[trimethylpurine]

Mac users are consistently the highest needs users in my environment. Ymmv. Samba is still broken. Microsoft apps don't work.

You can use them for Adobe. But even then, performance per dollar is poor. Adobe flies on much cheaper Windows hardware in the side by side testing we've done.

I'm the Director of IT for a 160M revenue company.

We allow Macs, and we support them. But I don't share your take on the benefits. I can't think of a single benefit frankly. It's a loss for the business.

Oh well, it's not my money.

[thewebguyd]

This reads like the last time you've evaluated is 2018. The entire office suite works great on Apple silicon with the exception of, obviously Win32 VBA macros and some PowerQuery features in Excel.

As for Adobe, I'm assuming you're issuing desktops then? Because for an equivalently performant laptop with heavy Adobe workloads you are going to spend the same as a MBP on the higher end Thinkpads, or dell precisions. There's no cost savings there, really (again, unless you have everyone on desktops).

If you're still domain joining macs, trying to use SCCM & GPOs, and treating them like any other windows endpoint, of course you are running into problems. Kind of a square peg/round hole situation.

Not doubting your experience, but to have relatively problem free mac endpoints you have to do things differently. Maybe not worth it for every company, especially any that are super deep into Microsoft. But I can say, they've worked great for mine and we are phasing out Windows entirely, and IBM, Cisco, and SAP all had similar lower total cost of ownership & less help desk workload after introducing macs. Then again, we no longer use smb/samba, we eliminated on-prem file shares a long time ago.

[trimethylpurine]

We use 10G fiber to a local file store. Not domain joined. Cloud is way too slow for media production (the users that Apple targets).

We use basic AV and monitoring, as required for carrying insurance.

We don't have any desktops.

Our comparisons are done regularly to show the difference to new employees and to ensure that we aren't biased in what we report for budgeting.

[kalleboo]

I have a friend who runs a video production company. He was a big PC guy, they used desktop tower PCs with power-hungry GPUs for editing. He recently switched them over to Macs after testing Premiere on the base-model Mac mini they got for the receptionist and finding it was on par with their expensive PCs. His M3 Max MacBook Pro runs their chroma key at twice the speed of the GPU in the previous editing PC, AI upscaling is the same speed despite being a laptop. Premiere is also far more stable on the Mac, he's spent days troubleshooting driver versions on the PC.

[grosswait]

Was that side by side comparison with all the security cruft running, because this is totally contrary to my experience with both sets of hardware managed by IT.

[trimethylpurine]

You have to have security software on both Mac and Windows machines in an enterprise. It's required to carry insurance.

[frollogaston]

Not surprising. I've used Macs since 2005, and 3P software and GPU support have always been weak points. People blame the lack of popularity, but macOS is inherently a moving target to support. You're talking about corp machines running Adobe software with GPU acceleration, so yeah. Only reason I might do that on a Mac is if it's my personal machine and I want it to be nice for other stuff, but it wouldn't be cheap.

[ksec]

>Adobe flies on much cheaper Windows hardware in the side by side testing we've done.

This is the first time I have ever heard Adobe files on Windows.

There were a period of time between 2015 - 2020 that might have been the case. Especially due to poor Intel GPU acceleration on Mac.

Since Apple Silicon, Adobe Apps on Mac has been constantly faster than Windows counterparts. With plenty of examples on Youtube and Reddit when people disocver it. I mean Adobe work best on Mac I thought was given, given the historic ties between the two.

[trimethylpurine]

These are new. The Macs are faster if you use regular Windows out of the box with all the bloat. But that's not what businesses do.

Put any kind of security software on the Mac and remove the bloat from Windows (normal for enterprises), and the Windows machines are faster.

You can blame the security software if you like, but you have to have it to carry insurance. And you have to have it to make a fair comparison anyway.

It's obvious that they will be faster. They come with a free video card at the same price point as the Macs that don't.

[thewebguyd]

Which security software matters greatly. If its poorly optimized, and doesn't use Apple's framework it's going to perform terribly (SentinelOne is notorious for this) , and by default with smb on mac it will scan every single file modification over the network. If you're working with huge files over smb you have to disable packet signing, make sure the mac isn't writing and looking for .DS_Store, and make sure directory caching is turned on (its off by default).

Your experience is valid, I don't doubt that, but you can't just toss a mac into a windows optimized environment and expect it to work, you have to take that extra bit of time to do things differently.

Either way, sounds like you made the right choice then for your own org, but for the vast majority of companies introducing macs generally aren't a loss and tend to have a higher ROI.

[trimethylpurine]

Which security software do you recommend?

I'm going to run your recommendations through some research tomorrow. It would be so cool if we can get local file sharing to work, even Mac to Mac would be amazing.

We have directories with 30k+ large images and video content that we need to share. Macs can't open them.

[trimethylpurine]

Also, thanks in advance for any advice, if it works.