policy on Windows not to mention just catch back up to MCX (Open Directory pre Lion). Add to that the fact that Apple forces you into upgrade deployments with new hardware and them pulling Lion off the App Store even though many pro apps still don't play well with Mountain Lion and you have Apple = crap when it comes to IT management. I say that as an avid Apple supporter but also as a Network Admin, Apple needs to fix their crap & quit playing the "everyone just needs to work around what we do" garbage. They are the underdog, they are the ones who need to prove they can play in the corporate industry.
Also, from a reliability & robust design standpoint Active Directory makes Open Directory/Profile Manager look like a kiddy tool.
Now if i was apple... I would make a billboards out of this report!
Hmm, I don't know that I would. The Apple only beat the Acer by 6% but costs three times as much. I realize that this may be interpreted as "you get what you pay for" but some may read it as Acer delivering 94% of the experience at 1/3 the price.
Add that $430 Acer beating a $2200 Apple by five places and the optics could slant negative. Many (most?) Apple buyers choose Mac for the intangible "experience" but beancounters don't have a line for that. In a cost/benefit analysis, the light that report casts on the Mac is not all positive.
That's cause he know more about networking & management than you do. While pretty stable & easy to configure Profile Manger still has a long way to come before it can match Group Policy on Windows not to mention just catch back up to MCX (Open Directory pre Lion). Add to that the fact that Apple forces you into upgrade deployments with new hardware and them pulling Lion off the App Store even though many pro apps still don't play well with Mountain Lion and you have Apple = crap when it comes to IT management. I say that as an avid Apple supporter but also as a Network Admin, Apple needs to fix their crap & quit playing the "everyone just needs to work around what we do" garbage. They are the underdog, they are the ones who need to prove they can play in the corporate industry.
Also, from a reliability & robust design standpoint Active Directory makes Open Directory/Profile Manager look like a kiddy tool.
I'm not questioning your analysis - you obviously know your stuff.
However, this is not the model that will be relevant, moving forward. All too often, I see IT people putting themselves into a corner because they neither understand nor support their users needs.
An IT department trying to force their policies upon their users is an IT department facing tough times.
IMO, this is why Microsoft is losing - they are trying to perpetuate a model that is no longer accepted by many users.
Another thing to keep in mind is that many of these PCs are actually decent devices, it's simply Windows and all the crap that comes with free Windows installs that sucks.
I've got a ThinkPad, I wiped Windows and installed Ubuntu Linux, runs much better than it ever did with Windows. Microsoft seems to be in self-destruct mode these days...
That's cause he know more about networking & management than you do. While pretty stable & easy to configure Profile Manger still has a long way to come before it can match Group Policy on Windows not to mention just catch back up to MCX (Open Directory pre Lion). Add to that the fact that Apple forces you into upgrade deployments with new hardware and them pulling Lion off the App Store even though many pro apps still don't play well with Mountain Lion and you have Apple = crap when it comes to IT management. I say that as an avid Apple supporter but also as a Network Admin, Apple needs to fix their crap & quit playing the "everyone just needs to work around what we do" garbage. They are the underdog, they are the ones who need to prove they can play in the corporate industry.
Also, from a reliability & robust design standpoint Active Directory makes Open Directory/Profile Manager look like a kiddy tool.
Really? You picked all that up from my posts eh? This is only one of the companies I work at. I happen to be deploy and manage ActiveDirectory networks and support way more Windows XP,7 workstations than I care to list here. But I suppose you already knew that.
What your amazing mind-reading ability didn't pick up on my posts is using Macs with Windows. In those environments, we use Macs in that capacity to access resources/applications that only run on Windows, and our Apple machines runs Windows in an AD environment with no problems at all in addition to the stable Apple hardware requiring zero assistance from me once the machines are set up. Our Dells, HP, and generic PC's constantly require a close eye to keep running. Fact.
In those areas where we don't need to deploy AD, again.. Apple works just fine in these environments.
I do agree that Apple has a lot a room for improvement to match the abilities of AD but that was not the scope of this article, nor with my posts.
Apple has proven that they can play in the corporate world. Get out more and perhaps you'll see that is the direction. If you don't want to adapt to dealing with alternate systems being deployed and prefer to continue complaining about how system X sucks compared to system Y, seek a different career. As an admin, you're paid to make things work. Management tells YOU that they want iPhones, iPads and Macs in your precious network. Corporate management has no problem listening to me when I give options on both sides and I discuss the pros and cons of both sides with hard facts. If you consider the admin I work with to be better with management considering the downright false stories he presents to suit his iHating agenda, then you along with others in that group are the problem.
