Posted on 10/20/2016 12:42:26 PM PDT by Swordmaker
In the early 80s my sister insisted MAC was the best platform on which to place a small IMS hierarchical database and teach IMS to mainframe programmers.
I am educated as an Economist. I've been a CEO. I know what Total Cost of Ownership means. It's exceedingly obvious YOU don't have a clue about what that means to a business. It is NOT subjective at all. It is easily calculated and can be looked at on an accounting balance sheet. Too bad you don't know that. Good thing such decisions are not in your purview. I've known this fact for more than a decade and it's been shown in every study by anyone who has bothered to do a TCO study which included all costs associated with using each platform per computer. You just ignored that calculation I showed you above. . . tens of millions of dollars, but you think it's "subjective."
The discussion here is completely irrelevant except within the very narrow confines of the article that Swordmaker posted. I have no idea about the actual expenses from the IT Department of a large corporation, and those expenses have no relevance at all to home users such myself or most of the rest of us on this forum.
A few months ago I purchased a little Windows 10 laptop/tablet computer at Walmart for $99. It has a little 10” screen and a keyboard that can be removed. It came with a free version of Microsoft Office. It is great for creating Word Documents, surfing the internet and playing games.
It is very handy and it has been used daily since that time without difficulties. Supposedly it was on sale, but it remained available for $99 for months. Currently they are $118, but I expect that they will be in the $69 range for Black Friday. I can guarantee that there were no comparable Apple products available that were not several times more expensive. And the situation has not changed.
My primary laptop is a Lenovo and cost $399 six years ago. It gets used several hours a day and is still going strong. I was able to upgrade the processor to an I5 easily because the computer has access through the back panel. I also doubled the memory to 8GBs with no difficulty. The laptop also has a PCMIA slot that I have been able to use numerous cards to expand its uses. There were no comparable Apple products at the time that were not several times more expensive.
So it is kind of interesting that in a corporate environment that Apple products can be comparable in expense over their lifetime, but it is completely irrelevant to myself and most other home users. This is especially true when we already have an investment in software compatible with the Microsoft operating system.
The choices available to those of us using Microsoft operating systems are nearly limitless both in software and hardware. This matters when one is interested in peripherals such as PCMCIA "expansion cards", 3D Printers, CNC Routers and Milling Machines, eprom programmers, robotics, automotive analysis interfaces and so on and so on... This is not to mention open source operating systems and software which gives nearly limitless options to those of us who use hardware originally designed for Microsoft operating systems. If you are using Apple products your options in all these areas are severely limited by comparison.
So yes, severely limiting your options by choosing Apple products may very well make sense in some corporate structures. But at this point I will continue to choose products that give me the most options and also can be found at a much cheaper initial cost.
“I am educated as an Economist. I’ve been a CEO. I know what Total Cost of Ownership means.”
Lol!
You do?
So then why are you bitterly clinging on IBMs word as the final “proof” of this absolutely stupid claim?
There are thousands of companies that have done their own calculations and have found that PCs work for them.
Apparently their personal findings didn’t tickle you like IBM showing this for themselves.
Another product of the university system.
Yes, very easy to learn. I was doing quite well in a couple of days.
You really think they start from scratch at the contest? ROTFLMAO!
You have no clue how PWN-to-Own hacking contests work, not a clue, if you think timing the hack has anything to do with the hacking.
The vulnerability the hacker uses was discovered by the hacker months before he ever shows up to the contest and his hack prepared in advance. The time for the hack to work is irrelevant. All the hacker has to do is have the proctor do what he has prepared in advance, run a script, install a file, navigate to a malicious website and click on a button, etc., and WHAM it's done. Every one of these targeted computers has had Java installed on it. But Apple Macs are NOT shipped with Java installed or even present by default! Most users do not require Java to ever be installed. They are also generally running in Administrator mode, not the safer standard mode.
Every one of those hacker contests start with the idea that someone has to do something a normal user would not normally do, and the hack requires physical access to the computer by the proctor, often the installation of a piece of software prepared by the hacker, giving administrator permission for that install. In other words, the proctor does something that would normally be done by getting a user to do by phishing them to download something from an untrusted source, go to a malicious website, etc.
