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I administer approximately 30 macbooks. 2018s with a few 2017s still in there. They're mostly unreliable garbage. In particular, zoom.us, our teleconferencin

by x0x0 7y ago

I administer approximately 30 macbooks. 2018s with a few 2017s still in there. They're mostly unreliable garbage. In particular, zoom.us, our teleconferencing solution, crashes them regularly with spewed messages about GPU stuff in console. We're about at the point of running windows vms so my salespeople can have a reliable conferencing solution. The keyboards also do not hold up at all. I've gotten into a shouting match at an apple store after buying their "warranty" and learning that a keyboard repair would mean the laptop would disappear for a week. That's not a warranty; that's some Dell consumer-grade bullshit. I basically had to buy a floater laptop on the spot. Two of the laptops, including my cofounder, have keys that don't work, but they're too busy to deal with Apple's bs to get them repaired. I'm aware that after the WSJ embarrassed them the wait is supposedly shorter, but it's not anything reasonable. They should be able to do a keyboard swap in an hour while you wait. Their busted ass OS also has automatically (!!!) disabled Filevault, refused to turn it back on, including spending 6 hours on technical support and an OS wipe. We had to take that laptop into the mac store for them to service. Folks, don't wait on installing an mdm -- just because you turn Filevault on, it can silently disable itself.

pfranz 7y ago
My company uses zoom.us on Win/Mac/Linux. Out of necessity, I also use TeamViewer, NoMachine, and occasionally Skype, Slack, and often just end up phoning them. I can only assume each needs deep integration into the OS because they all have problems. With zoom.us, I've had black screens (when trying to record?), keyboard input problems (where only alpha-numeric characters worked and other characters sent garbage), the mouse would stop working when certain applications got focus, and audio/video problems. These were mostly on Windows--I believe the black screen was on Linux. Screen sharing software also doesn't play well with each other or I imagine other software that messes with audio/video. zoom.us does seem to scale and perform better than the other solutions. I'm not sure it's a great representative of how good the OS is. Apple's keyboards used to be excellent. After the new keyboards came out a few years ago they've been delicate (I've come around on my opinion about how they are to use--but I'm still not a fan of the layout). Replacing them is also a nightmare. So far a keyboard cover has seemed to not have me baby it and prevented a repeat of any issues.
paulryanrogers 7y ago
Is there a PC laptop vendor you would recommend?
- cosmie 7y ago
  I've worked at a company that had Dell ProCare[1]. If you have issues, they'll send a technician onsite for a same-day or next-day repair. I've seen everything from keyboards to screens to entire mainboards get swapped out on the spot by technicians. For consumer grade stuff, I'm not a fan of Dell. But their business laptops and support services are solid, from what I've seen. I haven't experienced any of the other vendors, but any vendor with a business line (such as HP or Lenovo) have similar support services. And just as critical: they design their business laptops with that need in mind. If you pay for a service level that includes on-site support, very few issues are un-repairable by a field technician. And they even make access to things like the hard drive easy, since corporations don't like to relinquish control of potentially sensitive business data. Apple offers enterprise support[2] (not sure if that's an indication that the service is priced out of the SMB range) with similar onsite services. But their machines aren't exactly designed to be easily repaired. So if an Apple Store would have to send it off to a repair depot, I doubt a field technician would be able to do much more. [1] https://www.dellemc.com/en-us/services/support-services/prosupport-client-suite.htm#accordion0 https://www.dellemc.com/en-us/services/support-services/pros... [2] https://support.apple.com/applecare-enterprise-service https://support.apple.com/applecare-enterprise-service

by x0x0 7y ago

pfranz 7y ago

My company uses zoom.us on Win/Mac/Linux. Out of necessity, I also use TeamViewer, NoMachine, and occasionally Skype, Slack, and often just end up phoning them. I can only assume each needs deep integration into the OS because they all have problems. With zoom.us, I've had black screens (when trying to record?), keyboard input problems (where only alpha-numeric characters worked and other characters sent garbage), the mouse would stop working when certain applications got focus, and audio/video problems. These were mostly on Windows--I believe the black screen was on Linux. Screen sharing software also doesn't play well with each other or I imagine other software that messes with audio/video. zoom.us does seem to scale and perform better than the other solutions. I'm not sure it's a great representative of how good the OS is. Apple's keyboards used to be excellent. After the new keyboards came out a few years ago they've been delicate (I've come around on my opinion about how they are to use--but I'm still not a fan of the layout). Replacing them is also a nightmare. So far a keyboard cover has seemed to not have me baby it and prevented a repeat of any issues.

paulryanrogers 7y ago

Is there a PC laptop vendor you would recommend?

cosmie 7y ago
I've worked at a company that had Dell ProCare[1]. If you have issues, they'll send a technician onsite for a same-day or next-day repair. I've seen everything from keyboards to screens to entire mainboards get swapped out on the spot by technicians. For consumer grade stuff, I'm not a fan of Dell. But their business laptops and support services are solid, from what I've seen. I haven't experienced any of the other vendors, but any vendor with a business line (such as HP or Lenovo) have similar support services. And just as critical: they design their business laptops with that need in mind. If you pay for a service level that includes on-site support, very few issues are un-repairable by a field technician. And they even make access to things like the hard drive easy, since corporations don't like to relinquish control of potentially sensitive business data. Apple offers enterprise support[2] (not sure if that's an indication that the service is priced out of the SMB range) with similar onsite services. But their machines aren't exactly designed to be easily repaired. So if an Apple Store would have to send it off to a repair depot, I doubt a field technician would be able to do much more. [1] https://www.dellemc.com/en-us/services/support-services/prosupport-client-suite.htm#accordion0 https://www.dellemc.com/en-us/services/support-services/pros... [2] https://support.apple.com/applecare-enterprise-service https://support.apple.com/applecare-enterprise-service