Former Apple rival IBM could become the biggest buyer of MacBooks

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/former-apple-rival-ibm-could-become-the-biggest-buyer-of-macbooks/articleshow/48307677.cms

by satyajeet23 • 11 years ago

107 101 11 years ago

economictimes.indiatimes.com

Mithaldu2• 11 years ago

I really wonder why people keep submitting highly editorialized headlines when the guides clearly state not to do it.

On the article:

If this pans out it could spell the end of Thinkpads as high quality laptops that deliver premium performance while being very robust and sturdy. Who is left in that niche? Are we left with only either apple laptops, or shoddy plastic jobs that need to be kept in bubble wrap at all times?

listic• 11 years ago

Do you suggest that IBM was responsible for the vast majority of Thinkpad sales?

My hopes for great new laptops lie with some brand new crowdfunding efforts, fantastic as it may sound. Also, it would be a pity if Thinkpads would dies now, as they have just implemented dual batteries with hot swap in last two generations; IMO this is long overdue, but I haven't heard of a laptop manufacturer that did it.

Mithaldu2• 11 years ago

No, i'm saying that this will, directly and indirectly, impact the profits Lenovo sees, which will likely result in cost cutting decisions.

jacquesm3• 11 years ago

If this pans out it could spell the end of Thinkpads as high quality laptops that deliver premium performance while being very robust and sturdy.

I think that boat sailed a while ago. I'm writing this on one and it's the worst machine I've owned to date quality wise. Keys that spontaneously dis-integrate, wwan card that bricks itself (and replacements are not accepted by the BIOS because they're not 'authorized') and so on. Last laptop of this brand for me.

Maybe Asus or Acer has something half decent?

ild• 11 years ago

The last decent non-Apple laptops were the ones with 16:10 screen; since switching to 16:9 the whole industry refocused itself on making consumer grade products.

farresito4• 11 years ago

Which model do you have? I'm thinking about buying a laptop, and, obviously, one of the first things that come to my head is a Thinkpad, but I'm worried about the quality.

_nedR• 11 years ago

Typing this from a cheap Acer Aspire V5-471G (the cheapest make and model for given specs). Remember you get what you pay for.

The laptop looks sleek, but build quality is very flimsy with issues like paint-peeling, scratches, and malfunctioning hinges causing display to flicker/black-out. Also Acer support sucks and traveller's warranty is not international warranty.

Beware of cheap thinner laptops. They may look nice in the store but poor construction and cheap materials will come to bite you later. IMO Budget laptops have regressed in this matter compared to older bulkier models (including Dell Inspirons and XPSes in my experience).

Can't speak for more expensive models though.

mst2• 11 years ago

I went from an x61 to a Tablet 2, and it's been lovely (the bluetooth keyboard with trackpoint makes it usable as a laptop for me).

Every generation of thinkpad in the past decade plus seems to've been decried as terrible by at least some people whose opinion I respect, and then I've bought another one and it's worked fine.

I have a feeling that while there may also be some degree of decline, a lot of this is that when a thinkpad's good, it's sufficiently good that when we have trouble with one we judge it far more harshly than normal.

cpach2• 11 years ago

Have you considered switching to OS X? It’s a very good desktop OS.

rch3• 11 years ago

The Serval WS from System76 has nice specs. If the build quality is reasonably solid, and it works well with other distros, then that could be my next laptop.

Then of course there's the Eurocom Panther 5SE: Xeon E5-2600 v2 series processors and 32GB of DDR3 1600MHz RAM. Weighs 12lbs :)

Eventually I think the low-power server movement could end up yielding more high end laptops... hopefully some that are lighter than 5kg!

lnanek2• 11 years ago

Article seems correct to me. Even diehard thinkpad fans say the product line has degraded. Have you actually compared recent ones to older ones or are you just complaining without data points?

virtualwhys3• 11 years ago

Are we left with only either apple laptops, or shoddy plastic jobs that need to be kept in bubble wrap at all times?