Getting that piece of software onto a Mac is not so easy as you may think without the willing participation of someone like the proctor. Even installing the software is not as easy as clicking "OK" on a PC is, because on a Mac, one has to know and enter an administrator's name and password to do that. If it is from an untrusted site, the user will have to take a proactive action to turn off the option that absolutely prevents downloads from such sources in the Security Pane, an action that also requires an administrator's name and password.
Since OS X El Capitan, the underlying UNIX™ OS is protected from being modified by even the superuser unless those protections are turned off which requires restarting the computer in a Recovery mode, which any downloaded software cannot survive. Ergo, On an OS X Mac, such a download cannot modify the underlying OS in any meaningful way unless the user has been industrial strength stupid..
In the past, all of the hackers have targeted the Mac because it was the most desirable target to win. Charlie Miller, ex-NSA cracker, and three time black hat winner explained his Apple Mac crack had been ready for six months. That particular hack, he said, would have worked on any computer there, since it exploited a Java vulnerability, but he wanted the MacBook Pro. The second place winners won the Sony Vaio laptop just as fast when they were up to try their crack. . . and used the same Java vulnerability but with a different approach. Miller was first because he was the defending champ from the previous year. They've now gone to random contestant selection because of the unfair advantage of being first to try gives the previous winner. Time to crack has nothing to do with it. Being prepared is everything!
One year, Apple issued an OS Security update one week before the contest and the contest operators decided the contestants got to use the UN-UPDATED version of the OS. . . because the vulnerabilities they were going to use had all been patched! This was a major change in the time honored rules that the hackers had to use a fully up-to-date OS . . . but, hey, you gotta have winners, ya know! OOPS! Now, they won't change those rules any more after a lot of people complained about the unfairness of that rule change.
Now that's changed because there are now monetary prizes attached to specific targets in software and hardware offered by the publishers and manufacturers. The hackers are going first for the big money targets. That frequently is not the Macs or any Apple product. . . although this last fall there was a $500,000 bounty on an iOS 9 remote jailbreak hack of an iPhone 6s from some S.F. Bay Area company (thought perhaps to be Apple, although others thought it might be another security company looking for a means of iPhone access) which was topped at the last minute by an Israeli security company at $1 million which several months later was monetizing the hack to government agencies around the world for a very large fee. Alphabet/Google offers big money. . .
You are completely ignorant about modern Macs. You are talking about stuff that ran MacOS 9.2 and older. Nothing that ran on Intel processors and a mature OS X. You still live in the ancient past. I don't need to ask, all I have to do is read what you say about Macs. Your ignorance drips off of you.
Most companies never do a TCO analysis. That's a fact.
Their IT departments won't do it . . . for the simple reason of that equation of 1 IT guy for 18,000 Macs vs. 1 IT guy for 500 PCs.
The director of IT LIKES having a lot of people working underneath him.
It means job security. . . and a big paycheck when he's the boss of that many people.
He's not going to be the one to tell the CEO that his job and a lot of the guys and gals he has working for him, and the budget for his department, are completely superfluous and a waste of company resources.
No, he won't be telling the CEO or CFO that inconvenient truth. He will bury it as far down and is deep as he can. . . just as you are trying to do.
Frankly, every single time that I've been able to switch a Windows user over to using Macs, I've stopped making money off of them. It's inevitable.
Good thing most of them simply don't believe their business can use Macs, no matter what I do to show them and prove it to them. They listen to their peers who tell them the only way to go is Windows. I will go on billing them and making money from them, cleaning up the inevitable messes. A few do listen. . . and also inevitably thank me for switching them over. Some have even switch for their home use, but fear keeps them from switching the businesses. Fear and peer pressure are powerful non-motivators.
They all say "I wish my office work was as easy as what I do on my Mac at home."
Eventually they'll switch.
Blah blah blah
“all I have to do is read what you say about Macs. “
Now go ahead and tell me what I say about them.
You are just kicking up dust with a few suggestions as to why hacking into a Mac might be a little more difficult - everyone has known about Java for... well, forever.
So sure, don't download certain software or click on certain email links or go to an untrusted webpage.
Gee! People do that don't they. Sounds like a good idea for Mac or Windows and sounds like how crap gets into any computer. If you don't do a lot of things you will not pick up malicious crap. I don't and I don't pick any of it up either on my Win 7 64bit OS.
