
IBMs 200K Macs have made the workforce happier and more productive - myrandomcomment
https://www.jamf.com/resources/press-releases/ibm-announces-research-showing-mac-enables-greater-productivity-and-employee-satisfaction-at-ibm/
======
jasoneckert
This is also written by an organization (Jamf) who creates the only popular
product on the market for macOS deployment/configuration. There's likely a lot
of number fudging and creative bias in there.

~~~
sidlls
And it's a terrible one, at that. I haven't had anything but negative
experiences with any Mac infected with it.

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Forge36
Is this a selection bias?

1\. Users prefer Macs

2\. Users also have Macs at home

3\. Users choose to switch at work.

This leaves number out employees on each platform. One place mentions 200,000,
another 277,000 "Apple devices" the article starts with 290,000

It's not really clear to me what how the two compare at the conclusions are
shown but done if the data is missing

Approximating from their total employee count (350,000) these do appear to be
~50/50.

If this is accurate, 80% of IBM is using a Mac or 50% (depending on your which
number you use)

Is there another company using Macs at this rate (not Apple)?

Given this: I'm curious why users are more productive and how to replicate
that success beyond "buy a Mac"

~~~
hindsightbias
Older techs typically more win biased and IBM swings older. youts and some
older devs wanted Macbooks, and fought a trench war. Built their own support
system. Lenovo Tpads went to crap for a long while after the last IBM t6X, and
replacement brands were even worse. So many of the older crowd gave in. There
were guys dragging their duct-taped t60s until 2017 or so.

CFO/CTO saw the light and formalized the Apple lovefest.

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bArray
Switching OSes can be a big game changer for happiness, especially if you are
used to a particular OS.

Anecdote: I used to be a big Windows user, but after my partition table was
destroyed and I had to start again, I decided to try out Linux - and never
looked back. A few days ago I tried to help a friend get a program working on
his Windows machine and it felt so locked down and limited. The process was
something like:

1\. Need to use Git to grab the program. No Git installed. Can't run `apt-get
install git`, instead have to download a git bash and run some partial Linux
environment.

2\. `git clone` the program. Now discover I need to run some "anaconda"
software to download a program to install a library that python needs to use.

3\. Now I can run the software (not within the Anaconda prompt) and I need
some additional file. The path name for the user has spaces in, so I think
"I'll just create the file a the root C:\ to get this working". Nope, no
administrator access (on their own machine!).

It sounds simple enough, but this is all literally a one liner in something
like Debian: `apt-get install X; make; python X`. And every single Windows
experience (for me) is like this. Couple that with the fact that most commands
I need are now embedded in my brain, using Linux is a piece of cake, even for
problems I've not come across before.

~~~
lostmsu
In your epic story Debian would fail at step 1, apt install X without
administrator rights on the machine.

On the contrast, you can install most apps from Windows Store without admin
rights.

~~~
bArray
Well it would be `sudo apt-get install X` and the password is my password. In
Windows how do I write a file to C:\ without logging into the administrator
account? I didn't know, my friend didn't know, what's happened?

~~~
Const-me
The equivalent of sudo is right click / run as administrator. You can run a
command-line shell like cmd or PowerShell, or a file manager this way, and it
will allow you to write everywhere.

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exabrial
It's sort of mind blowing with these numbers that Apple doesn't intentionally
target the enterprise.

Things like disk encryption key escrow, active-directory like controls, a
single sign on solution, etc would effectively kill Windows in the enterprise.

~~~
jagged-chisel
My International Employer issues Macs. The disk encryption key escrow and
single sign-on are indeed functional. The AD-like controls are really the last
weak spot.

~~~
exabrial
What software are they using for both of those?

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mikece
I wonder if IBM no longer having the in-house brand now that Lenovo was spun
out makes it possible to even issue so many Macs. I'm also curious how much of
a choice there was for the folks who got the Macs: was it a matter of "here's
your IBM issued machine" or "Do you want a Lenovo, HP, Dell, or Mac?"

I'm also curious if a Linux-powered machine/laptop was an option.

~~~
geodel
> I'm also curious if a Linux-powered machine/laptop was an option.

Great question. In my experience of IT departments in companies whose business
is not software, default issue is a windows laptop from a vendor which offered
cheapest contract.

~~~
basch
Red Hat is 12k employees. How would IBM _not_ allow them to have linux
laptops.

