
Former Apple rival IBM could become the biggest buyer of MacBooks - satyajeet23
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/former-apple-rival-ibm-could-become-the-biggest-buyer-of-macbooks/articleshow/48307677.cms
======
colindean
IBM is wise to do so. The Thinkpad W540 that developers hired in summer
2014-summer 2015 got is terrible for Linux: graphics driver problems, the
trackpad is a horrible piece of junk that wholly depresses 1mm into the body
and has a texture that wears off after several _weeks_ (most folks who have
them, and there's a lot of them, carry mice instead), and they weigh a ton. A
coworker just got a Thinkpad W541 and it improves on the trackpad by readding
the missing thumb buttons under the spacebar.

The W530 and W520 weren't much better: they didn't have the terrible
trackpads. IIRC the W520's graphics stack worked better, but that was three
years ago. I helped an intern set up a W520 and it still had some issues
before we got it stable. I wouldn't call myself a super expert Linux admin,
but I do remember a day when I had to manually configure XFree86.

I came into IBM through acq. I'm a Mac guy these days, and was before the acq,
where I'd used a HP machine with Linux when I first joined the company because
there were no Macs to spare. When my pre-acq Mac couldn't run the Linux
binaries I needed for work, I switched to a T420 and disliked it. I used R4x
series in college and LOVED them.

I'm seeing more and more Macs around my office. We were probably 60% Thinkpads
with Linux, 30% Mac, 10% Thinkpads with Windows going into 2015. I had been
seeing Mac growth for a while, but it was all BYOD. Now that the deal went
through, most folks up for a machine refresh are choosing Macs, mostly because
that's what they own themselves. Some of the few die-hard Windows folks are
even getting Macs and dual booting Windows.

Like others, I can't really comment on the purchase quantity, mostly because
I'm not privvy to that information!

------
nfriedly
Speaking as an IBMer, I can say that a big part of this switch is about the
hardware. My ThinkPad was so unbalanced it was almost ridiculous: i7, 32gb
RAM, paired with a slooooow mechanical hdd and an utterly rubbish TN display.
(That and a frusturatingly bad touchpad). I prefer OS X over Windows, but only
slightly, the main reason I was so adamant about switching was to get quality
hardware.

~~~
gtk40
Doesn't IBM have nicer stuff available? I have an i7, 16GB of RAM with a 3k
display (but I prefer the nub, so I can't speak for touchpad quality as much)
which seems to complete the package. It's the standard laptop they give
developers at my job. We have the option of a Mac, but people end up using
Bootcamp with frustrating experiences.

~~~
nfriedly
Yes, I now have one of the higher-end macbooks now, but my point was that
Lenovo has a lot of "standard" options that are below-par and really don't
have any business being in a computer in that price-range.

------
noondip
How are they planning to manage so many computers, given that Apple provides
no practical enterprise management software for OS X?

Oh,
[http://jobs.utah.gov/jsp/wi/utalmis/oijoborder.do;jsessionid...](http://jobs.utah.gov/jsp/wi/utalmis/oijoborder.do;jsessionid=68FB0CE0EB4B0AE13841726F31E6EE41?ordernum=9650243)

    
    
        * CanHazImage * Pupet * Crankd * PlanB * Munki Required *
    

In other words, follow how Google manages their corp Mac fleet of "tens of
thousands",

[https://github.com/google/macops](https://github.com/google/macops)

[https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/managing-macs-
googl...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/managing-macs-google-scale)

~~~
jameshart
IBM _makes_ enterprise endpoint management software. That's how IBM currently
manages its mixed Windows/Linux/Mac desktop/laptop fleet. Adding more Macs
will just be changing the mix.

* Disclaimer - I work for IBM, but not in IT or on endpoint management solutions. I am not in a position to confirm or deny the possibility IBM might be buying hundreds of thousands of Macs. My work laptop is a Thinkpad.

------
ksec
Personally I think this is big, and now even bigger then I thought.

The largest Enterprise they had was only 25,000 Macbook a year. And IBM is 10
times the size of that order.

Most of the Enterprise I know, big or small are still very much Window based.
The way Mac are getting in right now are through BYOD. However, most CIO see
this as additional burden with Apple devices, and therefore most planning are
still based on the Windows world.

CRM, ERP etc.. lots of business class things still are not available on Mac.
Although there are alternatives, no business wants to try.

Hopefully IBM and Apple could use this chance to smooth out the quirks rolling
Apple devices in Enterprise. And more company to follow.

Dont get me wrong, this isn't about getting rid of Windows. I am sure there
are lots of people who enjoy Window 10. But when our company tries to switch
over to Mac, we have had very little support and real world cases to based on.

P.S - Most of you working in the I.T / Computer Industry would have no problem
doing so, but there are lots of industry out there who cant risk to switch
even if they wanted to.

~~~
lukateake
Please list enterprise-class software titles that are Windows only and
impeding a corporate IT switch. I'm looking for some incumbents to slay. :-)

~~~
WorldWideWayne
SQL Server (and client tools). Sharepoint. Active Directory.

