What other consumer company does onsite repairs and data recovery?
Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer... should I go on? LOL. Are you serious?
The enterprise customer is not Apple’s target customer, but Apple does have enterprise support agreements which will get you advance-replacement systems.
Yes, we know that’s their excuse for being at least a decade behind in adding proper controls to their OS. This is control stuff NT had and it was late to the game, commercial Unix had it half a decade earlier.
(They tried and failed miserably with OSX Server, using standard open source tools lots and lots of other places managed to get working. Ha. Couldn’t even build working LDAP support into BSD and support it? Laughably bad. Truly. I’ve seen home grown LDAP setups that handled thousands of systems easily. Like in its sleep. All AD started as was LDAP with benefits. LOL. This is late 90s stuff. They’re 30 years behind, really at this point. I mean, we had to pay Sun for the LDAP server back then but it was cheap. Every Unix had security modules and eventually PAM which worked with it flawlessly. How apple can take a Unix derivative and not know how to configure PAM properly is comical really.
As far as I know, that is a support model similar to other companies.
Nope. It’s not. I can easily buy multiple more options from literally anybody else.
But like I said its truly hilarious people think so. I guess y’all don’t notice these options even for home machines on all their websites? It’s literally there at checkout. Hahaha.
(In your case it sounds like you haven’t purchased any other hardware in a decade or more so it’d be easy to miss in that case. Check it out. Standard offerings for a very long time now everywhere else.)
No other vendor makes us drive corporate machines to a retail outlet. They show up and repair on site. For very little money too. This part always cracks me up. Mac user says their machine is dead we asked em if they want to drive over or us? If it was a PC we’d send the tech over to them. Even cooler they’ll dispatch throughout the entire city during the pandemic. Total cost per machine amortized over three years? $12 on our contract. Max. Including the “data never leaves our control” drive replacements to meet security standards all the customers want these days.
As for data recovery, if you’re not doing backups (especially with company assets) either the data must not be that critical, or your company needs new IT leadership.
Not the point. Backups are not infallible.
Apple actively works against professionals who offer such services and offer none of their own in return. At worst everyone else is neutral.
As far as backups go, it’s exceedingly rare for companies to back up desktops. That’s what network storage is for. Only home gamers keep data on the machines themselves. Companies wipe machines for all sorts of security and other reasons. Backups are required to be encrypted too. Even local ones. Try enforcing that without expensive third party software on a Mac. LOL. Good luck passing the audit!
Apple provides OS support for hardware well beyond the typical hardware lifecycle, which would generously be 5 years, but I have a 2013 MacBook Pro which is fully supported by (and runs just fine) the latest version of macOS.
No they don’t. I already gave examples.
I’m still running MSFT *server* software *NAMED* “2012”. Bwahahaha.
Are you kidding?
Eight years is pretty darn good in my book, especially when you consider that Apple releases a new major OS version about once per year, and they continue to provide security updates for a few years for prior releases.
It’s no better than anybody else. Clearly MSFT is supporting stuff older than 8 years as is Linux. They also release major versions as quickly.
Not sure what you’re smokin’. Apple stuff is at best average. That’s one of the reasons they had to move to their own silicon honestly. It’s just an Intel PC with a goofed up boot loader running BSD without making their own processors. At least four vendors had passed them up in build quality in the last five years.
(Examples include the Lenovo Carbon X1 entire series currently at Gen 9 or 10, HP’s thin and light models, nearly all of Dell’s XPS lineup... even Acer had equivalent hardware.)
There was a time Apple was pushing way out ahead of everyone else but that ended about a decade ago. Mostly under Cook. He’s no visionary.
Even ARM wasn’t done by Apple first. MSFT did ARM in their Surface lineup years before Apple. But they’re a software company. They screwed the implementation up bad. Be interesting to see if anybody goes back to it. Probably happen. Meanwhile AMD is smoking Intel right off the planet... if only they could do the same volume. That’s always been their biggest problem.
At least for a little while longer an Intel hackintosh is still the home gamer’s best bang for the buck. Easy to build a machine that smokes any apple hardware including the M1 for the moment. Probably not in two years.
Always fun to watch. But more fun to see the marketing BS people believe.
Remember when Sun said the Network was the Computer? And ignored that everyone was running Apache on their hardware? Hahaha. Nice hardware for a short while. Commodity stuff running Linux smoked them pretty quick.
Won’t be seeing any Apple logos in data centers still. Haha. We definitely know that! It’s consumer grade weak sauce hardware made in the same Foxconn building as the Dell.
Oh ok. Maybe across the street in the work compound. Hang some more safety nets for the suicidal workers...
If you haven’t seen a Macnook bend itself into cool arched shapes from the battery problems they all have, you really haven’t lived.
How big is your fleet of machines and how many are Macs that you manage? Got some good tips on command and control software to meet audit requirements? Pass em along.
Pretty much all I’ve got is hacky nasty JAMF like most places. Requires easily 4-8x the man hours to deal with than AD/Azure/Intune. Costs more too. And is usually broken at every minor OSX release. Damn near not auditable due to constant breakage.
Just the reality of Macs. I don’t hate em. I don’t hate any tech. It all pays the same to me if somebody wants to waste my time on them. Whichever one they think they need.
(Been wasting time on Outlook for an entire career and have never used it other than once when it was mandatory. Total garbage software people are strangely addicted to. Should have s been put down with a shotgun decades ago. And Exchange? Have managed to keep that junk out of the data center my entire career completely. Apple ain’t the only company that makes junk. But they’re waaaaaaaaay behind on the desktop these days.)
