New College policy towards Macs


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Well I'll give a little background info first, during the summer my college bought 25 new Macs for a the new Media suite. Apparently we spent close to ?40k (does this sound about right, not sure of the exact specs). Anyway for the last few weeks students and teachers alike have began steadily more frustrated with them. They claimed that they were the least reliable computer they'd ever used or that was the general feeling we were getting. I thought this didn't sound right so I went to try once for myself (as I'm doing Computing I can get in to the Media suite). I was surprised it wasn't some joke they were dreadful, the crashed every ten minutes or so, very disappointed Apple :-(

Anyway now the Principal has gotten involved, we spent so much on these and there totally unusable, the rest of our campus use HPs and Senior Management is annoyed that we colud have bought so many more HPs with the money we "wasted" (not use of the "s) on the Macs, overall there's a huge shortage of computers across the campus with every computer in the Library nearly always in use and a room full of macs being unused, seems a bit of a waste. Anyway our Principal has made his decision, the plans for two more Mac powered Media suites called off and we not allowed any more Macs period. Were not sure what's going to happen to the ones we already have, some of the computing teachers are saying they'll being removed next week, belief that when I see it.

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either they bought some mega crap ones from years and years ago or there not setup properly somehow?

my music course had old imac's setup in the rooms, all streaming off a cheap mac server and the reliability of them was excellent.

do you know what macs they are etc?

well. first thing i would do is swap out a harddrive and have a clean install of the latest mac os for it without anything else installed.

if the problem persists i would be inclined to say it's either the ram or power supply. It is entirely possible that apple may have gotten a bad batch of components from their venders.

of course of the problem goes away with a fresh install i'd start to look at the software installed more closely. i'd remove any startup items and see if it still crashes. and then reactivate each piece of software one at a time to find which one makes it unstable. Something else to remember about macs is that they can only allocate memory in contiguous blocks. that said their could be simply a lack of memory on them.

If worst comes to worst, they could always bootcamp them and load Windows (only) on them!

Strange that they've all performed that badly though... And yeah, my Macs have been great too!

We cant do that, we could have saved a few thousand and just bought HPs but you never know that might yet be one of are only options.

well. first thing i would do is swap out a harddrive and have a clean install of the latest mac os for it without anything else installed.

if the problem persists i would be inclined to say it's either the ram or power supply. It is entirely possible that apple may have gotten a bad batch of components from their venders.

of course of the problem goes away with a fresh install i'd start to look at the software installed more closely. i'd remove any startup items and see if it still crashes. and then reactivate each piece of software one at a time to find which one makes it unstable. Something else to remember about macs is that they can only allocate memory in contiguous blocks. that said their could be simply a lack of memory on them.

This might be a wild guess but I'll through it in to the ring anyway, I Apple know they have a bunch of below average quality Macs I probably better to send them to a College rather than private companies because Colleges buy them at reduced rates.

I just checked with someone doing Alevel IT, they are brand new. This is actually slightly embarrassing.... *runs away*

Well I'll give a little background info first, during the summer my college bought 25 new Macs for a the new Media suite. Apparently we spent close to ?40k (does this sound about right, not sure of the exact specs). Anyway for the last few weeks students and teachers alike have began steadily more frustrated with them. They claimed that they were the least reliable computer they'd ever used or that was the general feeling we were getting. I thought this didn't sound right so I went to try once for myself (as I'm doing Computing I can get in to the Media suite). I was surprised it wasn't some joke they were dreadful, the crashed every ten minutes or so, very disappointed Apple :-(

Anyway now the Principal has gotten involved, we spent so much on these and there totally unusable, the rest of our campus use HPs and Senior Management is annoyed that we colud have bought so many more HPs with the money we "wasted" (not use of the "s) on the Macs, overall there's a huge shortage of computers across the campus with every computer in the Library nearly always in use and a room full of macs being unused, seems a bit of a waste. Anyway our Principal has made his decision, the plans for two more Mac powered Media suites called off and we not allowed any more Macs period. Were not sure what's going to happen to the ones we already have, some of the computing teachers are saying they'll being removed next week, belief that when I see it.

Yep, sounds like a Mac to me. Same experience. They far from "not crashing" as all the BS ads are portraying Windows.

Finally smart logic. They should just dump all of them and get 3 times more PCs with Windows 7 and be done with it.

So it is either a problem with the machines/OS, or it is a problem with the software running on them. Does anyone there actually know enough to tell the difference between the former and the latter?

Not really our main guy at IT support just knows about Windows and a bit about Macs and we can't really afford someone just to manage 25 Macs.

Yep, sounds like a Mac to me. Same experience. They far from "not crashing" as all the BS ads are portraying Windows.

Finally smart logic. They should just dump all of them and get 3 times more PCs with Windows 7 and be done with it.

It's to late for that now where stuck with them now, anyways anyone doing Media has a room change now so the Macs won't be used at all. I've got Computing tomorrow second lesson I'll see if theres been any updates over the weekend.

My record uptime for my PowerBook G4 is like 150 days before I got tired of the updater popping up.