If you have chosen to make you living by providing IT support, it is in your interest that customers have problems you can address and earn money in the process, both for you and company you are working for. If customers have no problems, you are likely to be made redundant, which is hardly a goal in any chosen profession.
Unless your ideal is job where you don't have to do anything. Let me know if you managed to find one, I'd be interested myself. After more than 20 years in IT, I wouldn't mind some change. But then, I'd expect to have same issues with most other professions.
Making a living fixing problems is fine but I honestly can't do it if there are better alternatives available and the problems don't need to occur in the first place.
I've also discovered something in the last few years that I have never been taught in school or anywhere else:
Simplicity is important.
I find it gives you focus, which enhances the experience, which regularly gives you more satisfaction.
I think there are a lot of people out there that feel unsatisfied and don't know why.
I can't give advice on alternative careers, as that's going to be different for everybody.
However, I know somebody who can:
"Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion drowned your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary"
Been running different MacBookPro's with VMWare Fusion for a couple of years now. Best computer for an IT Admin because you can easily switch between OS's and remote into any computer on the network.
The report notes that comparing a Windows install on a MacBook Pro with one from Acer or Dell is a bit unfair, as Apple's version is "clean," or devoid of bloatware usually pre-loaded by PC OEMs
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by isaidso
Ha! That's the conundrum. Harder and harder to find work as a Mac specialized IT professional these days.
Nobody needs you. There just isn't much to do.
Well, AppleCare people get the calls. Apple's always looking for more people to be an Apple Genius or work the Apple Support Line.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bunlo
I am IT Admin, my boss is using Windows on MBP (XP to be exact), but still he is not convinced to switch 40 client machines to MAC, or at least MAC MINI on bootcamp Windows, he still thinks MAC is a TOY. on the other hand, he wanted iPad as presentation display for customers, but he thinks iPad is too small, and looking for something like 17" display. Well, all I can say is I am lucky that still keeping myself at work, because if my boss listen to my suggestion, I should be out of job by now.
I've worked with various large corporate resellers and what typically happens is that if a Business Manager is looking for a solution, they typically have problems with IT people because if IT didn't come up with the answer, they hate having someone else tell them what to use (hardware/software). But first you have to look at what are the users going to be able to do their job better? Can they do it better using a Mac vs a PC? Is there a better software package that works on the Mac vs the PC? What does the work flow look like? How much money does it cost to support each platform? There are a LOT of things to analyze, but typically Windows IT people are closed minded because they want job security and they feel insecure when Apple products are preferred amongst the users because they feel threatened by a platform they know little about and they didn't buy into the change. It's an EGO thing.
No wonder you always seem to be in a good mood. Liberation can't be overrated.
Well, there's a little outfit opening a branch in Austin called Apple. You could run their support for switchers.
Your last sentence—why PC geeks viscerally hate Apple is THE cultural question of this technical era. Are they just dinosaurs jealously offended by birds evolving right in front of them? Any ideas?
Why anyone would want to install and use a highly defective product like Microsoft Windows on a high quality machine like a Macbook Pro is beyond me I guess the OS brainwash is irreversible.
I find interesting that former Windows users are now singing the praise of Apple and Mac OS X after switching to that platform. What I would like to know what percentage of these people were Apple haters before the switch and who would bash Mac OS and Apple computers in forums like AppleInsider.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Flaneur
Your last sentence—why PC geeks viscerally hate Apple is THE cultural question of this technical era. Are they just dinosaurs jealously offended by birds evolving right in front of them? Any ideas?
He and I both came from the same technical background. I considered myself a "PC Geek" for literally 15 years. Built my own high-end PC rigs, and built them for others. After a while, the aura kind of faded as the one thing in common with those rigs (running Windows) was always its achilles heels. I gravitated towards the software side (I'm a developer) but do spend lots of time on the hardware side to keep my skills honed and to break up the routine. I embraced Apple machines - at first for curiosity - after my last Wintel laptop literally smoked on my lap and never looked back.
