Glorious wrote:the wrote:The really big turn off is that some of Apple's remarks toward user complaints have not been encouraging. Due to poor sales, Apple killed of the rack mounted Xserve line half a decade ago with little resistance but Apple's recent rise in enterprise usage has had some user interested in seeing that line return.
Apple figured out that it was better to get into Corporations from the top-down instead of the bottom-up, to the degree they want to get into that market at all.
To be clear, instead of presenting themselves as a total solution with servers, services and corporate-oriented configurability for every user, they just position themselves as having the coolest and most desirable devices to certain users.
Why? Because when a top executive wants the newest iphone, guess what he gets even if the standard is blackberry and blackberry ONLY. Oh, right, he gets an iphone.
This isn't hypothetical, it's my Fortune 500 company and many others like it I've witnessed personally.
Why should Apple compete for the corporate space when by ignoring it entirely they get the best possible inroad to the premium users they might actually want?
Agreed and I've seen it first hand as well.
So why should Apple compete for the corporate space? I wouldn't even say compete as it is more the necessity of support. When the technology is able to trickle down from the executives to the average corporate end user it has to be managed some how. I see the Xserve ultimately staying dead with Apple's ultimate being just software solution. All they'd need to do is better integrate iOS and Macs into Microsoft's AD. iOS integration into LDAP could also be improved too.
The idea of the Xserve coming back has just been an idea bounced around old OS X Server admins who had to deal supporting the exec toys without their own shiny Apple rack mount toys.
Flatland_Spider wrote:the wrote:There are really only two reasons to go with Apple vs. hackintosh: ease of setup and warranty/support.
If you're throwing those two out the window, why bother? Picky hardware, hard setup, and no support describes lots of different alternative operating systems, and I don't have to resort to piracy to run them. Some of them are even better at being a Unix then OS X is.
Simple: price and performance. For the enthusiast who knows how to slap together some hardware and edit some files to get an OS to install, putting together a hackintosh is trivial. And unlike the other Unix-like systems, you can run major 3rd party applications which is kind of a big deal. That means access to tools like Final Cut Pro and Photoshop even though they wouldn't be supported.
Flatland_Spider wrote:the wrote:Due to poor sales, Apple killed of the rack mounted Xserve line half a decade ago with little resistance but Apple's recent rise in enterprise usage has had some user interested in seeing that line return.
Xserve is not coming back. You might have a point except Linux exists, and OS X integrates into Unix networks nicely. Linux and a couple of Dell servers will serve OS X users nicely. Apple has its niche as a consumer company, and they do that well.
The problem is that their consumer iOS devices are finding their way into the enterprise environment and those don't have good AD or LDAP integration. Long term I see this as a software problem Apple will eventually resolve via separate management software and an iOS update. The Xserve will remain dead as Apple has no motivation to get back into the enterprise hardware market even if some old timer admins would like it.
smiley face not wink
