thinkback

If you’re looking for a bunch of lame excuses to refuse to support Macs, look no further.

What kind of preparation and planning did he do before switching his business to Macs? Due diligence, anyone? How does his obvious lack of preparation qualify him to write about the experience, especially for a supposedly serious publication?

Given that my colleagues and I support about 300 Macs (we have a few PCs kicking around too and a bunch of Microsoftian servers) in a large business, I feel qualified to say the this guy is a nit-wit.

I guess if he’s too dumb and ignorant to buy a $10 USB hub and keep his external USB drive, it’s no surprise that he’s too dumb to replace it with a fast firewire drive instead of a slow network drive.

Bozo. Bozo. Bozo!

I am the CFO of a multi-million dollar Ad firm based in Indiana. We have 72 iMacs and 14 Mac Pro’s on our premises, all running perfectly fine. Our IT Department absolutely loves them for their ease of use and configuration. When I hire new employees I am amazed at the responses I get when I tell them they need to learn Mac to work here. In almost every case they tell me they have been dying to try it and look forward to the experience. They are quite enthusiastic to get away from Windows.

If I based my purchasing decisions on where the on/off switch is, keyboard short cuts and USB availability I don’t think I would be buying “anything” and we would all be running “the pencil OS”.

This is the silliest argument for making business purchases I have ever heard. I would love to know the company he works for so I can short their stock.

Good to hear that I wasn’t the only one left wondering after reading that “review"…

My first thought was that he chose an iMac for business… Come on!  Like you’re going to buy a Dell XPS One or 210 for a business setting…

The “not enough USB ports” issue got me too.  I’ve had to put USB cards into PCs as well as Apples.  But it is also back to that form factor thing - you’d have to add a USB hub to a Dell One or any laptop as well.

And at least the keyboard shortcuts are fairly standard on the Mac - Apple actually has that as part of the developer’s information.  Whereas PC shortcuts vary from program to program.

And as you say, as a Mac user I don’t have a “Mighty Mouse” because it just doesn’t work for me…

I read part of that article and simply couldn’t finish reading it - it was so ridiculous. Thanks for writing a good rebuttal.

Ethernet enablement unit

I think what he’s referring to is usually for the MacBook Air:

Apple USB Ethernet Adapter
Easily connect your MacBook Air computer to an Ethernet network with the Apple USB Ethernet Adapter. Small and light, it connects to the USB 2.0 port of your MacBook Air and provides an RJ-45 connector that supports 10/100BASE-T performance.  $29 at the Apple store.

A few of the comments are rather laughable, Why they would be bothered but the ‘Designed by Apple in California’ is a mystery to me, they would they prefer ‘Designed by Acer in China’? Or for that matter the keyboard shortcuts, you can’t use an Apple like a Windows machine any more than you can use a hammer like a screwdriver. They may be used to drive fasteners but they can’t be effectively used in the same way. Besides this what exactly is SO MUCH different, it’s rather perplexing. Its like they were trying as hard as possible to find something to complain about.

I’m surprised that a magazine like Fortune would publish such drivel.

I was also puzzled by “ethernet enablement unit”. If you google these exact words (in quotes) the only hits are the original article and comments on it. The Mac already has ethernet so I assume this is some USB to ethernet adapter for an external USB device for which he ran out of ports (like a typical business user, who has at least 3 USB devices in addition to mouse and keyboard, each needing a powered port? ... never mind). But it you are doing that, why not just get a USB hub?

Or maybe he meant an ethernet enabled unit, still more expensive than simply buying a USB hub.

I was about to write that “journalist” myself, but I figure your article more than took care of showing him how many of us feel. He seems like a disgruntled teenager, firmly rooted in the “I like PC - NO, I like Mac” war. Childish and stupid and extremely surprising that an editor would let that piece through?

As a long-time Mac power user, I’ve come to expect moronic articles such as the one in Fortune. Aside from points made previously, why is compatibility with Windows, or creating familiarity with Windows, essential to business implementations? So many people have gotten used to Windows-centric quirks that they have difficulty getting back to simplicity in design and use? FWIW, my company has moved entirely to the Mac OS X platform, both servers and clients.

I think the author of that article speaks for a lot of people in that Macs are not considered the first option for most businesses for several good reasons, only I think he hasn’t elaborated the point enough :

1. Price.  Macs are still too expensive, both notebooks and desktops, and in everything from parts to hardware/software support.  Look in libraries, schools and offices and note how most businesses invest in equipments based on price.  The fact that PCs do the same thing at cheaper operating costs makes them an obvious choice for businesses who don’t care how they get things don’t as long as the result is the same.  And they don’t care about the boxes the computers came in either.

2. Apple’s lack of the usuals (usb ports, card readers) drives a lot of businesses up the wall.  Why do we have to pay a premium for something that doesn’t even facilitate basic needs?  Think about it.  If I get a Macbook as a replacement for my notebook I would also need a couple of externals to ensure that I have everything working the same way as before.  Now all that stuff is going to be hanging off the back of the computer which (if anyone hasn’t yet tried) is incredibly messy. 

3. Keyboard shortcuts?  Are we still living in the 80s?

4. Does the stupid mouse come standard on every Mac desktop?  Because I feel sorry for users who had to invest in a mac only to have to replace the mouse with normal usable ones.  Again, think of what most businesses would have to do if they really did buy Macs as replacements.  It would be pretty expensive just to get things right.

Macs has always been a target for businesses dealing with high end graphics and multimedia stuff (ie. companies that spend millions to make millions), but not for the majority of businesses who don’t need to spend the excess to do the same thing and probably even less. 

You see, smart companies don’t have to spend millions to make billions.