this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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The number of people who will leave windows over this stuff is trivial.
Apple has practically zero presence in enterprise (where one company can have 60,000 computers), and also practically zero in SMB.
Business software is written for windows. Even trying to use a Mac with the most basic office software is challenging - even if the exact same product exists in both.
People aren't flocking anywhere when their work machines are windows. Damn few people can be bothered with learning 2 ways to do things, especially when they're not interested in computing. I've been at this since before Mac existed, and while I can use OSX or iOS, I'm not wasting my limited learning time on something I rarely use, and can't really integrate with much of the rest I use.
Now let's look at some other arenas:
Legal - they all use a small set of document apps (which until recently was wordperfect), and some legal database apps. None of the database apps run on Mac as far as I've seen.
Engineering - there are practically no CAD apps for Mac. Some do exist, but again, even the ones that are on both Windows and Mac are problematic at best on Mac, typically unable to integrate with the back end.
Most people don't have the bandwidth to learn a new system just to avoid the shitty part of Windows (which only affects home users anyway). It takes less effort/time to figure out how to mitigate the Windows issues than to deal with a completely new system, that will also have issues integrating with other stuff they already have.
And they're not even trying as far as I'm concerned. Windows is dead easy to integrate something like device management software into or tie into central authentication or all sorts of enterprise goodies.
Apples enterprise software and integration is complete and utter trash. The it just works "magic" only applies to consumer things, the magic is gone the second you even think about doing anything remotely enterprise.
Got an Active Directory you want to integrate macOS with? Good luck. Want to use an apple alternative instead because you think it'll be better? Better get a time machine. Device management? Better get ready to jump through hoop after hoop for a maybe half working solution.
I always say, Windows is an enterprise OS with consumer features and MacOS is a consumer OS with (half assed) enterprise "features".
Yea, Apple very briefly started making effort to support enterprise in the 90's, but quickly gave up the effort. I don't remember it well, it may have been related to the PowerPC stuff they were doing with IBM (IBM dropped their support of the PowerPC project, unfortunately).
Wow, I've been in IT for a long time, and this is the best way I've ever seen to describe the difference.
Eh, it kind of depends imo. Apple's MDM is pretty great, they just don't offer any real alternatives to AD, Exchange, etc. and integrating Macs into a Windows environment definitely does make some of the "it just works" magic evaporate quickly.
For a small business willing to go all in and do everything the Apple way I can see it being quite attractive though. Managed Apple IDs through Apple Business Manager for use with iCloud, Automated Device Enrolment with zero-touch provisioning straight out of the box and a robust MDM solution like Jamf make for a pretty neat package. It's just not one that will appeal to every business, especially large ones or ones with a desire or requirement to keep things on-prem and in-house.
Apple definitely has a very long way to go to become any kind of real competition to Microsoft in the enterprise market, but with MS pushing more and more cloud stuff themselves (O365, Azure) I reckon it's only a matter of time before they start neglecting things like AD and Exchange. And more people using Apple at home means employees and decision makers will start wanting to use that stuff at work too, for better or worse.
I'm not saying Apple will dethrone MS or anything, in fact I don't think a future with Apple being a significant player in the enterprise market is particularly likely. But I think if MS screws up enough and Apple play their cards right, it's not impossible.
The issue in that whole proposition lies within this one single sentence
Nowadays, practically all companies are moving towards either SaaS, or in house web services. The pandemic has killed native enterprise apps, for better or for worse.
Windows only has decent presence because it's reasonably easy to integrated Windows machines into corporate structures. The moment Apple taps into that market, it's all over. We've seen that with Google basically ruining the school market for Microsoft by doing that, and it will happen again.
Counter point: I just got a new MacBook at work. It's an all windows enterprise. There are like 10 of us that got macs. The setup for them is kludgy because all of the tooling is for windows.
That said, Microsoft office and one drive is so much better to use because the "integration" isn't there...and it works like I want it to work.
It's hilarious to me that they've made their offering worse with all of their efforts to integrate 365 and onedrive into everything.
I think if apple just did a little towards the enterprise they'd take chunks of market share. Like having a macpro with a pic/cac card reader would be a good start.
Add to this lack of CUDA support, which is what pretty much all CAD runs on. Apple's Metal may be interesting, but that doesn't matter if the apps don't port to it.
It'll be especially interesting to see how AI plays out. If NVIDIA ends up winning (they're currently way ahead), it'll be the same issue as with engineering, but in more disciplines.
Oh, yea!
The other area I meant to mention related to engineering is external device control.
Things like specialized controllers for things like CNC, many of which won't even run on NT-based systems, and still have to run Windows 9x to have the DOS-level hardware control.
Do you know if they work at all on Linux? Just wondering what the path forward there is.
And yeah, we had an old Windows system with our pick and place machine because it really needed that specific version of Windows. I'm sure the same is true for all kinds of specialized hardware chugging along to this day in factories near you!
CUDA and AI stuff is very much Linux focused. They run better and faster on Linux, and the industry puts their efforts into Linux. CNC and 3D printing software is mostly equal between Linux and Windows.
The one thing Linux lacks in this area is CAD support from the big players. FreeCAD and OpenCAD exist, and they work very well, but they do miss a lot of the polish the proprietary software has. There are proprietary CAD solutions for Linux, but they're more industry specific and not general purpose like AutoCAD.
Good to hear!
My 3d printer works, but I wasn't sure about CNC because of my experience with pick-n-place machines having poor support. It seems the more industrial you go, the fewer options you have for support.
Well those people will just be ok with windows then. Heck, some people still run windows xp.
Right, that's because since, well, NeXT acquisition they very openly abandoned that whole area and turned to marketing their stuff as home stuff and fashionable toys. That may change in future, like everything else.
The funny part is - Apple doesn't need a full transition to be an option. They just need to make their system more and more usable (cutting cost and cutting their usual bullshit too, so maybe not too soon) for similar things over time. Then some small businesses may start using it, then bigger ones, maybe also in niche roles (like it is even now with audio production and publishing, I think? not sure, I'm not an Apple user).
Apple may participate significantly in the Wine project to change this. They are a big company with resources.
Apple also does have the weight to persuade the developers of mainstream CAD apps port them to MacOS. I don't think technical difficulties are the most important ones there. It's just that there were no reason to do it. Like no agreement, no common strategy, no deals. Apple wasn't interested in it because it's not their intended market, developers weren't interested in it because it's a small market.
There were differences in UX between any pair of a thing which lost popularity and a thing to which the former lost it. I'm not sure this is a good argument.
Also they can try playing the long game and expect more users in 5-10 years, not right now.