Ditch your Macs, Dell tells EMC staff Staff at EMC who go out into the world to meet customers have been told their Apple Macs aren't allowed to come with them. Amid Dell's looming takeover of EMC, an edict has been issued insisting that Dell customers must only ever see Dell laptops during meetings and consulting engagements, EMC insiders have told The Register …
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@AC & Windows 8/8.1
I recently speccd and am provisioning new desktops for a client. (side work). Got some nice HP micros with the Windows 7 downgrade rights and ordered media for another $5. What a treat. You get Win7 Pro or whatever, along with Win10 for the system on real DVDs!
Not one word of a lie about this:
At the moment I am working in a company where all staff are now being required to transition from MBR15 laptops to Lenovo Thinkpads P, with Windows 10. Apparently the rationale behind making 500+ video and image editing and marketing staff move to Windows is simply because in the new workspace they are moving to the designers *preferred the look of the Lenovo chargers to those of Apple*.
There are 'transition' meetings, which are coupled with explanations for the the new mot du jour 'Agile Desking' ("no, it is NOT 'Hot Desking', it is about 'shared office environments and better use of your time management"). The new office is apparently all about harmonious working conditions and the blending of ergonomic colours into the working environment - which the bland white Mac power adaptors do not fit into.
Quite how this accounts for the expense of junking close to £1m of new Mac laptops is a puzzle to me. In addition is why you would want to make your video editing staff trash Final Cut Pro and retrain on Adobe Premiere (more huge and unnecessary expenditure) is a further enigma.
Letting the interior designers dictate the computer platform? Are you working for Sir Steve Bong?
I can almost see the expression "Agile Desking"; the best desk is to the most agile. Will the insurers allow you to vault over desks to demonstrate your agility?
"Apparently the rationale behind making 500+ video and image editing and marketing staff move to Windows is simply because in the new workspace they are moving to the designers *preferred the look of the Lenovo chargers to those of Apple*."
I'm stunned...
Get some black Apple compatible chargers, perhaps?
Please tell me you made it up!?
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Of COURSE this is the case... heck, as a prior poster put it, I am sure there is a ban on HP and Lenovo gear as well... as their should be.
I work at a large Canadian tech firm as a consultant... I would never wear a logo from my competitor to a business meeting... ESPECIALLY if my company was providing me with their own logo-wear... (for the record, I wear business attire, so it is a non issue... lol)
I'd liked to have been able to identify one from a similar team yesterday by his shirt, but as it said Trend perhaps we should have, he crashed an entire microelectronics research facility, by plugging one unrelated cable into a Trend outstation hub. Cost in lost time, research etc runs to six figures plus. Just hope todays university wide network fiasco doesn't turn into the expected fuster cluck... But as arsesolutions and Trend are both involved some how I doubt it.
<sarcasm> Right. Because what the guys from Cupertino have banged together in China looks absolutely identical to what the guys from Texas have banged together in China, with its cheap plastics and overweight chassis. </sarcasm>
Put a little less sarcastically, not gonna work.
I could see this more half a decade or so ago, nowadays I see plenty of tech firms where by far the majority of engineers are carrying macs. Speaking for myself it's been 6 years now since I used windows in anger, forcing me back to it would be a huge productivity sap for many months. I wonder if those dells can be turned into hackintoshes?
I wonder if those dells can be turned into hackintoshes?
Oh sure, set the company up for MASSIVE fines. I can see the sense in having to force people to use your own brand, because you don't want to send the message that even inhouse staff prefers to use something else. It's rather entertaining that they now face the consequences of having tied their ship to Microsoft - unless, of course, they install the only viable alternative OS for PCs..
I feel sorry for the staff, but with W10 Slurp, Redmond has at least a pretty direct insight into how much people hate the new OS..
I did some consulting for HP back in the day, and as a contractor I was bringing my own laptop. But the project I was on required customer visits, and the exec in charge of the project had a problem with me showing up at the customer site with a laptop with a Dell logo. So I put some black electrical tape over the logo, and he was satisfied.
Dell's issue may not be so much one of trying to force everyone to use their hardware, but having a big Apple logo staring back at customers around a conference table isn't what they want those customers seeing. Cover it up, and even if those who look more closely can tell what it is, it isn't in your face during all afternoon customer meeting.
"[...] but you can't fault the design or materials. Makes the Apple kit look dated."
I agree with you that Dell mobile kit has come a long way in the last few years in materials and quality both, and I did intentionally overstate my sarcastic remark (that's why I put the tags around it...). Still, my point really was that Dell kit looks nothing like Apple kit (and I am not putting a preference on that, just pointing out they look vastly different). Hence my statement that a sticker across the logo isn't going to fool anybody.
Macs are a great little number for versatility. Unix based OS, runs Virtualbox for Windows or other UNIX flavours, lightweight, good battery life.
