Agreed! We use some at work and they're awful.

 

They're looking at getting new ones and I'm trying to persuade my manager to get some (much cheaper!) windows tablets.

 

Phil

 

As a business tool they are poor - they just aren't designed to work well with standard Microsoft services.

As a consumer gadget, they are excellent.

As a business tool they are poor - they just aren't designed to work well with standard Microsoft services.

As a consumer gadget, they are excellent.

 

Unfortunately trying to tell someone of authority that their favourite toy doesn't work with the other £10M of kit they have is like pushing water uphill.

 

To them a computer is a computer is a computer.

 

With regard to PCs, I've run Windows for years. I've run Linux for years. I'm thinking about buying a Macbook because it'll do the stuff I need to do for work and home (pretty much network and HTTP debugging, where *nix platforms have equally good tools as Windows, virtualisation in VirtualBox which you can use on any platform, casual home browsing and media playback, etc). It'll cost me a bit more in cash than some of the alternatives but I'm hoping it'll pay me back in the sense that I can't faff around with much of it even if I wanted to and therefore it won't spend half its life broken or subpar in some way. And I'll have other computers to do that on if I really, really want to. I seem to be getting to the point where I deal with broken crap all day every day for a living, when I go home I should probably not be doing the same thing

 

Macbooks are popular with pentesters who are probably the apex geeks outside of Redmond, Cupertino or Mountain View. They like them becasue they're powerful and run Linux under teh hood.

 

I'd root my Google devices but I can't muster the effort to move the data off it and back on.

Edited 22 October, 201510 yr by Aspman

I'm with Slider

Macbooks are popular with pentesters who are probably the apex geeks outside of Redmond, Cupertino or Mountain View. They like them becasue they're powerful and run Linux under teh hood.

 

I'd root my Google devices but I can't muster the effort to move the data off it and back on.

Yeah, that's kind of it. I do network stuff, network tools are more prevalent and subjectively "better" on *nix than Windows. I could buy a top of the range laptop and spend some time forcing Linux onto it including the slightly iffy support for new hardware, or I could spend £100 extra and save myself that time. 10-year-ago me would have gone for the first option everytime, current me is on the fence.

I'm a technomuppet with over 20yr of Microsoft usage. SWMBO decided to buy an iMac a couple of months back as my/our HP unit was getting dying. This was because "My sister has one". 'Kin brilliant! Damn you Apple, Damn you Kapitan, I hate the damn thing. (and when contacting her sister for advice the reply came, "I only use it for emails, Facebook and shopping, I don't know about much else" AAAArrrggghhh!).

I got my own back, I bought her an iPad and when she doesn't understand something I tell her to ring her sister.............

Unfortunately trying to tell someone of authority that their favourite toy doesn't work with the other £10M of kit they have is like pushing water uphill.

 

To them a computer is a computer is a computer.

 

Yep, been there, done that, many times.

I'm so on and off this fence it's getting really painful. But it's a real 1st world problem, so...

 

...in '06 I brought a mac and didn't really look back, stopped buying pc components every 6 months etc. That was until 2 years ago when I brought a retina apple 15 to work with. I still have the mac pro, but do not use it, except for heavy vm work. That mpb was recycled to a family member.

 

Instead I converted to linux, so I run a thinkpad x230 wither either a fedora or debian distro. It's ok, it's not flawless it's not easy, open and go, but it's not far off. I also have a spare i3/mbo and nvidia kicking about. I use it to play with new distros, recently it's been super flakey, randomly crashing, turns out it's a nvidia driver which has until this latest round of kernels/releases never been something I even had a problem with... so in short, if you're happy to be patient; I'm not, linux and OSS will rock, arch i3wm .

 

So what do I miss, software wise, ironically it's itunes, thats it and principally due to podcasts which is incredibly lazy. Other than that it's the fact it all does 'just work', there's no screaming fan because suspend didn't work, or black screens of driver fault.

 

I predominantly do development work, working with different languages, technologies, so my primary need is ram and a good-ish processor and some fast disk. I am still not 100% happy with the linux laptop, it gets in my way too often, normally when I'm in a hurry. This is not the fault of linux, nor the laptop, it's me. I like things to just work.

 

That is why I find myself almost monthly back on the fence. Apple privacy, lenovo privacy, microsoft privacy so on and so on. I resigned myself to knowing that nothing is private. So what if some big corp predicts I'm interested in red shoes this week, at least I'll know what to wear and can think about the colour of the sky some more.

 

So I am ironically toying with stripping right back to a desktop and chromebook for travel. I've not managed to code in a hotel room or a beach/cafe for years. Just need a *nix terminal for remote server mgmt, I don't need a 2k laptop in the boot of the car for that.

 

But actually with win 10 I did toy with doping the maddest thing ever and using linux vm's with docker for development, bizarrely it actually works and leaves the host OS amazingly clean and free of cruft/legacy packages. This means in short, use what you want and like. What suits you, and your personality.

 

Ultimately though, MS office rules the business world, FOSS equiv's are not equivalent when someone sends you a sheet with macros in and you spend a few hours picking over them to make them run or not at all... games windows domain, maybe steamOS, but a small dent, mac, more ecosystem than anything, buy into one, you buy into them all or there is less to almost no point. That I find hard to 'go along' with.

 

I don't like some policies but that's my reaction to deal with. I'll probably end up with a mac at some point again, I'm almost over the 1.1 being nerfed.