I have never read should rubbish in all my life
Be warned, as you read this you might think this is in no way related to your Mac and your particular setup, but I implore you to push on because it is not actually about Apple or Macs per se.
One of the driving forces behind this website has always been to read the trade papers, weed out the rubbish and present a clean and simplified version of Mac news for my clients and their friends.
If you read these trade rags long enough, and I have been doing it for 30 years now, you often see a pattern of sensationalism and half-truths in the reporting, a pattern that is no doubt repeated on subjects that I know nothing about…the car industry, the environment, and women to name but three. It is precisely because I don’t know the facts that I wont necessarily be able to spot the bull when its splattered into my eyes.
However, I have often been left wondering how one article can state, categorically, that Apple are about to cease production of the iPhone X because of its poor sales and then the very next article report how Apple sold more mobiles than any other manufacture?
Then of course there is the yearly article “Apple is doomed” and that has been appearing regularly since they really were in trouble back in 1996 but curiously haven’t stopped even when they were the biggest company in the world.
The latest dumb skullery comes in the form of an article that appeared a few months back concerning Apple’s server software. (I warned you, but don’t be put off). From the very start the reporter was negative starting in no uncertain terms that Apple’s new server software was a cope out. GONE is DNS and Mailserver. LEFTOUT is Calendar server and DHCP and Apple are all but ABANDONING VPN leaving Business customers adrift at the very time VPN was becoming a mainstream product.
Apple have given up. Apple don’t care about you or your business. What a load of crap!
Without walking into nerd rooms, sitting you down and making you listen to a lot of gobbledygook let me give you the truth. While it is true that these services are essential for a business to do, err, business the reality is even those with an Apple server never (or rarely) switch them on.
VPN is handled by most modems, as is DNS and a modem is better at DHCP and Mostyn server admins know this. The Mail server has always been difficult to set up and so most people have off site services or use a wonderful product called Kerio. One the one thing that the server does best, and will continue to do, is server files centrally at a fraction of the cost of a Windows server.
($39 for unlimited users as apposed to $501 for 25 users – I am not kidding)
And while I would be the first to admit that the Apple server is not in the same league as a Windows server it is often enough for a small business with a few employees, but did this article ever mention the reality of this…. did it hell.
So what is going on here? Well, to be honest I don’t know. Maybe they just like pointing out the negative without looking at the facts? Maybe it is the tech worlds version of only reporting on the pulp and not the juice like they do on the news every night in order to sell more articles?
If you don’t have a server and you have read this far… thank you, I hope it was worth it. And the take away from all of this?… well I guess is don’t believe everything you read… even when they are writing about something as silly as computers.
2 comments
Sometimes we need to look at the bigger picture when reviewing new products, or products that have seemly had features removed or replaced, and think to ourselves ‘what is the overall strategic path that the company wants to follow?’. More and more businesses are moving to the secure cloud and moving away from on-prem services. For a scalable monthly fee (based on space, and features), VM’s can be spun up to run all sorts of small business to enterprise level services that be appear on most end-user devices. Apple’s approach seems to have always aimed around making the most easy-to-use native end user environment rather than making the possibilities endless for the domain administrator. The move away from a comprehensive and multiple-version server environments, in my opinion, is to make the shift to over the WAN things-as-a-service approach using subscription based billing. It’s right to say that on-prem servers will most likely be used for very sensitive company data with complex permissions, but unless you’re willing to fork out for multi-location and multi-state disaster recovery systems – stick with a competitive and easy to manage private cloud.
Overall agree that bad reporting that doesn’t capture the ‘why’ because of the emotion attached to ‘don’t take away or relabel my admin-features’.
Sometimes people need to look at the bigger picture when reviewing new products, or products that have seemly had features removed or replaced, and think to ourselves ‘what is the overall strategic path that the company wants to follow?’. More and more businesses are moving to the secure cloud and moving away from on-prem services. For a scalable monthly fee (based on space, and features), VM’s can be spun up to run all sorts of small business to enterprise level services that be appear on most end-user devices. Apple’s approach seems to have always aimed around making the most easy-to-use native end user environment rather than making the possibilities endless for the domain administrator. The move away from comprehensive multiple-version server environments, in my opinion, is to make the shift to over the WAN things-as-a-service approach using subscription based billing. It’s right to say that on-prem servers will most likely be used for very sensitive company data with complex permissions (or legal/legislative requirements), but unless you’re willing to fork out for multi-location and multi-state disaster recovery systems – stick with a competitive and easy to manage private cloud.
Overall agree that bad reporting that doesn’t capture the ‘why’ because of the emotion attached to ‘don’t take away or relabel my admin-features’.