The real world, Apple…
I’m currently in a long term contract as a graphic design freelancer for a solidly PC-based company.
As I’ve said before, the means me having to use Windows exclusively.
This isn’t a problem as I’ve used Windows on and off throughout my career.
Through my career I’ve usually had to manage a suite of Macs that sit within larger PC-based businesses.
I’ve only really seen fully Mac-based businesses in design agencies and even then, there’s always a smattering of PCs around.
For the most part, I’ve managed this by keeping Macs and PCs separate.
Separate servers, separate workflows and the 2 worlds only cross when they have to, email, internet, networking etc.
I’ve done it this way because despite Apple advertising, connecting Macs to PC environments is frustrating at best and impossible at worst.
Yes – everybody tries to get along, but Apple’s SMB implementation is lacklustre and its Active Directory support is laughable.
Even though SMB is the officially supported file sharing protocol at Apple, and it’s ok Mac-to-Mac, it doesn’t use the latest version and is comically slow when connecting to PC shares, to the point where you have to disable features via the Terminal to get it to work.
I’ve always avoided connecting via Active Directory simply because it can’t be relied upon. It just doesn’t really work and from what I can glean online Apple are dropping support for it.
Apple are just not interested in playing nicely, or just don’t see the point of it.
This is why the Mac share of the wider PC market and its share of their internal revenue at Apple is stubborn in its growth.
Their advertising waxes lyrically about how fast, intuitive and productive their Macs are, but they say nothing about actually how you can incorporate Macs into your business.
They just don’t want to put the effort into this.
This was brought into sharp relief recently when out of the blue I was asked about the issues my workplace are having in the design department where I’m contracted, what could be done about it and whether moving to the Mac would help?
Now a bit of background on where I’m working currently.
There’s 5 graphic designers here and 2 marketing assistants. All using Windows.
We use an outside design agency for video work (which is Mac based) and this agency is part owned by the owner of the company
You can see where this is going.
We have lots of issues here and they all centre around the fact that their IT team, just don’t understand the size and complexity of the files and workflows the we use daily.
Storage is the main issue.
We create about 5 gigabytes of content a week and we store all that on an old networked PC in a locked room somewhere.
We connect to it using 10-baseT Ethernet.
Yes you read that right.
Their IT department are full of clever, qualified people, but in terms of large scale deployment of professional design workstations they are dangerously arrogant.
They are used to a world of ignorant users who use Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams and push tiny Microsoft Office documents around, all on the back of a Microsoft cloud based storage system.
The storage for the studio is a spinning HD of about 1TB and it fills up fast, so we have to constantly move this somewhere else so we can keep working.
IT flatly refused to invest in more robust local storage – their solution to all this is to use Microsoft SharePoint.
This of course isn’t a solution.
It’s cloud based and syncs back and forth as needed.
Fine if you’re using Office documents, small JPEG’s etc.
Not fine when you’re using InDesign with large placed files, Character Animator files which number in the 100s per project or huge Adobe Dimension, After Effects or Dimension files for instance.
So I quickly managed to convince them not to go down that road.
A design studio needs fast, local, networked storage that’s backed up.
So I was asked about this problem, and because the owner owns an agency that use Macs, I’ve been asked to come up with a solution, potentially using Macs.
I’ve deliberated long and hard about this and I’ve come to a sad conclusion.
I can’t recommend the Mac.
Despite me banging on about how good Macs are for 3 decades, in the real world your computer isn’t an isolated asset.
It has to exist in an ecosystem.
It has to play nice.
That ‘it just works’ mentality that Apple has, must apply in all circumstances.
But it doesn’t.
Yes, if you’re buying a Mac for personal use or you’re a start-up or a (very) small business then a Mac is a good choice.
I don’t need to tell you that I consider Macs the best computers around, they’re fast, reliable and the OS is simply the pinnacle of excellence.
But in larger corporations, none of that matters.
Putting a Mac in place would mean a huge amount of training, infrastructure changes, strict workflows and staff on hand to handle issues.
There will be less issues for the user for sure, but it’s a huge change for the company’s IT team.
Unless you delegate an experienced Mac user to act as the IT go-between.
This is what I’ve done in the past, but it’s not something I want to do in the future.
So I’m recommending that the company stick to Windows, and just beef up their storage.
A NAS RAID is obvious here that’s connected locally on the network. It’s not that difficult to figure this out.
So what lessons can be learnt from this?
Well in some alternative timeline where Apple thought that this was important, it means working closely with Microsoft.
Much more closely.
Close, as in having Mac staff actually on site with Microsoft to make all this networking bulletproof and ‘just work’ out of the box.
I think Microsoft of today is ideally placed to help here – this isn’t Ballmer’s & Gates show anymore.
The new Microsoft wants their tech to work everywhere.
But we don’t exist in that timeline.
We exist in the timeline where Apple just aren’t seeing that the Mac is an area of growth.
We have the Apple that’s obsessed with service revenue and the entertainment arena and of course, the iPhone.
Not one that wants to grow the market share and mind share of the Mac.
As my bio states, I’ll defend the Mac until the end of my days because Apple certainly won’t.
If someone like me wants to recommend the Mac, but can’t due to Apple’s intransigence, what does the future hold for it?
The Mac at work . . . 