| I find this disingenuous. I am an IBMer using an IBM provided Macbook, and the main reason the Mac is easier to use than IBM's PC (Lenovo, Toshiba) internal offerings is because IBM has made a genuine attempt at making it a good user experience, I assume 'because it's a Mac', and because of the ongoing 'IBM+Apple' alliance. They've created a 'Mac@IBM app store' to install common programs like Notes, Flash Player, Java - this effort didn't exist for Windows (any IBMers reading this - ISSI is completely different). Getting a license for something such as Microsoft Office is as simple as opening this Mac@IBM App Store and clicking download. On Windows you have to use a Lotus Notes form to request licenses, justify your business usage, wait for approval, then take your machine to the help desk. They use the system internal networking configuration to handle networking. The Windows images use convoluted third party programs with non-intuitive interfaces. They offer a simple, public facing URL (which I won't add here) which downloads a small .dmg which when run, downloads and unpacks everything you need to take a Mac fresh from Apple into a productive IBM machine, including VPN. The only way to reimage your IBM provided PC is to take it to the help desk. Even the internal online help for OS X vs Windows is better - the OS X help site is neat, well laid out, and holds your hand through configuring everything. The Windows site is a mash of poorly tagged wiki pages and broken links. There are definite issues. Sametime and Notes have the same problems they do on Windows. Sametime crashes silently. Notes - I still don't actually know how to close it without using Force Quit or the command line if I'm already there. The Mac@IBM store doesn't actually seem to be able to provide updates to software that it's installed - just throws an error. We are responsible for the security of our laptops at office locations and are provided Kensington locks for this, but Macbooks don't have a Kensington lock slot. I could go on but I'm not trying to disparage IBM here, just point out the logic behind some of the commentary in the article. |