~~~
watersb
Serious question, since I'm decades out of date with corporate IT:

Are these considered problems or solutions? AD solved problems for the last
company I was at, but only for the minority of machines running Windows.

~~~
WorldWideWayne
For the majority of businesses that are running all Windows computers? Yes,
these are solutions. Otherwise they wouldn't be billion dollar businesses for
Microsoft.

------
brudgers
_" We've got to find a way to make the overall cost the same or lower than PCs
to make that happen."_

That's a tall order given IBM 's existing software infrastructure, Apple's
migration tooling and support staff for enterprise, and the constraints that
accounting standards place on the way equal cost would have to be figured.

Calculating the charge against goodwill associated with getting 200,000 people
to give up their ThinkPad keyboards is left as an exercise for the reader.

------
bane
I work for a small enterprise (under 2,000 people) and we get a choice of a
couple different Macs (Air, Book, Pro), Dells in various configurations as
well as Surface tablets.

The tech folks usually get a Mac Pro or a high-spec'd Dell (it has better
specs than any Mac Laptop that's available at the moment, but is about the
size and weight of a TV tray). The business guys and PMs go for the Airs and
Surfaces...I'd say the Surfaces are about 2:1 to the Airs on takeup, and
that's mostly because of the form factor and pen.

There's been a couple rough spots, but our leadership simply decided it was
time to figure it out, and if we did, we'd be years ahead of larger
enterprises, thus giving us a competitive advantage.

~~~
walshemj
So what happens when you need to seriously use excel and the Mac version falls
over.

~~~
bane
Excel on Mac works fine, and we do some fairly sophisticated numerical
modelling work.

In terms of Office, the bigger problem has been legacy Access databases. We
solve this by setting up some VMs with RDP access for the Mac users. But
there's also a couple Mac utilities that let you export Access tables to CSV
which can then be loaded up into something sane.

A surprising number of people also use Project, Visio and OneNote and there's
not really a good portable solution for those cases. I've been pushing people
to use yED for portable charting (instead of Visio), OneNote is now available
for Office 365, and people are finding Excel a good enough Gantt chart tool
for many purposes.

Office on Mac is quite good compared to Windows, just not all of the products
people expect to use are available.

The bigger picture thing is that this is going to happen and enterprises need
to figure it out. Non-cross-platform applications and processes need to be
abandoned. This also happens in reverse with remote Linux servers being easier
to work with on Macs than via Windows (putty and winSCP sort most of the
issues out, but they aren't perfect).

In my experience people really don't care about the desktop experience too
much, IMHO Windows is better than OS X for most of that anyways, but they care
about "getting shit done" and that means apps, and these days web-based apps.
The OS just isn't that big of a factor so long as the things people need to
GSD is available. They're choosing hardware and form-factor over OS and they
pick the one they think will work best for them.

~~~
walshemj
Well until a few weeks ago you where limited to 65k rows in mac excel.

Having struggled with OSX an apples obvious abandoning of any professional us
other than a one man band designer - I hate apple hardware with a vengeance.

------
dfc
Actual Title:(emphasis mine): "Former Apple rival IBM _could_ become the
biggest buyer of MacBooks"

Submission Guidelines Refresher:

In Submissions

Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or
exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an
article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's
important....Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading
or linkbait.

------
davelnewton
It wouldn't take very long to re-equip all their employees.

Some of the Lenovos are pretty robust, too; I don't know much about the low-
end models, but some of the upper-ends are quite nice. If they had first-class
Linux support I'd even consider getting one.

~~~
eyce9000
Indeed, the hardware on Lenovo's is reasonably good, but if you are an
enterprise trying to move away from Windows, the hit-or-miss Linux support
somewhat limits your options. From experience, running Linux ( RHEL / CentOS
6.x) on ThinkPads can be a frustrating experience, not sure if that is a
limitation of drivers or of the ancient Gnome 2 desktop interface.

~~~
slgeorge
The way around that is to get the vendor (IBM, Dell or whomever) to CERTIFY
the hardware for the Linux distribution of your choice. That guarantees that
the HW vendor will make sure that drivers are available. You can get your hw
vendor to do that if you're in the process of doing a hardware refresh and
will be buying new systems, e.g "I will be buying these systems from <insert
alternative vendor> because they are certified with <insert distribution name
and version> and you are not".

If a system is not certified then you are relying on Linux developers making
it work - they may do so, but are often hindered by drivers or small tweaks to
hardware. As importantly, making a whole system work is fully is considerably
different to making a specific component work.

------
arcosdev
Just in time to enjoy the now quickly deteriorating quality of Apple's latest
MacBooks!