Regular MacBook: excellent. Regular MacBook with iTerm 2 installed: pure friggin' bliss. It has probably saved my bacon a few times now with its ability to load a layout profile depending on host. I normally don't have both production and test open at the same time but when I do, the fact that production systems come up with a red background forces me to think twice before I hit enter.
Sometimes it's the small stuff that makes a difference.
Pity they cost so much, but it's not as gross as people like to make out.
I used to buy pretty potent Sony Viaos, and the hardware was about equivalent in price. Where MacBooks definitely pay back their costs is in usability and the far lower price of damn good software. An example: Microsoft Visio: around the $300 mark, and frankly terrible after Microsoft ruined the UI (even before they made things worse with the %^$& ribbon). Omnigraffle Pro for OSX (which also handles Visio files): $199, and far, FAR more usable, not to mention a far better and more professional looking output without doing anything special. The only software that's still worth the money is the new Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo, and that only became a Windows product after they had the OSX version working - oh, and none of that subscription lark.
IMHO, the price of a Mac is only "high" if your time has no value and you only use pirated software. The moment you run one professionally, the TCO actually creates questions about any continued use of Microsoft products instead - certainly if you stick to Linux on servers.
No, the BYOD is cancelled and everyone will be given a new, fairly good I have to say, Dell laptop. So no more BYOD.
However, there are things you can do about it. Install Linux on the laptop and run the corporate image as a VM. Even though the mac won't be allowed, at least you can work in linux and have a vm for incompatible stuff.
Well... you can't. Corporate policies are strict and you cannot have OS XYZ on your laptop if OS XYZ is not in approved list. Right now only Windows 7 is in the list. Having my past experiences with "widespread" use of Linux on enterprise workstations, the only way is vice versa - have Linux VM to work comfortably. At the moment I know I am only one. Previously there was another one, who gave up finally due to issues with requirement on using corporate communication tools, which are, naturally, only Windows/Mac compatible.
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>Well... you can't. Corporate policies are strict and you cannot have OS XYZ on your laptop if OS XYZ is not in approved list.
Yeah, I worked for a bunch of a*holes like that ... came in early one morning, started by installing Windows 2000 again, without domain (I am a grown-up and responsible person, I think I can choose my desktop background) ... then, later, installed Linux ... nobody noticed ... especially when Nimda, Sasser, or whatever (cannot remember) brought down everybody's desktop except mine ;-). After that, anybody with one or more working braincells migrated to either OS X or Linux.
Rules are made to be circumvented ... gimme awk, sed, vi etc and a decent shell (NOT CMD.EXE) and I can get more stuff done than the rest of the team combined ... ;-)
At one point we had an 'IT specialist' whos one and only qualification was some MS cert in setting up Windows XP.
So most of us in the QA department switched to Linux - the OS which our software was running on anyway. Asked nicely and corporate opened a port on the exchange server for Thunderbird. The only windows application we needed was a test case repository, which we either ran from a seamless locked down XP VM or wine.
Was great until $CORPORATION took over and forced their Windows 7 corporate network domain laptops on us. (Though thankfully we had skipped Vista).
I made friends with our IT department. Then, I asked them for an old desktop, one they were going to recycle. I ended up with a ultra small form factor Dell system, which works fine, as long as I prop the top open (seriously -- the HDD reads 10-15C lower than when buttoned up). Bought my own HDD for it and installed Linux Mint on it. Named the machine so they know who has it on the network. All is cool, as I use it to do things my official Win7 machine can't (image editing, scripts, etc)
I also asked if I could have a laptop out of the recycle bin. Supplied my own HDD again (as they had shredded the one it came with) and now have a nice little Linux Mint laptop at zero cost.
When IT needs something out of the ordinary, I help them out. We have an excellent relationship.
Agree about the high-end Dells, but not just for gaming.
I use the XPS 15 with the top end processor (quad core i7) and it's really very nice. The reasons I stuck with the 15 inch MacBook Pro previously was the trackpad (or course), and the centralised keyboard (no numeric keypad throwing everything off centre). The XPS 15 has basically the same layout and feel (trackpad close even if not quite as good, but keyboard better IMO). Only problem is faffing about with the 4k screen - very nice when the application uses it properly, but some software can't handle the scaling very well. Mostly not a problem though, just an occasional irritation.
On the OS side of things, I still flit between Windows and Mac, and I have to say that I am baffled by comments about OS X being more usable than Windows 10. On the whole, I find OS X 'nicer' for casual stuff, but Windows is better for heavy multi-tasking (development work, market research analysis, etc). Swings and roundabouts, horses for courses, and all that.
Bottom line, though, is that the XPS is the equaliser when comes to comparing Mac and PC in the high end 15 inch category, and the Dell is a lot cheaper for a significantly higher spec at the moment. Will be interesting to see what Apple does with the next Mac refresh.
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