Dell Precision line is still kicking, beastly machines, there is no better (IMO of course ;-)).

They won't win any design awards and are a bit on the hefty side, but performance-wise hard to beat. Have 32GB RAM in mine, can have several VMs running, and do development work (compile to ram disk instead of thrashing SSD) on host OS (Fedora) with memory to spare.

Dual fans are also a nice-to-have with heat-generating i7 processor. Maybe not a huge deal for some but the BIOS is pretty ridiculous in terms of configurability/locking down the machine.

farresito4• 11 years ago

Do you like the keyboard? It's probably the thing I'm most concerned with. If so, which model do you have? I'm trying to find business laptops with good keyboards, but so far the only things that I find acceptable seem to be Thinkpads.

rch3• 11 years ago

Looks to me like the M3800 isn't quite up to spec with the MBP, and has a ways to go to catch System76.

Edit: The M4800 doesn't come with 32GB of RAM either - which one do you have?

Dylan168072• 11 years ago

So the article title is "Former Apple rival IBM could become the biggest buyer of MacBooks"

And the submission title is "IBM to Purchase 200000 Macs Annually with 75% of Empl. Switching from Lenovo"

That's editing, not editorializing. There's no opinion inserted. Instead vague terms like "big" are replaces with concrete numbers, making the title almost as useful as the entire article. The guidelines are against edits, but they also seem to be against flashy vague terms, and a change like this is useful.

mst2• 11 years ago

Except that the article itself doesn't say either of those things.

It says that 50-75% of employees could switch, and that IBM could purchase up to that many Macs.

It completely misrepresents the article.

hackuser2• 11 years ago

Are we left with only either apple laptops, or shoddy plastic jobs that need to be kept in bubble wrap at all times?

Anecdotally, and based on a limited sample size, I've had great experiences with HP's corporate laptop (and other) product lines - not the consumer lines. They seem to last forever, much longer than Dells and than users, who like new equipment, would like them to. I have one that's around ten years old that runs fine, except for the pointstick. I can't remember the last one that suffered hardware failure.

Their Elite laptop line has excellent support and excellent design. Sitting next to me is an EliteBook; I can pop off the bottom cover and service it as easily as a desktop. It's pretty cool.

davelnewton• 11 years ago

It wouldn't take very long to re-equip all their employees.

Some of the Lenovos are pretty robust, too; I don't know much about the low-end models, but some of the upper-ends are quite nice. If they had first-class Linux support I'd even consider getting one.

eyce9000• 11 years ago

Indeed, the hardware on Lenovo's is reasonably good, but if you are an enterprise trying to move away from Windows, the hit-or-miss Linux support somewhat limits your options. From experience, running Linux ( RHEL / CentOS 6.x) on ThinkPads can be a frustrating experience, not sure if that is a limitation of drivers or of the ancient Gnome 2 desktop interface.

slgeorge2• 11 years ago

The way around that is to get the vendor (IBM, Dell or whomever) to CERTIFY the hardware for the Linux distribution of your choice. That guarantees that the HW vendor will make sure that drivers are available. You can get your hw vendor to do that if you're in the process of doing a hardware refresh and will be buying new systems, e.g "I will be buying these systems from <insert alternative vendor> because they are certified with <insert distribution name and version> and you are not".

If a system is not certified then you are relying on Linux developers making it work - they may do so, but are often hindered by drivers or small tweaks to hardware. As importantly, making a whole system work is fully is considerably different to making a specific component work.

pavement• 11 years ago

...because Windows is intolerably awful now, presumably getting worse every day.

Seriously. It's been downhill since Vista. Every upgrade since XP has been disruptive, and destroyed time-saving behaviors.

TheOtherHobbes2• 11 years ago

While OS X and Linux both have their problems, being defiantly user-hostile aren't among them.

I can't imagine the mind of the person at MS who decided that making Solitaire pay-to-play was a good idea.

It's fascinating how decisions like this get made, how products like Win 8 and 10 get out the door, and how MS seems to think it can fix the terrible design by downvoting critics on public forums and getting PR companies to write booster posts that are so ham-handed they have no persuasive power.