The admin at this company though, has such a hatred for Apple products. The company went to iPhones, then iPads for the field, and now (very slowly) Macbooks are entering the network. A lot of those changes were mainly my doing as I showed management precisely what these options can do, versus hearing nonsense faults from the one person that is supposed to offer options. Some people (like me) embrace change others don't. He's younger than me so if anything, he should be more open to more modern alternatives. So I'm not sure what's up.
My story is very similar. But it was Windows and PCs that drove me to try Macs. I got in when OS X had just come out. It was aweful and insulted what the classic os had been. But that changed a couple years later, when I was saying goodbye permanently to BeOS and the Haiku community. I got a MacBook Pro and felt much more comfortable. Far fewer annoyances. Then an iPhone. iPhone sort of saves me on a regular basis. Funny thing is, the maps app was a last second addition to the device and it's one of the most important features to me. I am planning on buying the next iPad. I'll probably use my iPhone and MacBook less for Internet then. My MacBook Pro with Logic is taking over from where I gave up on Sonar on Windows.
I don't run Windows on my Mac. I didn't have enough hard drive space until I replaced the internal drive and Windows is an intolerant inflexible jerk that refuses to work on removable drives without hacking I have zero desire to deal with. I did try Windows on my MacBook once with boot camp, but the trackpad driver was abysmal. I gave it up for that alone. I might have a Windows partition on a future Mac Pro, but I'm really moving permanently away from Windows and especially PC hardware. I'll never go back. Not ever. After building and maintaining many machines, I feel like I wasted so much time and money and effort. I also regret having advised people to let me build computers for them. The costs saved were not worth the frustrations. I wish I'd started my family members on Macs instead. Now they're stuck with Windows (mostly because of fear of change and MS Office). Two of my close friends would change to Mac if not for Access not existing on OS X at all (WINE is not likely a solution I want them to have to cope with).
I'm not following you.
If you have chosen to make you living by providing IT support, it is in your interest that customers have problems you can address and earn money in the process, both for you and company you are working for. If customers have no problems, you are likely to be made redundant, which is hardly a goal in any chosen profession.
Unless your ideal is job where you don't have to do anything. Let me know if you managed to find one, I'd be interested myself. After more than 20 years in IT, I wouldn't mind some change. But then, I'd expect to have same issues with most other professions.
Re the list, it is a bit odd. First off, computer which costs 30% of MBP13 is almost as reliable. Paying 3x the price to get 0.07 improvement in reliability is a bit of an overkill. Then, as others noticed, why is MBP15 so much lower? what exactly are stats based on, and is each computer's usage taken into account? If MBP13 is used in light scenarios, for Internet, email, social networking, it is very likely it will have less problems than MBP15 which is likely to be more used under heavier loads, for games, photo/video editing etc. And then, what happens with computers known to be reliable, like ThinkPad T series and HP EliteBooks? Are they not on the list because they are much less reliable than number of Acers (hm...) or because they don't cause any problems to their customers, so repair centre simply don't have any stats on them?
Quote:
Originally Posted by JimDreamworx
A Windows install devoid of bloatware?
So in other words, when you buy anything else, you are paying for an OS with advertising?
You get the ads because you are cheap. You (as in, the general computer-buying public) want the best hardware at the cheapest price, and have put up with getting this bloatware in order to pay $50-$100 less than you otherwise would.
That's cause he know more about networking & management than you do. While pretty stable & easy to configure Profile Manger still has a long way to come before it can match Group Policy on Windows not to mention just catch back up to MCX (Open Directory pre Lion). Add to that the fact that Apple forces you into upgrade deployments with new hardware and them pulling Lion off the App Store even though many pro apps still don't play well with Mountain Lion and you have Apple = crap when it comes to IT management. I say that as an avid Apple supporter but also as a Network Admin, Apple needs to fix their crap & quit playing the "everyone just needs to work around what we do" garbage. They are the underdog, they are the ones who need to prove they can play in the corporate industry.
Also, from a reliability & robust design standpoint Active Directory makes Open Directory/Profile Manager look like a kiddy tool.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Yojimbo007
Now if i was apple... I would make a billboards out of this report!
Hmm, I don't know that I would. The Apple only beat the Acer by 6% but costs three times as much. I realize that this may be interpreted as "you get what you pay for" but some may read it as Acer delivering 94% of the experience at 1/3 the price.
