FU 2 the FU: I GOT IT!!!!!!

[AlphaDog]

Congratulations!

I'm at least an hour closer than Racer, except I'd really look out of place at a kegger for the guys, so just have a couple for me.

[ztirffritz]

I'm only 2.5 hours by car. I was in Portland for 5 days last week.

[kahuna1342]

I am in Gresham and could be anywhere in the Portland area in half an hour. Congrats on the new job!

[Silencio]

Nice! Another excuse for me to come up to Portland for a visit.

[Racer X]

[quote elmo3][quote Racer X]And with the Intel macs dual platform, why should they really care at this point.
Are you asking why the company would care if they got a Macintosh or not?

Because in order to standardize purchasing and support costs and issues, companies tend to standardize on manufacturers, vendors, and platforms. If they have an IT support team, the IT support team will create a known infrastructure they can easily support in order to maximize uptime and minimize corporate disruption.

For better or for worse, this is why Apple has made very few inroads into the corporate world.

If the company has standardized on hardware because it meets their price/performance point and support metrics, they are very reluctant to go outside of that hardware. They might have HP stuff all over, but won't go Gateway. So it's even worse for Apple, never mind that Apple is using off-the-shelf components.

In short, they care very much about a non-standard piece of hardware/software coming into the environment--even if it's just another mainstream Windows box from a mainstream company.
and where I work, on a case by case basis, they will buy the hardware and software that best suits the needs of the user, and the requirements of the job. PCs running XP are the standard, and with a legit business case, they will deviate from the standard.

As a contractor, if it takes me an extra 40 hours a year fighting with an OS that is almost fully functional for the tool set installed on it, they will happily get me the proper hardware to allow me to fulfill the job I am contracted to do as it is cheaper than buying a second rate PC which has a cheaper initial outlay, than to pay me to sit while the IT weenies figure out why crap stopped working overnight.

I personally pissed away 6 hours on one issue one night because XP wouldn't let me burn some data to a disk, or copy to an external hard drive, despite the fact that I have full Admin rights to my laptop. That alone wiped out any hardware savings of the Dell vs a Mac in less than one business day. They ended up wiping the drive after doing a brute force data recovery of a crucial video file.

And as for IT support, they have 2 full time people for 85 employees running PCs at our location, and no support for Mac users, yet they never have any trackable down time attributed to the Mac OS.

Contrast that with the thousands of man hours of attributed to down time of PCs over the last decade that are a direct result of Windows and its gaping holes, vs the 0 trackable hours of down time to the Macs on site attributed to anything other than a pure hardware failure (like an optical drive crapping out) So, lets say 500K pissed away vs 0 pissed away. yeah....PCs historically are cheaper to buy, but not to support.

Even with 1 K for a PC vs 2 K for a Mac, over the useful life expectancy, the Macs are cheaper from a purely hardware standpoint because they will have a longer useful service life Yet you know that.

I would say that losing the perfect candidate for a job over a pidly reason like forcing them to use tools that they are less productive with is a very sound business case.

If weapon makes 30 an hour salary (roughly 60K), he bills out at about roughly 100 an hour burdened. If he wastes 20 hours a year struggling with 2-3 insignificant issues or recovering from a virus or two the Mac is paid for right there (the tax write off of the hardware not withstanding) And the company would save on support costs from the IT staff, as I am sure he wouldn't be calling them.

[Sam3]

My wife and I have a close friend who also was out of work for a while. She got a job designing labels and was given a PC to use with the standard Adobe tools. Working on a PC was horrible in her experience. The machine seemed to down more than it was up, her productivity suffered. The IT department also consisted of only a few people, who started blaming her for the WIndows errors, saying that she was doing things wrong.

I would argue that a tool is not just software, hardware *is* important as well.

But congratulations on the offer! Maybe you will be able to wrangle the machine of your choice.

[Racer X]

is it REALLY user error if the tool is so poorly designed that the majority of users have reoccurring issues using it for the intended purpose?