As a company, MS has a lot of really smart individuals doing really dumb things collectively. I'd be incredibly interested if MS could find its own Rodney Brooks to explain the business processes that make that happen.

Not a hater, btw. Office 365 and Azure both have their good points. But Windows and mobile seem like industry-changing disasters now, and from the outside it seems like the icebergs shouldn't have been that hard to miss.

joshontheweb• 11 years ago

Solitaire is pay-to-play now? Thats insane.

UnoriginalGuy3• 11 years ago

I can't imagine the mind of the person at MS who decided that making Solitaire pay-to-play was a good idea.

It categorically is not.

All of the functionality in classic solitaire (the version since Windows 95) is all free. There are also additional game modes which are also free.

But they've added "daily challenges" which you can pay to play. It is an optional additional part of the game.

how products like Win 8 and 10 get out the door

You mean products people dislike because Microsoft has actually tried to push forward their platform? Seems like they cannot win. If they push out a product exactly like XP over and over people will complain that Microsoft is being lazy/playing it safe/not innovating, but if they push out a product like 8/10 then people complain that they are changing too much.

Reminds me a lot of Ubuntu Unity. Everyone complained that they wanted innovation in the Linux desktop space, and when Ubuntu tries to provide that everyone freaks out because "they changed classic Linux!!!" Well which is it? Do you want to see progress or don't you?

MS seems to think it can fix the terrible design by downvoting critics on public forums and getting PR companies to write booster posts

Now we're moving into the realm of conspiracy theory. Did it ever occur to you that other people have a different opinion to you and that that is ok? Not everyone is a Microsoft shill, and your opinion isn't the only legitimate one.

trimbo• 11 years ago

Actually Vista added one of my most-used time-saving features: Windows-key and start typing to search. Huge, huge win (for me at least).

r00fus• 11 years ago

Part and parcel of the new Apple/IBM cooperation deal. I wonder if IBM is pushing iOS as well for their employees?

INTPenis• 11 years ago

I knew there had to be a deal behind this.

Personally I couldn't be more happier with my X230 and many co-workers use the X1 Carbon.

So technically I can't see a reason to do this. The X1 Carbon is essentially an ultrabook close to the new macbooks in most of its features.

douche• 11 years ago

They are buying large numbers of iPads. It's been fantastic for my company, as IBM is a major customer for one of our products, and now we have to support Safari and mobile Safari as first-class browsers, in addition to the legacy versions of IE still used by many of our other customers.

Not to mention that IBM insists that we use DB2 and run on their flavor of server-side Linux, where the IBM products that we integrate with have different long-standing bugs than on the Windows versions all our other customers use.

pinaceae• 11 years ago

well, the new ms office for osx is really good, so if all you need is web apps for business tools (erp, crm, etc) plus productivity apps a mac is the machine to go with right now.

mb, mb air, the small mbp are all excellent office machines.

switched personnally to a mba in 2012, wouldn't go back to a wintel notebook if they paid me.

jebblue3• 11 years ago

> well, the new ms office for osx is really good

Didn't the Mac version of Office get canceled then restarted then canceled then restarted a number of times over the years?

vetinari• 11 years ago

No. It lagged about a year behind the windows version (2003->2004, 2007->2008, 2010->2011, no 2013 equivalent), for 2016 they should be both at the same time. Also, regarding the features, it used to lag, but since 2011 it achieved almost feature parity (minus the addons, that are downloadable extras, like PowerQuery, PowerMaps or PowerPivot).

shellbye• 11 years ago

"A country does not have permanent friends, only permanent interests." Same to companies.

matt4711• 11 years ago

Most IBM employees in Australia use Toshiba laptops instead of Lenevo.

Nursie2• 11 years ago

When did that happen?