Add that $430 Acer beating a $2200 Apple by five places and the optics could slant negative. Many (most?) Apple buyers choose Mac for the intangible "experience" but beancounters don't have a line for that. In a cost/benefit analysis, the light that report casts on the Mac is not all positive.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hezetation
That's cause he know more about networking & management than you do. While pretty stable & easy to configure Profile Manger still has a long way to come before it can match Group Policy on Windows not to mention just catch back up to MCX (Open Directory pre Lion). Add to that the fact that Apple forces you into upgrade deployments with new hardware and them pulling Lion off the App Store even though many pro apps still don't play well with Mountain Lion and you have Apple = crap when it comes to IT management. I say that as an avid Apple supporter but also as a Network Admin, Apple needs to fix their crap & quit playing the "everyone just needs to work around what we do" garbage. They are the underdog, they are the ones who need to prove they can play in the corporate industry.
Also, from a reliability & robust design standpoint Active Directory makes Open Directory/Profile Manager look like a kiddy tool.
I'm not questioning your analysis - you obviously know your stuff.
However, this is not the model that will be relevant, moving forward. All too often, I see IT people putting themselves into a corner because they neither understand nor support their users needs.
An IT department trying to force their policies upon their users is an IT department facing tough times.
IMO, this is why Microsoft is losing - they are trying to perpetuate a model that is no longer accepted by many users.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JimDreamworx
A Windows install devoid of bloatware?
So in other words, when you buy anything else, you are paying for an OS with advertising?
Yup. A PC that comes loaded with Windows comes loaded with crapware.
Another thing to keep in mind is that many of these PCs are actually decent devices, it's simply Windows and all the crap that comes with free Windows installs that sucks.
I've got a ThinkPad, I wiped Windows and installed Ubuntu Linux, runs much better than it ever did with Windows. Microsoft seems to be in self-destruct mode these days...
Quote:
Originally Posted by hezetation
That's cause he know more about networking & management than you do. While pretty stable & easy to configure Profile Manger still has a long way to come before it can match Group Policy on Windows not to mention just catch back up to MCX (Open Directory pre Lion). Add to that the fact that Apple forces you into upgrade deployments with new hardware and them pulling Lion off the App Store even though many pro apps still don't play well with Mountain Lion and you have Apple = crap when it comes to IT management. I say that as an avid Apple supporter but also as a Network Admin, Apple needs to fix their crap & quit playing the "everyone just needs to work around what we do" garbage. They are the underdog, they are the ones who need to prove they can play in the corporate industry.
Also, from a reliability & robust design standpoint Active Directory makes Open Directory/Profile Manager look like a kiddy tool.
Really? You picked all that up from my posts eh? This is only one of the companies I work at. I happen to be deploy and manage ActiveDirectory networks and support way more Windows XP,7 workstations than I care to list here. But I suppose you already knew that.
What your amazing mind-reading ability didn't pick up on my posts is using Macs with Windows. In those environments, we use Macs in that capacity to access resources/applications that only run on Windows, and our Apple machines runs Windows in an AD environment with no problems at all in addition to the stable Apple hardware requiring zero assistance from me once the machines are set up. Our Dells, HP, and generic PC's constantly require a close eye to keep running. Fact.
In those areas where we don't need to deploy AD, again.. Apple works just fine in these environments.
I do agree that Apple has a lot a room for improvement to match the abilities of AD but that was not the scope of this article, nor with my posts.
Apple has proven that they can play in the corporate world. Get out more and perhaps you'll see that is the direction. If you don't want to adapt to dealing with alternate systems being deployed and prefer to continue complaining about how system X sucks compared to system Y, seek a different career. As an admin, you're paid to make things work. Management tells YOU that they want iPhones, iPads and Macs in your precious network. Corporate management has no problem listening to me when I give options on both sides and I discuss the pros and cons of both sides with hard facts. If you consider the admin I work with to be better with management considering the downright false stories he presents to suit his iHating agenda, then you along with others in that group are the problem.
Making a living fixing problems is fine but I honestly can't do it if there are better alternatives available and the problems don't need to occur in the first place.
I've also discovered something in the last few years that I have never been taught in school or anywhere else:
Simplicity is important.
I find it gives you focus, which enhances the experience, which regularly gives you more satisfaction.
I think there are a lot of people out there that feel unsatisfied and don't know why.
I can't give advice on alternative careers, as that's going to be different for everybody.
However, I know somebody who can:
"Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion drowned your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary"
Then why didn't they include a Microsoft signature laptop in their test?