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> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me. This is true in business/enter
by thewebguyd 5mo ago
> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.
This is true in business/enterprise IT also. Any big company that's done a switch, or at least offered an employee choice, almost immediately saw a huge drop in help desk workload from mac users.
Legacy win32 apps aside, it's baffling to me that Windows is still the dominant share of computers issued to employees at nearly every non-tech company.
- infecto 5mo agoPart of that reason is Microsoft office is a third class citizen on macOS. Edit: Not sure why this would get downvoted. Weird. It absolutely lags behind windows version of the products by years. Excel did not get ribbon key shortcuts until 6 months ago. It’s a pretty terrible experience for most power users.
- bdamm 5mo agoHow? My experience with Excel, Word, Powerpoint, event Teams, is that they generally work fine. This is unlike the situation from e.g. 20 years ago, when you could barely get work done due to all the crashes, but that is a very distant memory now. There was a brief time during 2019 when Teams on Mac was kind of awful, but that's long ago in the past as well. My biggest complaint these days is that Teams uses far too much CPU when I'm sharing my screen. But other than that, everything seems to be ok.
- mountain_peak 5mo agoPeople might not remember, but Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were all released for the Macintosh before Windows. Back then, the Macintosh versions were 1st-class citizens and (and you mention), Windows versions were a buggy mess. Having used versions on both for years, I'd say there was a "dark" time around 2011 when the macOS versions were lagging badly feature-wise, but they're pretty much on-par today. My biggest complaint is that you can't turn off the ridiculous animations in macOS versions (e.g. moving between cells in Excel). That makes the entire suite "feel" slower when in reality, the macOS version could easily be just as responsive as the Windows suite.
- storus 5mo agoThey still aren't on-par today, in MacOS Excel you can't do some charts you can do on Windows.
- infecto 5mo agoLack of parity. It’s getting better but my classic example is ribbon shortcuts for Excel. They did not exist until something like 6 months ago.
- havaloc 5mo agoWhat's sad is that in my experience supporting 80 users, Word et al work with fewer issues on Mac. The stack integration on Windows is fine, until it isn't.
- pseudosavant 5mo agoI can't speak for Teams (that is just an Electron app), but all of the legacy Mac Office apps are still a subset of the capabilities of their Windows counterparts. If you can't tell the difference between Google Sheets and Excel, you probably won't notice the difference between Mac and Windows Excel. But if you are in some role like finance where you spend a ton of time in Excel, the gaps become obnoxiously noticeable. Especially because VBA is completely non-existent on Mac.
- a1o 5mo agoI don’t know why you are getting downvoted, agree with you, Microsoft Office is awful on macOS, it just doesn’t work the same, has awful integration with Sharepoint (and Sharepoint in MS Teams and OneDrive), and continuously forgets its properly licensed and complains with a big message that it isn’t licensed - sometimes downgrading to read only. It’s just a terrible thing to use.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ramgine 5mo agoAnecdotal but I’m a sysadmin in the IT dept in my rather larger company and have zero issues with office on my daily driver m2 Mac Pro. On my Dell precision running win 11 I constantly have issues with outlook, teams, etc.
- infecto 5mo agoCannot speak to bugs but purely functionality. Historically speaking the macOS products lag by years.
- prmoustache 5mo agoMany companies nowadays only provide the most basic office license with only web access to office apps for most of their employees. So for those that puts all OS at the same level. Having said that software lagging in versions/features doesn't mean users are less efficient using the older tool. Are todays office users more efficient in word and excel with the ribbon than they were using office97 a few decades ago? Has it been measured? I know I am still lost whenever I need to find something on the ribbon.
- infecto 5mo agoSure if you are a basic user it’s no issue. Basic being someone using 1% of the feature set. The moment you start developing any skills in office there is an actual difference in the product. Like I already said, MacOS did not have ribbon shortcuts until a few months ago. That’s simply insulting that such a core function for users would be missing.
- prmoustache 5mo agoThe ribbon is a UI providing a way to access functions, not a core function in itself.
- infecto 5mo agoAre we arguing if ribbon shortcuts are not a core function?? I don’t know why we are even going down this road but… for any user that has moderate level of use in excel, the keyboard shortcuts are used so heavily that they absolutely become a core function to the use of the platform. Power users in finance may even go to the extreme of popping out certain key caps on their keyboard to reduce mistakes and maximize their efficiency.