Wasn't that way in Perth a couple of years back, it was all Lenovo, except management were moving over to Mac as their refresh cycle came through.

nfriedly3• 11 years ago

Speaking as an IBMer, I can say that a big part of this switch is about the hardware. My ThinkPad was so unbalanced it was almost ridiculous: i7, 32gb RAM, paired with a slooooow mechanical hdd and an utterly rubbish TN display. (That and a frusturatingly bad touchpad). I prefer OS X over Windows, but only slightly, the main reason I was so adamant about switching was to get quality hardware.

agumonkey2• 11 years ago

Since the t60 days people have been screaming complaints about ThinkPads TN panels. Lenovo has been a little more listening to customers recently, I guess now even more.

TD-Linux2• 11 years ago

Most of the Thinkpad models now have fancier IPS screens as an option. For example, my W540 has a 2880x1620 IPS display.

brudgers3• 11 years ago

Better displays and SSD's have been ThinkPad options for several years now. Buying a box with spinning rust and modest display quality was a purchasing department decision. They're not manufacturing quality issues. Their imposition reflects IBM corporate culture or your department/division/team microculture.

gtk40• 11 years ago

Doesn't IBM have nicer stuff available? I have an i7, 16GB of RAM with a 3k display (but I prefer the nub, so I can't speak for touchpad quality as much) which seems to complete the package. It's the standard laptop they give developers at my job. We have the option of a Mac, but people end up using Bootcamp with frustrating experiences.

nfriedly3• 11 years ago

Yes, I now have one of the higher-end macbooks now, but my point was that Lenovo has a lot of "standard" options that are below-par and really don't have any business being in a computer in that price-range.

ksec• 11 years ago

Personally I think this is big, and now even bigger then I thought.

The largest Enterprise they had was only 25,000 Macbook a year. And IBM is 10 times the size of that order.

Most of the Enterprise I know, big or small are still very much Window based. The way Mac are getting in right now are through BYOD. However, most CIO see this as additional burden with Apple devices, and therefore most planning are still based on the Windows world.

CRM, ERP etc.. lots of business class things still are not available on Mac. Although there are alternatives, no business wants to try.

Hopefully IBM and Apple could use this chance to smooth out the quirks rolling Apple devices in Enterprise. And more company to follow.

Dont get me wrong, this isn't about getting rid of Windows. I am sure there are lots of people who enjoy Window 10. But when our company tries to switch over to Mac, we have had very little support and real world cases to based on.

P.S - Most of you working in the I.T / Computer Industry would have no problem doing so, but there are lots of industry out there who cant risk to switch even if they wanted to.

narrowrail2• 11 years ago

I'm just curious why you wouldn't simply install Windows on Apple hardware.

Nursie2• 11 years ago

In IBM's case it's because they want to reduce their reliance on MS. They have suites of IBM packages that can be installed on top of Redhat, SuSE, Ubuntu or Debian to make IBM-styled linux.

But they also have Notes etc for Mac OS now, so no need to shy away from it.

brianwawok• 11 years ago

Because osx is better than Windows 10?

UnoriginalGuy3• 11 years ago

Because Apple's drivers are insanely terrible.

Windows runs well in Parallels, but fortunately when you run Parallels you're also running either generic drivers or drivers developed by the Parallels team. Thus the experience is solid.

When you run Windows using Bootcamp you're forced to run Apple's own drivers to power a lot of things. But Apple has left their drivers buggy, unoptimized, and just bad. I think Windows has shown that with good driver support you CAN get solid battery life, but on a Macbook/Pro/Air you get terrible battery life because Apple doesn't support their own hardware going into lower power states.

I've tried to run Windows in Bootcamp, I honestly wonder if the people who constantly tell others to do so actually ever have themselves? The experience was most unpleasant, even graphics switching wasn't supported, the touchpad broke every few weeks, it ate through battery life, got extremely hot, and Apple's updates to the Bootcamp drivers took months.

