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Apple's chance to grow as half a billion Windows 7 PCs hit EOL:
The company's enterprise credentials continue to extend. At a recent Apple-focused enterprise IT event, we encountered opinion and statistics to reinforce this point.
The point being that support for Apple technologies has become a human resources issue, and that people entering the workshop will choose to use that company's technologies if they can.
This is prompting some of the world's most influential enterprise firms to offer that choice to their employees.
Beyond HR considerations, IBM CIO Fletcher Previn points out multiple advantages Cupertino's computers offer, not least in terms of net promoter score, user experience and the actual costs of management, upgrade and support.
[...] The positive upswell in support for Apple's systems comes as around 417,000,000 Windows 7 devices (a big chunk of all Windows PCs currently in use worldwide) are about to experience Microsoft terminating support on January 14, 2020.
It's a relatively safe assumption to think that at least some tens of thousands of these PCs could now be replaced by an iPad, or even a Mac.
Why wouldn't some of these migrate to Apple's platforms, when Microsoft's fee-based extended support package costs up to $200 per device?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12 2020, @12:37AM (8 children)
When I worked for them, I got an ancient RS/6000 AIX box, 20 MHz POWER1, because we were the Unix team.
Then, when they forced everybody onto Bloatus Notes they placed an Aptiva running Windoze (additionally) on everybody's desk who wanted one. Just for fucking email.
I used the shitty AIX front end until I taught myself enough Bloatus Notes scripting to forward all incoming mail to my old vnet (Mainframe based, but forwarded into pine on my machine) email.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12 2020, @12:42AM (4 children)
AIX, the vogon poetry of unix.
Now they run redhat.
My condolence to Linux. Let's fight the good fight till ...
(Score: 3, Funny) by RamiK on Sunday January 12 2020, @01:05AM
I think that's systemd.
There it is.
compiling...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12 2020, @01:58AM (1 child)
Pretty much, it even includes a Windoze-like registry that controls a lot of operation. SystemD is an exercise in minimalism in comparison.
At least they own it. I wonder which parts of their Unices they will kill off. Keep the Linux kernel, or the AIX kernel? Keep SystemD or the ODM?
Linux isn't lost yet. And aren't a lot of us old-timers used to fighting for Linux in the 90s?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday January 12 2020, @10:33PM
It hasn't lost, but it's sitting in its corner reeling and bleeding because it's gone back to the old days where people who know it have to spend 4 hours getting even a basic installation to work through fiddling. With modern Linux installs you're wasting so much time fiddling just for basic functionality that it's not worth the hassle anymore unless you're paid to fiddle with it all day.
Jews ruined it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @02:47AM
...the fat lady sings?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12 2020, @04:31AM (1 child)
Pine is ok,
but Pine Is Not Elm.
I wrote some of that ancient AIX code when we were moving away from the AS/400. I had six RS/6000s doing distributed tasking on work I was forbidden to discuss outside the office. We didn't have email -- security risk.
At home, I ran OS/2 until IBM killed it.
Today, all my real work happens on OSX Snow Leopard on a 2009 Mac Pro (isolated, not network connected. I have a highly customized Linux DMZ for that -- not systemd. Absolutely not.) I can do this because I work for myself and I know how computers work under the hood.
Windows peaked with version 7. It's all been downhill since then.
Look, it's simple. The OS just needs to be as basic as possible and get out of the way do you can do your work without having to be bothered. Linux has the right idea, but it's too rough around the edges and the software I use doesn't run there. OSX is very much like Linux under the UI if you give it a root user account, and the UI is clean, polished and comfortable. It's the better product. Oh, by the way, Apple can just go to hell with all their newfangled cables. Data transfer isn't that hard. They're only changing it so they can make more money off the cable sales.
As far as I'm concerned, modern OS's peaked with Snow Leopard. Sure, there's a few things I like better in the newer versions, but there's far more things they changed I find bothersome. No OS is secure, so stop pretending they ever can be. (stuxnet, for example). Why do you think they have to update the OS every three days? New attack vectors, that's why. Just wall it off. Use a sacrificial machine for communications with the outside world and wipe and reinstall it a few times a year -- like changing the oil in your car of the air filters in your house. I transfer files using 32 GB SD cards. It's just like the old floppy drives, but bigger and smaller at the same time. Sure, it's less convenient, but I probably have far more control over my security than you do too.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday January 12 2020, @10:37PM
Linux was great, and Ubuntu lead the way. Then some Jews decided that the adoption of Ubuntu, being a free product, would have killed their big moneymakers and would have dropped the value of that lucrative Microsoft and Apple stock in their portfolios and trillions of offshore dark-money.
So they killed Linux by returning it to difficulty and usability in much the same way they are trying to kill free speech and deprive Americans of their own constitutional rights.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday January 12 2020, @10:52AM
You could avoid Lotta Snots at IBM if you wanted. I did for years, you just had to keep a 3270 emulator around to do the stuff via 1970s mainframe code that they'd barely managed to make partially work some of the time on Snots.