New College policy towards Macs

[Miuku.]

For some reason, I find it hard to believe that all 25 Macs are having issues at the same time. My school has tons of Mac labs (and an equal number of PC labs), and we've never had problems with them

You'll find that Neowin, amongst other places, is full of people who pull things out of thin air to show some product or manufacturer in a bad light. Lying is easy when you don't need to prove anything and no one knows who you are.

[neufuse Veteran]

You'll find that Neowin, amongst other places, is full of people who pull things out of thin air to show some product or manufacturer in a bad light. Lying is easy when you don't need to prove anything and no one knows who you are.

psh hey we had a Art Mac lab at our univeristy all fail at once, all 105 of them... but then we had a major power surge take them all out at once :laugh: nothing like just setting up 105 Mac Pro's and not putting surge protection on yet and then have the univeristy power plant (yes we have our own power plant, its a natural gas one) spike in power and fry them all at once

[BajiRav]

You'll find that Neowin, amongst other places, is full of people who pull things out of thin air to show some product or manufacturer in a bad light. Lying is easy when you don't need to prove anything and no one knows who you are.

wow, just wow. :rolleyes: there is always one...

[dead.cell]

You'll find that Neowin, amongst other places, is full of people who pull things out of thin air to show some product or manufacturer in a bad light. Lying is easy when you don't need to prove anything and no one knows who you are.

Newsflash: not all products can be seen in a positive light all the time. Not sure if you're aware of this, but products do have a tendency of failing. Also, people are surely capable of causing any number of products to fail.

Last but not least, not everyone is a troll or fanboy. In fact, going around dismissing a post just because it places a certain company in a negative light would certainly seem a little... nevermind, I'm not going to say it. You catch my drift though. :)

[WatchTheSoup]

You'll find that Neowin, amongst other places, is full of people who pull things out of thin air to show some product or manufacturer in a bad light. Lying is easy when you don't need to prove anything and no one knows who you are.

I guess the ~25 dead hard drives my school techs removed, confirmed faulty by Disk Utility and other tools, is a lie. I'm sorry physical evidence is not believable in your court of law. :rolleyes:

Why are most Mac users like this? Butt hurt because you overpaid for a PC painted in white with a fruit logo?

-----

The warranty expired on our school Macs (they are almost 2 yrs old) so my school had to order all new ones from Apple. One of them was DOA, fun stuff! And yes, ~25 of them died September/October. It's rather puzzling that they all died in the same time frame

Edited November 10, 2009 by WatchTheSoup

[Elliott]

The warranty expired on our school Macs (they are almost 2 yrs old) so my school had to order all new ones from Apple. One of them was DOA, fun stuff! And yes, ~25 of them died September/October. It's rather puzzling that they all died in the same time frame

Hard drives under similar stress tend to die around the same time if they're all the same model. Imagine that. :p

Just as a counter to this lab story (because if you know what you're doing, experiences like these shouldn't happen), I deployed 30 iMacs in a school lab over the summer. They're all being managed by a Mac Mini running Mac OS X Server connected to an Active Directory controller. We haven't had one fail yet, and they all work very well for the students.

[techbeck]

Go back to support and tell them to fix it. After all, Mac has the best customer support available to man and will always service you with a smile....thats what their ads claim. Keep in mind, their ads also claim to be better and more stable/reliable that PCs...

And yes, first part of the paragraph was loaded with sarcasm. But in seriousness, always but one or two of something for testing purposes first. I would also go back to Apple and demand them to fix the issues, or refund your money.

[drshdw]

I guess the ~25 dead hard drives my school techs removed, confirmed faulty by Disk Utility and other tools, is a lie. I'm sorry physical evidence is not believable in your court of law. :rolleyes:

Why are most Mac users like this? Butt hurt because you overpaid for a PC painted in white with a fruit logo?