I'd happily recommend running OS X and Parallels w/Windows. I'd still warn caution if your productivity relies on Bootcamp working and working well.

lukateake• 11 years ago

Please list enterprise-class software titles that are Windows only and impeding a corporate IT switch. I'm looking for some incumbents to slay. :-)

Joe8Bit• 11 years ago

If someone came up with a way of doing large scale fleet management of Mac devices (software installs, updates, rights management et al) in a vaugley similar way to the way Windows env (eg point and click) they'd make an absolutely fortune.

reirob• 11 years ago

MS Project

WorldWideWayne3• 11 years ago

SQL Server (and client tools). Sharepoint. Active Directory.

hackuser2• 11 years ago

How will this boost your business' bottom line, and boost it more than alternative investments?

Remember the costs: Not only buying new computers but buying some/many new user applications, retraining users on the OS and applications; rebuilding systems that integrated with the old platform and apps; replacing or rebuilding IT management systems that manage testing, deployment, configuration, patching, and support of thousands (or more) of computers and users; retraining or replacing much of your IT staff; testing and deploying all these things (with newly trained staff using new tools); and all the costly downtime that results from the inevitable bugs of new systems, greatly compounded by deploying all these new systems together: e.g., Why can't they print? The new OS? The new printer driver? The new printer config? The new application? The new user errors?

What does the business gain? Instead of clicking an icon on the Windows desktop, the employees click one on the Mac desktop. Then their application or browser opens and they do the same thing they did last week (except for having to be retrained to do the same task in a new way).

UnoriginalGuy3• 11 years ago

Exactly.

The popular thing to do right now is for businesses to move away from platform locked software completely. So instead of it being a "Windows Vs. Mac Vs. Linux" battle, all internal software is on the web and the desktop only runs Office/browser/email client, etc.

Now, sure, there is some software that cannot be run in a browser. But that list of software shrinks more and more as additional browser functionality is added and libraries make it easier to do complex things.

So the question is: How does this expensive Mac migration pay for itself in the short, medium to long term? And are there other avenues, like web-migration, which could have saved more?

arcosdev• 11 years ago

Just in time to enjoy the now quickly deteriorating quality of Apple's latest MacBooks!

dfc2• 11 years ago

Actual Title:(emphasis mine): "Former Apple rival IBM could become the biggest buyer of MacBooks"

Submission Guidelines Refresher:

In Submissions

Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important....Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

noondip• 11 years ago

How are they planning to manage so many computers, given that Apple provides no practical enterprise management software for OS X?

Oh, http://jobs.utah.gov/jsp/wi/utalmis/oijoborder.do;jsessionid...

    * CanHazImage * Pupet * Crankd * PlanB * Munki Required *

In other words, follow how Google manages their corp Mac fleet of "tens of thousands",

https://github.com/google/macops

https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/managing-macs-googl...

batbomb• 11 years ago

Jamf is the usual solution

stephenr3• 11 years ago

How is profile manager + remote desktop (using the 'install package' or 'run script' functionality) not capable?

jameshart• 11 years ago

IBM makes enterprise endpoint management software. That's how IBM currently manages its mixed Windows/Linux/Mac desktop/laptop fleet. Adding more Macs will just be changing the mix.

* Disclaimer - I work for IBM, but not in IT or on endpoint management solutions. I am not in a position to confirm or deny the possibility IBM might be buying hundreds of thousands of Macs. My work laptop is a Thinkpad.

omarforgotpwd• 11 years ago

iOS and OS X both support a really great Mobile Device Management protocol (MDM) you can do everything you can imagine and then some, and you can even buy the device paired with the MDM server so that it's forced to use your settings and can never be unpaired.

IBM makes a front end to this MDM protocol, so they can probably use that. Or Profile Manager, which Apple includes with OS X server. See Air-watch.com for an example of what the MDM protocol allows.

brudgers3• 11 years ago

"We've got to find a way to make the overall cost the same or lower than PCs to make that happen."

That's a tall order given IBM 's existing software infrastructure, Apple's migration tooling and support staff for enterprise, and the constraints that accounting standards place on the way equal cost would have to be figured.