The real issue is that there is simply more crap out there for Windows and virtually nothing for Mac.
When enough people switch then you can start making money off the crap that is targeted to a Mac. It ain’t special.
And the reason that is? Simple: It really is a lot harder to write successful malware for Macs.
I am going to repeat my question from earlier in the thread. When will there be enough people who have switched, 99.9% of whom go bare naked without any anti-malware software on their Macs, before we start getting those hackers writing the malware for the 110 million vulnerable Macs out there in the wild? When? We've been told what you just told me for 18 years and it hasn't happened yet and there have been hackers who have tried to write self-replicating, self-transmitting, self-installing malware for Macs during that time and every single one of them has failed miserably to be successful. So, exactly how many will it takes before all these generally more wealthy, more vulnerable exposed Mac users become targets of these crooked hackers? When? How many will it take?
30% of the computers in California right now are Macs.
We keep asking and all we get from you smug prognosticators, who don't use a Mac and have never tried to write malware for it, and who always claim the "Mac ain't special", is crickets. So step up and explain when will it become attractive for these miscreants? We are getting tired of both waiting and your predictions.
Couple of comments on the article. As far as TCO goes, the oldest Macs are only 18 months old so hardware failures probably aren’t much of a factor yet. I thought the claim of 1 IT support person per 18K Macs was high, so I searched around a bit. Found a couple of articles from last fall that said they had 24 people supporting Mac 130K devices. That included IOS devices. Haven’t found any updated info.
Yup. That's one of the things that annoys me. It is their decision of course, but I'd really love to see a "vmMac", which would be a VMWare image that you could purchase. Since the emulated virtual hardware in VMWare is pretty standardized, from a support standpoint they wouldn't have to deal with the issue hardware compatibility and such. I'd be more than happy to pay for it. Also, if they just shipped an image, it you wouldn't have any installation weirdness. At least that way I could talk to my iPhone without having to install a copy of since Apple doesn't support iTunes on Linux. Speak of which, that would rock as well.
TO speak to the topic, it really doesn't surprise me. Now that you're seeing less internal corporate apps and website that are geared towards specific versions of windows or IE, more corps should be looking at this kind of thing.
This data is as of day before yesterday from an IBM Vice President who should know what he is talking about. I suspect they found that 24 was too many. Another article I found from about a month ago said seven IT guys supporting IBM's Mac base. Now it's five. . . perhaps they are busier than a one legged man in a rear end kicking contest, but that seems to be the current number.
As for longevity of hardware, my office has found that Macs are like Mack trucks. They just don't break. In almost twenty years of running Macs, we've gone through more than 100 through normal upgrade cycle (we usually replaced them on a four year cycle, although this last one was six) and we've had only two that gave us problems. One was a brand new one that was a lemon just this past quarter, and one that had a hard drive give up the ghost and require replacement. Every single one of the Macs we had was sold for approximately 40% of the original purchase price except for a MacPro which we kept for longer than the normal cycle. It was 30%.
I am not in this forum to answer an overtly stupid shill-for-Mac question. There are roughly 1.5 billion users of Windows worldwide. There is as much justification to hack a Mac as there is to answer your question: Mac is so zero as to reach singularity.
I was on the net when there where only 8 million between the US and Canada. I was a charter member of many computer forums and have focused on race-horse rigs while observing Apple use its boat anchor hardware and proprietary software to con customers up to about the #4 computer maker in 1996. Since then it became a boutique computer business whose best claim was that their crap didn't crash.
Now they want to go low end attempting to get their special sauce software on as many unsuspecting numbnut's computers as possible. Capitalism baby! I'm all for it.
To be trendy and polite, Apple has always run a closed ecosystem. They have been financially successful. The big question will be whether big corporations will let the vampire into its network.
Found a recent article that says 50 Mac support staff for 210K devices. http://www.cultofmac.com/449972/ibm-now-uses-macs-company/
This is not just a decision by IBM to convert to Mac. This is a partnership and in that joint venture IBM will take over the sales of Mac. The IT for a Mac then is primarily ‘Cloud based’ which brings up all sorts of questions. Sure, you can cut staff, just like asking people to press ‘one’ for English.
I Missed the joint venture thing with Apple and IBM. It would make sense IBM would allow Macs in house since they have to write apps, configure cloud services, etc.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.