- bigstrat2003 5mo agoIt's much harder to manage Macs than Windows machines, especially if you are a Windows shop already (which most are). Microsoft is working on eroding the quality of their software, but for now the management tools they offer for Windows clients are simply unparalleled in the Mac world.
- thewebguyd 5mo agoSure, if you're still on-prem AD or hybrid. For orgs that have already moved to full Intune/EntraID, managing windows via Intune is still years behind a good macOS MDM. InTune still feels half baked.
- splitstud 5mo ago[dead]
- vondur 5mo agoNot really the case any longer. JAMF is pretty easy to use and it's way better to work with compared to Intune, which to me feels half baked compared to something like on Prem AD/GP/SCCM.
- Drunk_Engineer 5mo agoEnterprise Mac still has occasional problems -- mainly due to Microsoft crapware IT departments insist on installing.
- kristianp 5mo agoMicrosoft or giant piles of poo like crowdstrike?
- mywittyname 5mo agoPor qué no los dos?
- baq 5mo agoAsk serious security folks at serious orgs if they can afford to not run crowdstrike regardless of OS.
- michaelt 5mo agoCan any serious security folks at serious orgs confirm they can't afford not to run crowdstrike?
- mikestorrent 5mo agoCrowdstrike is not what is slowing down my Mac. Web pages in Firefox that somehow take up 1GB of RAM are.
- 5mo ago
- elorant 5mo agoThere’s nothing baffling to it. Windows PCs are upgradable. Apple won’t even give you a PCie slot on its $10k mac studio ultra to install a better network card or whatever.
- robertlagrant 5mo agoMost people have laptops now, in my experience of large corporations.
- recursive 5mo agoI got the RAM upgraded in my work laptop.
- airstrike 5mo agoLast time I requested that, they just swapped my laptop for a newer one with more RAM
- Hugsbox 5mo agoOn very rare occasions I may do that for a user, if I happen to have extra RAM on hand from - for example - a broken machine. But by and large it's just going to be a whole machine upgrade.
- cortesoft 5mo agoI haven't worked with TOO many different companies, but I have worked at a few of various sizes (from small startup to huge Fortune 100), and none of them ever provided upgrades for machines. It was always full replacements. Sometimes you would get a used machine, but they were from someone else who left, not an upgraded machine. Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?
- trimethylpurine 5mo agoMac users are consistently the highest needs users in my environment. Ymmv. Samba is still broken. Microsoft apps don't work. You can use them for Adobe. But even then, performance per dollar is poor. Adobe flies on much cheaper Windows hardware in the side by side testing we've done. I'm the Director of IT for a 160M revenue company. We allow Macs, and we support them. But I don't share your take on the benefits. I can't think of a single benefit frankly. It's a loss for the business. Oh well, it's not my money.
- grosswait 5mo agoWas that side by side comparison with all the security cruft running, because this is totally contrary to my experience with both sets of hardware managed by IT.
- trimethylpurine 5mo agoYou have to have security software on both Mac and Windows machines in an enterprise. It's required to carry insurance.
- thewebguyd 5mo agoThis reads like the last time you've evaluated is 2018. The entire office suite works great on Apple silicon with the exception of, obviously Win32 VBA macros and some PowerQuery features in Excel. As for Adobe, I'm assuming you're issuing desktops then? Because for an equivalently performant laptop with heavy Adobe workloads you are going to spend the same as a MBP on the higher end Thinkpads, or dell precisions. There's no cost savings there, really (again, unless you have everyone on desktops). If you're still domain joining macs, trying to use SCCM & GPOs, and treating them like any other windows endpoint, of course you are running into problems. Kind of a square peg/round hole situation. Not doubting your experience, but to have relatively problem free mac endpoints you have to do things differently. Maybe not worth it for every company, especially any that are super deep into Microsoft. But I can say, they've worked great for mine and we are phasing out Windows entirely, and IBM, Cisco, and SAP all had similar lower total cost of ownership & less help desk workload after introducing macs. Then again, we no longer use smb/samba, we eliminated on-prem file shares a long time ago.
- prmoustache 5mo agoA company CTO told me once that he was a linux user at home but windows was the only option from a soc2 auditing point of view as MacOs faired barely better than linux in the fleet device management area.
- vablings 5mo agoRHEL has support for SOC2 requirements. RHEL is also very nice in general
- jonathaneunice 5mo agoNot true. Macs easily pass SOC 2 audits. You'll need MDM, installed anti-virus/anti-malware, and reasonable update policies, as with any endpoint. But have passed multiple years' audits with mostly-macOS fleet.