Calculating the charge against goodwill associated with getting 200,000 people to give up their ThinkPad keyboards is left as an exercise for the reader.

bane2• 11 years ago

I work for a small enterprise (under 2,000 people) and we get a choice of a couple different Macs (Air, Book, Pro), Dells in various configurations as well as Surface tablets.

The tech folks usually get a Mac Pro or a high-spec'd Dell (it has better specs than any Mac Laptop that's available at the moment, but is about the size and weight of a TV tray). The business guys and PMs go for the Airs and Surfaces...I'd say the Surfaces are about 2:1 to the Airs on takeup, and that's mostly because of the form factor and pen.

There's been a couple rough spots, but our leadership simply decided it was time to figure it out, and if we did, we'd be years ahead of larger enterprises, thus giving us a competitive advantage.

walshemj2• 11 years ago

So what happens when you need to seriously use excel and the Mac version falls over.

alexpersian• 11 years ago

Run it through a VM.

bane2• 11 years ago

Excel on Mac works fine, and we do some fairly sophisticated numerical modelling work.

In terms of Office, the bigger problem has been legacy Access databases. We solve this by setting up some VMs with RDP access for the Mac users. But there's also a couple Mac utilities that let you export Access tables to CSV which can then be loaded up into something sane.

A surprising number of people also use Project, Visio and OneNote and there's not really a good portable solution for those cases. I've been pushing people to use yED for portable charting (instead of Visio), OneNote is now available for Office 365, and people are finding Excel a good enough Gantt chart tool for many purposes.

Office on Mac is quite good compared to Windows, just not all of the products people expect to use are available.

The bigger picture thing is that this is going to happen and enterprises need to figure it out. Non-cross-platform applications and processes need to be abandoned. This also happens in reverse with remote Linux servers being easier to work with on Macs than via Windows (putty and winSCP sort most of the issues out, but they aren't perfect).

In my experience people really don't care about the desktop experience too much, IMHO Windows is better than OS X for most of that anyways, but they care about "getting shit done" and that means apps, and these days web-based apps. The OS just isn't that big of a factor so long as the things people need to GSD is available. They're choosing hardware and form-factor over OS and they pick the one they think will work best for them.

jebblue3• 11 years ago

IBM used to have tens of thousands of employees and not just technical people, running Linux on the desktop/laptop.

colindean• 11 years ago

IBM is wise to do so. The Thinkpad W540 that developers hired in summer 2014-summer 2015 got is terrible for Linux: graphics driver problems, the trackpad is a horrible piece of junk that wholly depresses 1mm into the body and has a texture that wears off after several weeks (most folks who have them, and there's a lot of them, carry mice instead), and they weigh a ton. A coworker just got a Thinkpad W541 and it improves on the trackpad by readding the missing thumb buttons under the spacebar.

The W530 and W520 weren't much better: they didn't have the terrible trackpads. IIRC the W520's graphics stack worked better, but that was three years ago. I helped an intern set up a W520 and it still had some issues before we got it stable. I wouldn't call myself a super expert Linux admin, but I do remember a day when I had to manually configure XFree86.

I came into IBM through acq. I'm a Mac guy these days, and was before the acq, where I'd used a HP machine with Linux when I first joined the company because there were no Macs to spare. When my pre-acq Mac couldn't run the Linux binaries I needed for work, I switched to a T420 and disliked it. I used R4x series in college and LOVED them.

I'm seeing more and more Macs around my office. We were probably 60% Thinkpads with Linux, 30% Mac, 10% Thinkpads with Windows going into 2015. I had been seeing Mac growth for a while, but it was all BYOD. Now that the deal went through, most folks up for a machine refresh are choosing Macs, mostly because that's what they own themselves. Some of the few die-hard Windows folks are even getting Macs and dual booting Windows.

Like others, I can't really comment on the purchase quantity, mostly because I'm not privvy to that information!

jbfr• 11 years ago

I work in the IBM Design Studio and all the employees have MacBook Pros. It's been working out pretty well actually, even with respect to integrating with some of IBM's legacy software that we have to deal with.

Former Apple rival IBM could become the biggest buyer of MacBooks

Related Stories