-----

The warranty expired on our school Macs (they are almost 2 yrs old) so my school had to order all new ones from Apple. One of them was DOA, fun stuff! And yes, ~25 of them died September/October. It's rather puzzling that they all died in the same time frame

Your school must be giving off EMPs or dirty power. 25% failure rate on HDs? It's possible, but really only due to overheating or a really bad batch. Were they Seagates o.O

[Shadrack]

I think that throwing them all out is quite a waist.

What kind of Macs are these? I'd buy one!

It would be pretty bad luck if they were all full of bad hardware because of a batch problem at the manufacturer. I'm willing to bet it has something to do with some software installed (probably server related).

[Elliott]

Were they Seagates o.O

:laugh: I wondered the same thing. Seagate drives are horrible. I've had to RMA just about every single Seagate drive I've ever bought.

[thealexweb]

Bit of an update, you can't even empty the bin on some of them any more, they claim you don't have permission.

[Shadrack]

:laugh: I wondered the same thing. Seagate drives are horrible. I've had to RMA just about every single Seagate drive I've ever bought.

Really? Hmm... I have had to RMA Western Digital and Maxtor drives before. I don't think I've ever had to RMA a Seagate drive.

Bit of an update, you can't even empty the bin on some of them any more, they claim you don't have permission.

Can't you do a clean install on one of the machines and isolate it from the network? I bet you anything something was screwed up software-wise when these things were setup initially.

[thealexweb]

Really? Hmm... I have had to RMA Western Digital and Maxtor drives before. I don't think I've ever had to RMA a Seagate drive.

Can't you do a clean install on one of the machines and isolate it from the network? I bet you anything something was screwed up software-wise when these things were setup initially.

It's not up to me lol I'm just a student watching the tale unfold.

[pawn3d]

It's not uncommon for Apple to take you to the cleaners.

Back in the day, all Macs were reliable. Today, it's only the high end.

Tell your principle I'll buy the Macs from your college. I'll give you 100 per unit.

[craybox]

I havent ready through the whole thread but when they realized they had a problem have they contacted Apple about it ? What did they say ?

I am sure they would have had something to advice, there were some instances of machines being sent out with a corrupt installation recently so an fresh install from the DVD would have been required.

two many of our customers rather than ring us and tell us they have a problem they just live with it get more and more frustrated and then call us up after 3 months ranting..

[bobbba]

You'll find that Neowin, amongst other places, is full of people who pull things out of thin air to show some product or manufacturer in a bad light. Lying is easy when you don't need to prove anything and no one knows who you are.

This post is pretty much 2nd hand info and it's not from someone involved in working on it so there's little if any value. There's so little information on actual problems just generic terms like "they're unusable" and crashing so that no one can offered a reasoned explanation or assistance. Instead it's just food for trolls and fan boys from both sides.

[mrt2]

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!

I'm involved with batch purchasing for the government and I can tell you from first hand experience that whether it's windows or Mac computers, bad batches of hardware happen... All they need to do is tell the volume sales or institutional sales rep that they believe they got a bad batch and they should be able to send you a replacement for all 25... I've had bad batches from Dell, HP, Lenovo... you name it. It happens... If the IT department there hasn't already determined this is just a bad batch then they are obviously in the wrong field or should get more experience in this business. :(

Throwing Windows on it won't solve anything. It will still crash.

[REM2000]

ive installed plenty of Windows and Mac Computers, as the above poster has stated, it's entirely possible that a bad batch had been sent out.

However all of the Windows and Mac's ive installed and configured on a network work flawlessly (or about as flawlessly as compters can be). If i installed 25 computers at a clients and they were not working i would be contacting the supplier whether it be Dell or Apple. There is no way in hell i would just right it off to being bad software etc.. Any issue needs to be resolved.

[mrt2]

^^To the original poster^^ You should show the powers that be at your school this thread and in particular my and REM2000 Post...

I have over 10 years in the experience managing large million to billion dollar IT projects for the government and trust me, I know what I'm talking about...

