ChefDude

"I致e been in denial for a while, but it hit me so hard yesterday that I finally have to admit it: I知 an Apple fanboy. Once you hear my story, you値l agree that if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.

http://www.cultofmac.com/how-the-edi...-fanboy/105882

This article has a tinge of the contrived about it, but if there's any truth in it, gawd help us all

boxst

For the moment Apple is a huge money making machine with no-one else really getting a look in.

You go to an Apple Store to buy your computer / iPhone / iPad etc.. and then you can buy all the software from the App Store. You never have to enter another shop. Amazing.

If businesses start to buy Mac's then Microsoft is in lots of trouble.

Ant

Especially going by their 1/4 profits.

They're taking over

ChefDude

Servers will be the tipping point. If businesses get confidence in apple's server racks, this will trickle down to the desktop machine sales too.

IWatkins

Didn't think Apple did a serious server product? Or did I miss something? I know they do a workgroup server product but is a full on enterprise system available?

ChefDude

I'm not actually sure they're on sale anymore!



http://store.apple.com/us/product/G0GM0LL/A

I guess it's a steep market to penetrate.

tech specs from 2009
http://support.apple.com/kb/SP511?viewlocale=en_US

Markus

Apple binned their XServe rack mountable server earlier this year, and those who used them were not overly impressed.

You can run OS X Server in a VM, Apple specifically changed the EULA for SL server to state this.

Apple isn't overly interested in business, consumers are their main priority. Education does factor, but mainly only selling machines. The administration side of things isn't something they have put much effort into. It's one of the reasons why my previous employer was around for a fair while. We provided a solution where Apple had none, or a poor offering. The "Preferences" (Think AD Policies) feature of Workgroup Manager was ok, but it was limited in certain areas.
One of the big limitations was it had to run on Mac OS. The configuration utility for app required this too, however, the actual shared resource could run on any server that could handle an AFP share, so that is Windows server (prior to 2008 you could use their Services For Macintosh, then, and now, GroupLogic's ExtremeZIP is the best solution out there), *nix with netatalk, Netware with, umm, some weirdly named thing, and of course a Mac server.

This was a big advantage to our clients, as they tended to have a non mac based infrastructure, so being able to host our share on a windows server really appealed to them.

Also look at iPhone configuration utility. It's ok, but it is lacking some things I would want in a business level phone lockdown utility, for example, disable use of the phone, or create a blacklist and whitelist of phone numbers. Complete control over what apps can be run (the new B2B system might allow that though). They are getting better, but they still need more.

They could come up with great business solutions if they really wanted to, but as said earlier, I don't think they are too bothered. They like that companies buy Macs and that you can hook them into an AD environment, but beyond that, they are "meh, whatever".

Hanley

Wonder who he's talking about?

Coffin Dodger

EFA

ChefDude

CD, your 12 year old son has hacked your account!!

ChefDude

Coffin Dodger

Feckin school holidays. I'll give him a slap when I get home

mike1210

I had no probs with older XServe's running Tiger and Leopard. Newer ones running SL were a different matter. Very unstable and sporadic crashing. External people I spoke to had to stop SL server upgrades as they were too unreliable.

The desktop SL though was tidy and new features were great for corporate places. Intergrated VPN, Exchange support (worth the price alone for my Uni) and much better AD binding engine.

Mac mini servers we have, have been OK but this isn't really a "server" platform TBH.

The support for server VM's is tidy but we havent tried that as yet.