~~~
hermitdev
Somewhat tangentially related, a Sass I worked at, most devs preferred
MacBooks for their dev boxes (ruby on rails + Java). At the time, Windows 8.1
was out. Our target runtime env was Ubuntu. I preferred to do all my
development in a linux VM. I was constantly finding bugs that were checked in
because they assumed the other devs assumed that their Macs mirrors the
deployment environment. Except, it didn't

Most common culprit was case sensitivity issues. APFS, by default, like NTFS,
is case insensitive, unlike most common Linux filesystems. APFS can be made to
be case sensitive, but it turns out, breaks a non insignificant number of Mac
targetted apps.

Of course, this breaks when you have a case difference when deploying to
Linux. E.g. cannot import a ruby module because of a case difference in a
filename. In my experience, the belief they were running on a *nix meant my
fellow devs thought they were immune to fuckups they associated with Windows,
but they were wrong and abstinent/arrogant about issues when confronted about
it, by me, because I was running Windows (although running our code in a linux
VM). I hope thats not everyones experience, but that was my one experience
with Mac users targeting Linux for deployment. Seriously had a hard time
convincing them there were problems because "it works on my machine," to which
of course I responded "deploy it and run the tests again."

To;Dr; MacBook != Linix laptop. Gets you maybe 95% of the way there. Still
better off using a linux VM than relying upon same behavior between OS X and
Linux. Besides, OS X is not even linux based. It's originally based on Net BSD
(I have no idea how far the kernel, etc have deviated since).

~~~
myrandomcomment
They UNIX parts of Darwin was based is a derivative of 4.4BSD-Lite2 and
FreeBSD.

~~~
hermitdev
Yes, meant to mention that OS X is largely BSD derived, and certainly not
Linix derived. Though, I am under the impression that OS X was derived from
NetBSD, not FreeBSD.

An aside, I ported NetBSD's strptime to (modern at the time) C++ in internal
code at a previous employer, because we needed a cross platform DateTime
parsing routine. (And strptime is not posix and not generally available to
posix systems). To the best of my knowledge, there's still a bug in handling
timezone offset parsing. Its been too long for me to remember exactly, but
circa 2008, the man page definitely did not match the actual source behavior.

~~~
myrandomcomment
[https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...](https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/BSD/BSD.html)

“The BSD portion of the OS X kernel is derived primarily from FreeBSD, a
version of 4.4BSD that...”

[https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths](https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths)

“The two operating systems do share a lot of code, for example most userland
utilities and the C library on OS X are derived from FreeBSD versions.”

------
myrandomcomment
So random stream of thought here so sorry...

When I was at IBM I had a laptop running OS/2 (which has things I miss to this
day). Current startup, all MacBook Pro (well 2 windows guys and a handful of
Linux). Last startup all MacBook Pro. Startup before that which is now public
with 1000s of employees, MacBook Pro starting back in 2007. IT requirement for
all was turn on FileVault, give IT the key. Google Apps for everything, any
other system like CRM is in the cloud (HubSpot, Salesforce, etc). Firewalls
PFsense with OpenVPN. Switches for building / DC (our own at 2 places), UniFi
for others. IT at least in this area is something that comes after you go
public. You higher what is now called DevOps (was called good sysadmin when I
started) for build and test infra when it gets to big for the original
engineering team to deal with. Remember when you had a work cell?

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cardosof
Couldn't this really be just due to some kind of a Hawthorne effect?

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m3kw9
When you don’t have to deal with malware and all sorts of scanners in the
machine, it’s a sum greater than the whole type satisfaction.

~~~
wmf
IIRC IBM installs antivirus on their Macs.

~~~
kpU8efre7r
McAfee or Norton?

------
cantene
Apple made Mac’a in enterprise and education near impossible to justify.
Server app is crippled, imaging is now discouraged and works only with MDM
profiles. Good luck imaging the entire OS, Catalina firmware upgrade make that
impossible. Open directory hasn’t seen any love from Apple in many many years,
we all use AD to manage logins. NetBoot has lost UI is further crippled with
Sierra ... the list goes on and on.

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YesThatTom2
I kind of want to shout: This is what we’ve been telling y’all for
decades!!!!!

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netsharc
Wait until they all install Catalina...

I think this is a press release, not news (although many news outlet actually
just copy-paste press releases), so it doesn't belong here...

~~~
jagged-chisel
I belongs insofar as your fellow hackers have upvoted it to be here

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ngcc_hk
Is Gartner still use mac?

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boofgod
MacOS users are happier because ignorance is bliss

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thrower123
IBM is not shy about spending lots of money. They are a very good customer to
have.

~~~
FpUser
Actually back at the end of 90's the company I worked for at the time was
doing some jobs for IBM. The amount of pressure IBM managers put on us trying
to get away with paying as little money as possible was quite impressive. They
wen as far as trying to get stuff done for free in exchange for promise to be
able to use them as a reference.