------
r00fus
Part and parcel of the new Apple/IBM cooperation deal. I wonder if IBM is
pushing iOS as well for their employees?

~~~
douche
They are buying large numbers of iPads. It's been _fantastic_ for my company,
as IBM is a major customer for one of our products, and now we have to support
Safari and mobile Safari as first-class browsers, in addition to the legacy
versions of IE still used by many of our other customers.

Not to mention that IBM insists that we use DB2 and run on their flavor of
server-side Linux, where the IBM products that we integrate with have
different long-standing bugs than on the Windows versions all our other
customers use.

------
shellbye
"A country does not have permanent friends, only permanent interests." Same to
companies.

------
jbfr
I work in the IBM Design Studio and all the employees have MacBook Pros. It's
been working out pretty well actually, even with respect to integrating with
some of IBM's legacy software that we have to deal with.

------
matt4711
Most IBM employees in Australia use Toshiba laptops instead of Lenevo.

~~~
Nursie
When did that happen?

Wasn't that way in Perth a couple of years back, it was all Lenovo, except
management were moving over to Mac as their refresh cycle came through.

------
jebblue
IBM used to have tens of thousands of employees and not just technical people,
running Linux on the desktop/laptop.

------
pinaceae
well, the new ms office for osx is really good, so if all you need is web apps
for business tools (erp, crm, etc) plus productivity apps a mac is the machine
to go with right now.

mb, mb air, the small mbp are all excellent office machines.

switched personnally to a mba in 2012, wouldn't go back to a wintel notebook
if they paid me.

~~~
jebblue
>> well, the new ms office for osx is really good

Didn't the Mac version of Office get canceled then restarted then canceled
then restarted a number of times over the years?

~~~
vetinari
No. It lagged about a year behind the windows version (2003->2004, 2007->2008,
2010->2011, no 2013 equivalent), for 2016 they should be both at the same
time. Also, regarding the features, it used to lag, but since 2011 it achieved
almost feature parity (minus the addons, that are downloadable extras, like
PowerQuery, PowerMaps or PowerPivot).

------
pavement
...because Windows is intolerably awful now, presumably getting worse every
day.

Seriously. It's been downhill since Vista. Every upgrade since XP has been
disruptive, and destroyed time-saving behaviors.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
While OS X and Linux both have their problems, being defiantly user-hostile
aren't among them.

I can't imagine the mind of the person at MS who decided that making Solitaire
pay-to-play was a good idea.

It's fascinating how decisions like this get made, how products like Win 8 and
10 get out the door, and how MS seems to think it can fix the terrible design
by downvoting critics on public forums and getting PR companies to write
booster posts that are so ham-handed they have no persuasive power.

As a company, MS has a lot of really smart individuals doing really dumb
things collectively. I'd be incredibly interested if MS could find its own
Rodney Brooks to explain the business processes that make that happen.

Not a hater, btw. Office 365 and Azure both have their good points. But
Windows and mobile seem like industry-changing disasters now, and from the
outside it seems like the icebergs shouldn't have been _that_ hard to miss.

~~~
joshontheweb
Solitaire is pay-to-play now? Thats insane.

~~~
Cthulhu_
But the OS is free now, so I guess it's a fair trade.

~~~
EarthLaunch
Leaving aside how insane and petty charging for solitaire makes them look,
there's a caveat to 'the OS is free'. Fact is, the OS was free to the vast
majority before, either through OEMs, corporate systems, or pirating. So to
most people, it's not a case of the OS becoming free; rather it appears to
them that the OS is becoming _less_ free as ads and paywalls appear.

------
Mithaldu
I really wonder why people keep submitting highly editorialized headlines when
the guides clearly state not to do it.

On the article:

If this pans out it could spell the end of Thinkpads as high quality laptops
that deliver premium performance while being very robust and sturdy. Who is
left in that niche? Are we left with only either apple laptops, or shoddy
plastic jobs that need to be kept in bubble wrap at all times?

~~~
jacquesm
> If this pans out it could spell the end of Thinkpads as high quality laptops
> that deliver premium performance while being very robust and sturdy.

I think that boat sailed a while ago. I'm writing this on one and it's the
worst machine I've owned to date quality wise. Keys that spontaneously dis-
integrate, wwan card that bricks itself (and replacements are not accepted by
the BIOS because they're not 'authorized') and so on. Last laptop of this
brand for me.

Maybe Asus or Acer has something half decent?

~~~
farresito
Which model do you have? I'm thinking about buying a laptop, and, obviously,
one of the first things that come to my head is a Thinkpad, but I'm worried
about the quality.

~~~
jacquesm
T 540 P.

~~~
farresito
I've heard that there are big differences in quality based on the
manufacturers they use. For example, I think for the keyboards they have four
or five different manufacturers. The T models use two different ones (while
the lower budget models use the other three), one of them being LiteOn (which
is the best one), and that depending on which manufacturer you get, you might
get a higher quality or a lower one, especially with keyboards.

Have you taken a look at other laptops? If so, which one will you go with next
time? I'm a Linux user, so if Thinkpads are as bad as some people say they are
nowadays, I might even get a MBP and install Linux on it.