Only time I've had it crash is when I was mucking around in the terminal.

You lucky git, most media students here would love uptime of 30 mins without something going wrong.

I find OS X frustrating to use, sure, being a Windows user...

I've got a couple of modern (and classic!) Macs and I've only seen them crash now and then, they run into far less trouble than my relatives who all use Vista OEM-crapware laptops from PC World.

If multiple Macs are failing for you, then it has to be something you guys are doing with them. I can't think what though, it's a very strange issue... and also a tasty snack for the mindless Apple haters around these boards. Hurr derp! Windows 7 neva failz!1

Care to explain exactly how they were set up? Fresh installs I presume, what software are they running, how are they networked, etc.

I find OS X frustrating to use, sure, being a Windows user...

I've got a couple of modern (and classic!) Macs and I've only seen them crash now and then, they run into far less trouble than my relatives who all use Vista OEM-crapware laptops from PC World.

If multiple Macs are failing for you, then it has to be something you guys are doing with them. I can't think what though, it's a very strange issue... and also a tasty snack for the mindless Apple haters around these boards. Hurr derp! Windows 7 neva failz!1

Care to explain exactly how they were set up? Fresh installs I presume, what software are they running, how are they networked, etc.

Speaking of 7 the tech guys (the guys that practically live in the basement, not the buffoons from PC world) are stilling evaluating the possibilities of a full Windows 7 roll-out.

I agree. I really suspect it's a software/configuration issue or a bad batch of hardware.

Did you guys ever call Apple support (still under warranty?). Usually large volume customers get better support than regular customers as well.

I'm not sure we count as large volume, and I presume some contact has been made with Apple, also yes they are defiantly under warranty there to new not to be.

I find that to be rather unusual, because in my experience, I've had no issues with my Macs. My MacBook Pro once went about 60 days without restarting (the only reason I had to restart was because I needed to update OS X), and the Macs in my school run flawlessly. At my school there are about 16 G3 iMacs, 8 Power mac G4s, 3 Power Mac G5s, and 3 Mac Pros. None have had any problems; I spend about an hour a week running basic maintenance on them and keep them well-updated. They run faster than the new Dells.

This isn't the first time I've heard of this story, with Macs being terrible at school. I can only trace it down to two main factors: the students are completely mac-illiterate, or that there's no tech guy to fix the small problems that eventually cause the crashes. I don't find it plausible that 25 brand-new Macs are complete lemons.

Gotta be the software they're using. Is it possible that your school is pirating the Media software?

I know that's a far fetched, and maybe even offensive, idea. But if your school just got a bunch of new Macs, for a media lab, then it really wouldn't surprise me. The media software is damn expensive. I wouldn't suggest it if I hadn't heard of schools doing this before.

Because that isn't the OS X I know. No OS I've used has been unbearably unstable, unless it's a beta/alpha... and even then I usually find it somewhat workable. What you're talking about sounds more like ReactOS :p

I've had no real problems with my Mac, until I bought a HP c5580 printer last week. My Macbook has bluetooth, the printer has bluetooth, so why in the world don't they work together. I gave it a quick google and since Snow Leopard has been released a significant amount of people have had all sorts of printer issues.

I know that's a far fetched, and maybe even offensive, idea. But if your school just got a bunch of new Macs, for a media lab, then it really wouldn't surprise me. The media software is damn expensive. I wouldn't suggest it if I hadn't heard of schools doing this before.

Having experienced the fun of dancing around software protection policies, I have to mention here that the software doesn't need to be pirated to be mucking up the system. One classic case is Adobe CS packages. Absolutely awful, and essentially requires that all users have administrative rights unless you actually modify both the installer and applications. It just doesn't play nice in a lab setting.

