Mixed bag
That's the trend Brister wanted to get ahead of when he began looking at MacBooks one and a half years ago. "By being an open IT environment, where people can choose different ways of getting their job done, they're more productive and happier," he says. Not to mention that he was a fan of Mac technology and wasn't happy with the performance of other laptops the company had tried, including those from Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. "They were all equally bad in different ways," he says.
With the MacBook, Brister sees lower failure rates and fewer support calls, both among people already familiar with the Mac and among PC veterans once they've become accustomed to the platform. Most users are now running applications directly on Mac OS rather than using VMware's Fusion virtual machine software to run Windows on a Mac, or they're using cloud-based applications such as Google Docs.
Those who are using Fusion tell Brister that applications run better in an image on the Mac than on Lenovo hardware. Although he wishes the Mac had a docking station, a cost comparison with the PC shows that the Mac is competitively priced, he says.
However, Brister says Apple falls down in its support offerings. For instance, because the company offers no on-site service, he's forced to take units to the Apple retail store for repair or ship them to Apple. Meanwhile, employees are without a computer. "I don't want to keep spare inventory machines around that I'm paying depreciation on," he says.
Another problem is acquiring Macs for Serena's offices in Germany and France, where Apple requires the machines to be purchased in quantities of more than seven and five, respectively, which is more than those offices need. Apple is working on this problem, Brister says, but he's seen no progress in the past six months. He doesn't want those employees purchasing units at the retail store because they won't get the discounts he has negotiated, and "it would be an accounting nightmare," he says.
Brister also finds it troublesome that Apple provides no product road map, although he says that there was a time that he was warned to hold off on making a purchase because a new product was to be released the following week. "Anything we have to go on is rumors," he says, pointing to the recent release of the MacBook, which he said did not live up to some of the hearsay of quad-cores and default 4GB RAM.
At Werner, DeCanti says he believes Apple is no longer focusing energy on advancing Macintosh integration into the Windows world. For instance, while Apple has promised better integration with Active Directory, it hasn't reached a level that makes it easy to use in that environment, he says. "There are hacks that have gotten us so far, but the connectivity is fragile and hard to maintain," he says.