I read this article 20 years ago.
It’s got the same energy as the “year of the Linux desktop” meme. I think that the mobile space will be Apple-dominated first, then laptops will come later as the PC market naturally shrinks and starves off less-profitable players à la the current tablet market.
I'm guessing there's a bit of source bias here. I'll buy that Windows won't be dominant in 10 years, but defaulting to Apple doesn't seem backed by the data presented.
Yea, most enterprises that I know of are looking at VDI. I don't think Apple has made any effort in that area?
Apple won't dominate the corporate space because then they would have to support the corporate space. They know if they do that their products will be common, and they couldn't charge the premium they do. Then the people that demand corporate support their Apple products wouldn't be rebels sticking it to The Man. Would doctors and C-Level wannabes really feel special if they didn't have to throw their weight around to get IT to accept Macs? If that common, dirty, IT troll just sauntered up from the basement with a fully supported Macbook Air ready to go, it would take all the "I feel SPECIAL" out of the experience. And that is what Mac users pay for.
Not necessarily Apple being dominant, but the only thing that you need is a Web browser and no one will give a shit what you run that on, Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS
Unlikely....MS Office is still the default for many enterprises today. 365 Office online version is not convenient. OSX version is deliberately made worse to entice people to use Windows
Microsoft has done an excellent job achieving parity between Mac and Windows by making the Windows version worse, as well.
Google Docs is fast becoming the standard office suite in a lot of organizations.
Maybe for newer organisations.
But not for large oranisations. And when some jobs depend on creating the shiniest powerpoint presentation in the world, MS Office is unlikely to go away for now.
some jobs depend on creating the shiniest powerpoint presentation in the world
Basically all consulting everywhere.
I hope so. Competition would make Windows a better product. Most of innovation that Windows has had in the last 10 years it's all about getting telemetry and adding ads.
It would be good if the change was towards Linux, but it seems more likely the transition will be towards an increasingly restrictive Android, reflecting how phones have become people's primary computing devices, so I'm not looking forward to it.
My guess is the future will just be a subscription service for everything.
With the push to SaaS for so many enterprise apps you have a lot less lock in for windows as an OS.
I really hope this will not be the case.
It's a real shit show for a small business to correctly setup their MDM and account sync. One of the hardest parts is getting those shitty devices into the Apple registry, i.e. connecting the device with a Business (Account).
Unless Apple drops the price of their devices by at least a third, it's not really going to happen.
Another thing to consider is that Jamf will certainly not be dominating the Apple MDM management solution arena in a decade either.
Companies with a mostly win estate with win infra, aren't happy with paying another $40 per user, per year for Jamf and Intune will be making up a lot of ground for a one shop solution, even if management is not as featured or complex as what Jamf offers.
The bigger problems Apple has are their enterprise device and user management, and the fact that many businesses are still reliant on Windows-only software.
Most companies I've worked for buy machines that usually aren't much cheaper than Apple equivalents, at least in terms of MSRP, despite the quality often being worse. My work-provided 2022 HP Z-Book 15 is more expensive as configured than my personal M2 14" MacBook Pro, and is still a shittier machine in just about every objective (and subjective) way I can think of. This is because enterprises typically buy business class laptops like Lattitudes and ThinkPads rather than lower cost (and less durable) consumer oriented machines. That said, it is not uncommon for IT departments at large enterprises to pay well under MSRP for these machines when buying in bulk.
Sticker price isn't that big a factor in enterprise in my experience. For one thing, Dell, HP, and Lenovo's enterprise PC lines are more expensive than their consumer lines, so the difference isn't all that big. Also, there have been many studies showing that Macs offer a lower TCO than Windows PCs.
I can see this happening, though it will vary widely by industry for sure. I've been working in roughly 50/50 Mac/PC offices for over a decade now. Users like Macs, Apple has good enterprise management and security features, and Microsoft is kind of shitting the bed with their cloud migrations. Microsoft lives by inertia and backwards compatibility, and they're throwing away that advantage by making these transitions difficult.
I would love to use Linux on my work PC but our IT is too lazy to figure out how to put their corporate spyware on it.
As someone that both runs Linux at home as a daily driver and runs an infrastructure and ops team for a company.
The threats against the two are totally different and modern businesses need things like detection and response capabilities. Most of which don’t have Linux desktop counterparts.
I used Linux for my work PC for a year and had endless problems. If it was my personal pc that would be fine but I was wasting time that I should have been using to complete my work, instead spending that time debugging constantly changing problems
Funny, that's my daily experience using corporate windows boxes.
I think you're born either able to use Linux trouble free or able to use Windows trouble free
Mine has been super smooth as a workstation for 7 years. But I think that is the fragmentation issue with Linux. I chose a distro based off of a corporate one and random dude uses Hannah Montana Linux expecting same results.
True, the solutions people would give to my problems almost always involved installing a new disro, and usually it was a different distro in each answer
This is happening in my workplace. Almost all new hires request a Mac over windows
Would Linux not be a better call? Both upfront and maintenance cost would be much lower without question.
BuT mACs ArE s0 pReTtY
In practice not really. Linux is great on servers or specialized workstations, but for general end users it just doesn’t work out. I could get into why, but it essentially boils down to support and compatibility.
I migrated our company from Windows to RedHat and Macs, but I wouldn’t put macOS on a server* nor would I put RHEL on a sales guy’s laptop.
*except things like build servers.
Annecodotally I have run it for 7 years including high end CAD. it has been much more stable and predictable than Windows.
I just installed Mint on my personal desktop. So far it's pretty solid and I'm not missing anything from windows. A little bit of glitchiness but not bad. And while I'm a developer, I'm not exactly a Linux power user - outside of basic directory commands, I have to Google anything.
All I'm saying is from the end user perspective it's fine other than Firefox tabs crash on me from time to time. Idk about from a provisioning or management standpoint.
I'd love to. Personally I use CAD software that doesn't have a native Linux option or (good) FOSS alternative. Also, there's a lot of work done in Excel. No way my company is going to find a transition away from Windows to be attractive.
The cost of the OS itself is insignificant.
You're still paying for the hardware, still paying for warranties, still paying for support, and most importantly, still paying for IT staff. The cheapest platform is generally going to be the one that requires the least support staff to manage.
IBM has found that Macs are significantly cheaper in the long run, owing to increased productivity and reduced support costs. See https://www.computerworld.com/article/3452847/ibm-mac-users-are-happier-and-more-productive.html
And they get to choose? Never worked for a business where that was true.
It really depends on the position and the business. If you directly create value it’s pretty easy to make the ask, and they’ll probably say yes. Some businesses however are too burdened with vendor lock-in or lacking IT skills to make it happen.
Let’s see. I work at a huge corporation (tens of thousands employees each with his own laptop). Until now: only windows, currently since a few years HP Elitebooks (the suck completely if you need a little bit power) and optionally some zBooks.
Some months ago they introduced MacBooks as another option. But with less support and some things a bit more complicated as the corporation completely relies on the AD user management.
Unfortunately we have a ton of custom made software applications or specialized software which - of course - run only on windows. So currently, the MacBooks are only an option for the typical Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel user.
I don’t see this being transferred to complete Mac compatibility within the next 10 years. Probably step by step (we just started using Codebeamer as our Requirements Engineering tool, which is completely web based. That’s nice. :)
But that’s just the first step. We‘ll see in a few years.
Isn't apple working on a WINE fork to run windows apps on mac OS?
My work uses a mix of Microsoft Office and LibreOffice on our machines. I doubt the latter will become an industry standard anytime soon, but I was honestly surprised to see them using it.
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