Of late, I’ve started to notice that this whole Apple as your work desktop machine is, well, working out. I am, of course, an Apple fanboy, so of course I want to see it succeed. The context here is largely for technical audiences, but I keep my eye firmly on non-technical workers. Indeed, several my friends who are the family “IT admin” — the guy the whole family, including extended, call to help them with their computer problems — tell me that when they give their family members Macs, the support calls stop.
Anyhow, here are 3 points on the topic, two of which are from the Coté-verse:
I have to say, I am at least 5x more productive at home on my Mac than I am waiting 15 minutes for my Windows machine to boot and log into the network in the office. I tend to do my most important work off hours now, just to be able to work on a more intuitive and easier to use machine. I feel like I can concentrate more on the problem I am working on than how to do it, which again, tied into the whole Rails conversation for me.
It was interesting to hear Dave talk about how “beautiful” their infrastructure is, because they have been able to focus on things aside from security, VPN, notification frameworks and the like because a lot of the things that infrastructure folks spend most of their time on are taken care of already on a Mac network.
One interesting aspect of this setup was how reliant it was on using peer-to-peer think vs. centralized server think.
I often wonder what the “business” and “enterprise” stories are with Apple, specifically as desktops. I rarely hear people saying their stuff doesn’t work — price and simply noticing their presence seem more the barriers. The biggest question I always have is: is Apple interested in business and enterprise desktop sales? That’s a silly question, who wouldn’t answer yes?
But, I feel like there’s a bug stack of marketing firewood yet to be lit ablaze to accelerate and encourage that growth. No problem for Apple’s bottom-line, really, they seem to be doing all right at the moment. There’s also that cynic in the back of my head that says, “could Apple really handle the demands of being a business desktop supplier? Are they too cool for that?”
It’s more a desire on my part to see more positive experiences like the above: getting beautiful, IT infrastructure out of the box so that the IT department can focus on creating strategic value with IT rather than just keeping it running and the user complaints to a manageable hum.
Update: check out this piece for some cold water on the above. In sum: the business software support isn’t there.
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