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No mobile Surveillance app TerraMaster still doesn't have a dedicated Surveillance app, although from searching online, Surveillance can be used and managed through the TNAS mobile app. I tried this with the updated TNAS mobile app beta in combination with TOS 7 and got a message that Surveillance was "Only accessible through web browser," so I reckon this must be limited to the stable versions of TOS 6 and the mobile app. More quirks In addition, whenever I minimized the Live View window in the browser Surveillance app, the feed appeared to switch to the Low-bandwidth stream, and there was no way to get the High-quality stream back. To get the High-quality stream back, I had to close Live View and then reopen it. Benchmarking A pretty cool feature of the TOS 7 is that it allows you to install directly to the NVMe M.2 SSD. In order to do that, you would have to leave out any HDDs during initialization, and even then, the system partitions are always written to two HDDs when they are eventually added. With three NVMe slots, this also gives an interesting scenario where you could build a TRAID storage Pool for installing all your apps and Docker on, and keep the third for SSD cache on the HDD pool. Limitless options! SATA PCIe 3.0 X1 A CrystalDiskMark test on a mapped network drive from within a Windows 11 25H2 PC (image above) connected over a 5 GbE hub was well within acceptable ranges. Although the read result on SATA was a little less than with the F4-425 Plus, for some reason, while writes were generally better. SATA PCIe 3.0 X1 I also ran the NAS Performance tester, which tests the link speed performance. As you can see, it pretty much maxes out the 5GbE connection. Of course, you can also opt to bond the two 5 GbE connections for a bit more umph, but I didn't do that. TOS 7, which, as of testing, is still in Beta, comes with an App Center that has a bunch of handy programs you can install right off the bat, such as Emby, Plex, Docker, as well as in-house Backup and Surveillance solutions. As you can imagine, any media streaming services you would want to host off the F4-425 Pro will work great, thanks to the Intel Core N350 CPU and its 16 GB of DDR5 memory. Accessing from mobile is only possible if Security Isolation Mode is disabled, which can put your NAS at risk from external sources, so there was no way to access it from the TNAS Mobile app. It's also quiet. I had this sat next to my computer on my work desk for the past week, and I did wonder if the noise I was accustomed to with NAS devices would annoy me, but all I could hear was a soft whirring of the rear fan (which was a little annoying) when the disks were not actively copying or reading data. Conclusion So what have I learned? Unfortunately, this release raises a few important questions and concerns that I feel haven't been adequately addressed. What I didn't like Our variant shipped with TOS 7 beta, and it's advised not to use it in a production environment. I feel that's a bit limiting on an $800 device. The mobile app is also still in beta and does not support some of the first-party apps, like Surveillance, and it still has quite a few bugs. I am a bit confused about the OpenClaw marketing along with the F4-425 Pro. I feel like that if it's going to be a main selling point, then offer official guidance on how to get started with it. TerraMaster recommends enabling SPC, but then markets the NAS for use with OpenClaw, which requires disabling SPC to be able to use it, opening up genuine security concerns for the NAS; and that's before you get into the security concerns of OpenClaw itself. Of course, the above issues won't be a problem if you decide to install something else on it, or even go back to the stable TOS 6. I wish TerraMaster had just given TOS 7 as opt-in rather than shipping with it. TOS 7 has been available as a preview since December 2025 (so well before my last TerraMaster review), and according to a thread on Reddit where a user shared a screenshot from the TerraMaster Facebook page, it is scheduled to launch today, June 23, but there's nothing about that in the TerraMaster news blog. My contact confirmed over email that TOS 7 exits beta today. The rubber feet also deserve a mention as they continue to be a problem, with them coming unstuck the moment you shift the F4-425 Pro anywhere on your desk. What I liked What it comes down to, though, aside from what I already mentioned, you are still getting a quality, affordable device here, so recommending it will depend on the individual's use case. If you're just looking for a relatively small NAS device to manage virtual machines on, backup your files, and take care of your home theater streaming, then it is a great device that will certainly futureproof you for some time. It provides good performance, takes up little space, and is, on the whole, very quiet. Four bays afford proper redundancy using TRAID or RAID 5, and you can even expand on storage capacity by adding the 2-bay D5, or 4-bay D8 Hybrid DAS over a USB 3.2 (10Gbps) link. Considering the 2024 releases were more about power, with the likes of an Intel Core i5-1235U high-end laptop CPU under the hood, I asked my contact last time if we could expect more of the same in higher-end models and was told: It makes a lot of sense to use Intel's N350 chip inside a NAS; it is more than capable of doing what the F4-425 Pro is intended for, media streaming and backup. The only downside is still the clear lack of community and even staff support on the official forums. In the past, I have had topics go unanswered for days, or there would be generic-type "we've noted this and passed it onto our developer team" type responses. Along with the other things I mentioned, it all ends up costing it a couple of points. If you are comfortable with the command line, Docker, and setting up TrueNAS or Unraid, you'll be fine. You can do great things with this hardware. In TOS, the apps are a bit lacking, and things don't always work as expected.\ AI NAS?! What has become clear to me this year is that we are going to start seeing all kinds of "AI NAS" come to market, and while that might be good for us consumers, be diligent and research these claims. Although the F4-425 Pro technically comes with AI, it is really using a cloud service that is externally sourced off-device through the third party OpenClaw app. My colleague did review a newcomer to the NAS space earlier this year, and it includes a local AI assistant inside the Zettlab D4 NAS, and they do not even use AI in the product name, check out Chris' review here. Where to buy and a discount coupon However, it does not change the fact that this is truly a great entry-level home media-class NAS that you can buy right now. TerraMaster is having a 20% off launch discount, plus you can also still apply our unique 10% off coupon on checkout, which only works on the official website. So here is a breakdown of the pricing that is only valid on the official TerraMaster website. TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = $575.99 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = $503.99 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = £525.59 TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) + 20% discount + 10% coupon = £460.79 Use NEOWIN coupon code during checkout for 10% discount Over on Amazon US and UK, the F4-425 Pro also gets a 20% launch discount, but here, the above 10% coupon cannot be applied. TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) for $639.99 at Amazon US (was $799.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) for $559.99 at Amazon US (was $699.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N350) for £583.99 at Amazon UK (was £729.99) TerraMaster F4-425 Pro (N305) for £511.99 at Amazon UK (was £639.99) As an Amazon Associate, when you purchase through links on our site, we earn from qualifying purchases.
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