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5% of Mac users at IBM call the help desk, compared to 42% of PC users

7 pointsby dpaluyover 9 years ago

1 comment

halchionover 9 years ago
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&#x27;s PC (Lenovo, Toshiba) internal offerings is because IBM has made a genuine attempt at making it a good user experience, I assume &#x27;because it&#x27;s a Mac&#x27;, and because of the ongoing &#x27;IBM+Apple&#x27; alliance.<p>They&#x27;ve created a &#x27;Mac@IBM app store&#x27; to install common programs like Notes, Flash Player, Java - this effort didn&#x27;t exist for Windows (any IBMers reading this - ISSI is completely different).<p>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.<p>They use the system internal networking configuration to handle networking. The Windows images use convoluted third party programs with non-intuitive interfaces.<p>They offer a simple, public facing URL (which I won&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>There are definite issues. Sametime and Notes have the same problems they do on Windows. Sametime crashes silently. Notes - I still don&#x27;t actually know how to close it without using Force Quit or the command line if I&#x27;m already there. The Mac@IBM store doesn&#x27;t actually seem to be able to provide updates to software that it&#x27;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&#x27;t have a Kensington lock slot.<p>I could go on but I&#x27;m not trying to disparage IBM here, just point out the logic behind some of the commentary in the article.