[dyn]

I work at a high school in the IT department, and we've about had it with Macs. The problem is that we use only Dells, and than someone somehow got some money and bought a number of iMacs without asking us first. Trying to add Macintosh computers to an otherwise completely windows-based environment is just asking for disaster:

- Macs can not be easily imaged without a Netboot Server (leaving the much easier and more universal PXE out of the question)

- Macs can not easily be remotely monitored without purchasing Apple Remote Desktop, most other management systems don't support Macs

- Macs can not be managed through Group Policy without buying special third-party software

- Software and Upgrade deployment involves going to every computer with a CD, instead of just using a central deployment system

To me, it just doesn't seem that Macs are great computers to add to a primarily Windows-based network, it will increase the workload of IT greatly. In education, the IT department is usually stressed out enough to begin with (students breaking stuff, insignificant budgets, understaffing), so the amount of attention that Macs require is just way higher than what an educational IT department can provide.

That's because a Windows network unfortunately is Windows only and does not provide a lot of management tools (you have to buy those separately...). Novell's Netware has a lot more management options and is able to create a mixed network with Windows and unices like Linux and Mac OS X. If you add Zenworks to that mix you have a very nice management environment to do nearly everything you want. GPO's for example only work on Windows machines, like every other feature AD brings except for credentials (aka username plus password). The same thing goes for the central deployment systems on Windows that only use the MSI to deploy software. That also brings another problem called dll hell as well as software that does not really work great with MSI. Novell's snapshot technology is a bit better at that but it does have the same dll problems which is a typical Windows problem.

Trying to add any non-Windows machine to a Windows network using AD is a disaster. It has been the centre point of all of the court cases and investigations to Microsoft. The EU actually convicted Microsoft because it wasn't doing a lot to enable others to use or mix with their environment. Windows networks are a complete disaster if you ask me. If you want to do anything more than basic you have to buy some piece of (expensive) software to do so. I dunno if OS X Server will be a similar story but it is using a lot of common open source software to do what it does. You can easily do that with any unix/linux OS and use stuff like samba for the Windows machines. The other way around seems to work a bit better (adding Windows to a non-Windows network). That's why you'll mostly find 2 kind of networks: a Windows network and a non-Windows network. Sometimes it's better to not have everything in one big network (security reasons, having things separated, etc.). Especially with a lab this might be useful as you can confine it.

[drshdw]

That's because a Windows network unfortunately is Windows only and does not provide a lot of management tools (you have to buy those separately...). Novell's Netware has a lot more management options and is able to create a mixed network with Windows and unices like Linux and Mac OS X. If you add Zenworks to that mix you have a very nice management environment to do nearly everything you want. GPO's for example only work on Windows machines, like every other feature AD brings except for credentials (aka username plus password). The same thing goes for the central deployment systems on Windows that only use the MSI to deploy software. That also brings another problem called dll hell as well as software that does not really work great with MSI. Novell's snapshot technology is a bit better at that but it does have the same dll problems which is a typical Windows problem.

Trying to add any non-Windows machine to a Windows network using AD is a disaster. It has been the centre point of all of the court cases and investigations to Microsoft. The EU actually convicted Microsoft because it wasn't doing a lot to enable others to use or mix with their environment. Windows networks are a complete disaster if you ask me. If you want to do anything more than basic you have to buy some piece of (expensive) software to do so. I dunno if OS X Server will be a similar story but it is using a lot of common open source software to do what it does. You can easily do that with any unix/linux OS and use stuff like samba for the Windows machines. The other way around seems to work a bit better (adding Windows to a non-Windows network). That's why you'll mostly find 2 kind of networks: a Windows network and a non-Windows network. Sometimes it's better to not have everything in one big network (security reasons, having things separated, etc.). Especially with a lab this might be useful as you can confine it.

AD is a pain in my ass. Trying to integrate a large AD database with OD is hellish.

[WatchTheSoup]

I think that throwing them all out is quite a waist.

They only threw out the drives, not the entire units

They were all Western digital drives ... I am a big fan of WD, and this is disappointing (WD5000AAKS)