Ditch your Macs, Dell tells EMC staff Staff at EMC who go out into the world to meet customers have been told their Apple Macs aren't allowed to come with them. Amid Dell's looming takeover of EMC, an edict has been issued insisting that Dell customers must only ever see Dell laptops during meetings and consulting engagements, EMC insiders have told The Register …
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From my experience, for research purposes, it is possible to get OSX to play nicely on a non mac x86 machine if you are strict with your hardware shopping list.
However, as you mention, one downside is licencing, the other is updates - if an exploit is patched and sent as an official update, the hackintosh kernels don't phone home to Cupertino and so don't neccessarily get the same updates.
Some years ago there was a lawsuit in the US, arising from fiddling with the brand markings of sports shoes. As I recall it, somebody under contract with one of the big manufacturers was wearing shoes made by another, then fiddling them to look like the first one's. I think that it was the second manufacturer that sued.
As for me, neither Apple nor Dell is offering me endorsement money to be soon in public with its goods. Until that happens, I'll use what I use.
"As for me, neither Apple nor Dell is offering me endorsement money to be soon in public with its goods. Until that happens, I'll use what I use."
Do you work for Dell / EMC public facing team?
if yes, you WILL use it or find another Job. If not, your statement is utterly pointless.
They do it all the time on TV, covering the Apple logo with a grey sticker. It just makes you go "Nice MacBook Pro, logo's covered so Apple must have said No'.
It would be obvious once MacOS fires up anyway.
What they should do is say 'You can use your own machine but we'd rather you carry a Dell, here's a healthy discount on an XPS or Precision'.
If the job can be done as efficiently using a cheap Windows laptop, show your staff how to do it. If they can't do it, ask yourself why.
Personally, I have little tolerance for support staff who insist on running "something special". I'll give some freedom for more RAM and a beefier processor in order to run different VMs, but the base OS and environment on the VMs should be what the customer or end user is using. When things go wrong, support staff should be the first to spot problems because they are using those services to do their jobs.
Yep. Years ago my brother in law formed a company to do web design. His partner persuaded him to buy (bil was putting up the VC) Mac G3s because " they were the best".
He didn't seem to have considered that anything they designed would be viewed mostly on PCs and that he would need to "sanity check" everything on a PC anyway. He was convinced that the software they were using "was only available on the Mac" and was nonplussed (I'd always wondered what that looked like) when I showed him that not only was I running that very product on my old XP machine, I was running a better version than he had.
And I lost count of the times he arrived on my doorstep begging to use my "crappy" XP machine to do something because he either didn't have the software to do it himself or his machine was back in at CompUSA waiting for "the Mac guy" to show up - he worked only on Tuesdays and only then if he felt like it.
And then the G3 power supply quit and he was faced with the standard Mac servicing fee hereabouts: 1 limb. I stupidly offered to open it up and take a look and got a first hand up-close-and-personal close encounter with the "better design". Suffice to say I wouldn't own a Mac on a bet afterwards.
I was shopping in Richer Sounds a few years ago when it was the UK's best high street seller of audio kit. There was a bloke in there asking for their worst set of speakers. He was a recording engineer and he wanted an artist to hear how his/her music would be played by a typical consumer.
I just did a little moonlighting job tidying up the cables behind someone's Home Entertainment system because they were having an argument with the cleaner over them not sweeping under the spaghetti (yeah, he's a bit of an arsehole). Anyway, they'd spent £9k down at the Sony shop back in 2010, DVD player, top-of-the-line 5+1 Home Cinema amp & mahoosive speakers, big plasma screen job.
I had to ask him who he'd pissed off down there, because the amp had never been wired in at all and the speaker cables had not a single clamp or screw mark on them.
"You didn't notice that your £9k surround sound system sounded like an couple of earbuds sat in coffee cans?"
"No, the guy from the shop told me it was all good to go."
"And the fact that the remote volume control didn't move the knob on the amplifier?"
"Is it supposed to do that?"
"And that the scary bits in Aliens you didn't hear the slavering beasties sneaking up on you from behind and breathing down your neck?"
"I don't watch those kinds of films. I just watch the news mainly, and the wife watches the odd Bollywood."
*facepalm*
*realisation... money to burn*
"Well, it's all working now. That'll be £500 please."
A company supplied system from Dell also has a custom OS image on it and is pretty locked down regarding what you can and can't install or run. Local admin status for your workstation is severely crippled if it is granted at all. A non standard image will have a lot of issues trying to connect to corporate via VPN. But with that many employees for the under appreciated and understaffed IT support team to service, the rules and policies are understandable if not enjoyable.
The funny thing is that more than a few Dell Sales engineers are sharp enough to know the workarounds to at least run the OS they prefer and are able to install and run tools they need...Its a tribal knowledge thing and I sure won't spoil it...but for the new EMCers that actually hang around, a quick question over drinks at Tech Summit to the right folks will yield interesting options.
"A company supplied system from Dell also has a custom OS image on it and is pretty locked down regarding what you can and can't install or run. Local admin status for your workstation is severely crippled if it is granted at all. "
Luckily, Dell makes it very easy to change HDDs. One with the corporate image, one with your choice of OS. Same laptop, two completely different personalities! :-)
Compaq did the same thing to Tandem Computers when they bought us, and it was field staff first followed by internal. We were located down Stevens Creek Blvd from Apple and besides the green screens for our mainframe systems, we were mostly an Apple shop so it was pretty wrenching for all of us.
No matter the power of Dells being offered to EMC staff, these alternative computing devices cannot honestly be considered as " nice replacement kit" when they still run Microsoft Windows operating System (OS) software, which is probably the reason these EMC folk chose Apple in first place.
The fact that Dell has placed it's complete being and soul in the hands of Microsoft, for Server OS, Mobile (Wow!) and most likely storage software shows that they have no regard for the most advanced, efficient/high performance , reliable and secure EMC solutions based on Linux, and for Apple iOS/Android Mobile platforms.
Denial is not a river in Egypt, it is the disconnect from reality being exhibited by Dell in their servile relations with Redmond.
Sad and sic.
I really don't see a problem here. All vendors have a preference, their own deals for notebooks or happen to be manufacturers themselves; if Apple acquired EMC, I doubt they'd leave them using Dell/Lenovo notebooks, if the shoe was on the other foot.
Besides, for an industry that's supposed to be technical, I really don't see what the fuss is about using a PC from the fruity company that has the same guts as your average PC notebook, yet costs four times as much and runs a derivative environment that's based on a 50+ year old OS, with a silly and superfluous amount of GUI animations that makes me dizzy, everytime I see it.
Every Apple owner I know complains, after a year or so, that their Mac is "running slow" and it's off to the Apple Store, who will more than happily extort £100+ from them, to "fix the problem". The hang-up with anyone who moans about Windows/Linux is that they're a fashion victim - everyone's got an expensive PC (Apple Mac) so I should not feel left out.
As a Mac-touting pointy-haired Senior Manager at EMC, I can confirm that nothing has been said to anyone about ditching their Mac and that all of this is pure speculation. Only Sales and Pre-Sales are currently being issued with new Windows 7 Dell laptops.
I would also point out that this isn't really a suitable forum for this discussion.
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