[menssen]

Is the Apple/consumer thing still true? Not questioning your general business-model assumptions, but anecdotally all the “consumers” I know with Macs are holding onto them for six years, while every dev shop I’ve worked in in this decade goes through new MBPs like commodity office supplies. I’m just curious if there are recent stats on who Apple is selling computers to (I haven’t seen any for a while.)

[nikanj]

Apple doesn’t really have a product combo to replace AD+SCCM. Macs are popular in companies that are still small enough to have people manage their own machines.

[indemnity]

Is that really true?

We have 20000 Mac users in a company of 90000, I don’t think this is a corner case for large technology companies.

My machine is managed in the sense some things are preinstalled and IT has a way to push software updates.

What more management is required? Anything more and IT would probably fuck it up like they did when our division was still on Windows.

[nikanj]

Unified image on all machines, auditability of installed software, etc. End users absolutely do not have admin rights.

Not saying your company has to be like this. Just saying 1) this is where MS has very little competition, and 2) where they make absolute bank.

[tcoff91]

Our macs are integrated with AD and are remotely managed similarly to windows.

[wtallis]

> in companies that are still small enough to have people manage their own machines.

Company size doesn't have much to do with this. Macs are popular at IBM.

[digi_owl]

Last time i read anything about that, those computers were still largely self-managed (though with a in-office wiki for collected solutions).

[reaperducer]

> Macs are popular in companies that are still small enough to have people manage their own machines.

140,000+ employees in this company. Macs outnumbers Windows boxes. Pretty much the only place you see Windows machines are in the various accounting departments, and in the call centers where they're just used as terminals to big iron.

[digi_owl]

Frankly i think consumers value backwards compatibility as much, if not more, as companies.

At least as one gets older and just want to get that thing done that they always have (a certain big name author still writes using WordStar in DOS i believe).