“With iOS leading the charge Apple has become an enterprise company,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld. “Enterprises naturally want to migrate to Macs (why else do they ask IBM to sort this out for them), but equipment budgets are limited.
“Isn’t it time Apple provided OS X as a virtual machine to help enterprise users migrate?” Evans asks. “Think about it. Already as a result of the huge seismic shift to iOS devices among Fortune 500 firms Apple has built a huge opportunity to flog Macs to big enterprise clients. But there’s a snag – enterprises are limited by available budgets and Apple wants them to buy iOS devices, so why not offer virtualized OS X desktops on a per seat basis through approved suppliers?”
“That would enable large enterprise clients to migrate thousands of staff to OS X today on a path to major Mac (or even iPad Pro) deployments later along the road,” Evans writes. “There’s no better way to convince people to switch to Mac than giving them a chance to use one every day. Even a virtual Mac on a PC would help convince people to migrate to the platform.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: But would it really work as well as a real Mac? Or would issues with hardware, drivers, etc. cast a negative light on OS X that would never happen on real Macs? Unless it were seamless, such a move might prove to be more harmful than beneficial in promoting the spread of Macs and OS X.
SEE ALSO:
Mac at work: IBM launches services to deploy Apple Macs at scale to the enterprise – August 5, 2015
IBM helping other companies adopt Apple’s indomitable Macs – August 5, 2015
IBM could become the biggest buyer of Apple MacBooks – August 1, 2015
IBM ends workers’ Windows PC hell, offers employees Apple Macs for the first time – May 28, 2015
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Agreed. Who wants FragmandrosX.
Apple has already tried that.
It almost destroyed the company.
Never again.
Support costs on cobbled systems eat up savings gained from using “2nd rate hardware.”
Too risky. People might stop buying Apple hardware and enjoy using OS X on machines with upgradeable RAM, SSDs, CPUs and slots for other expansion purposes. You know, the that can no longer be done on a Mac.
They could do it, they would just need to do it right for the reasons you give.
1. Price Virtual Mac OS at a level where it was cost effective for transitions, but not for hardware replacement at which point a Mac would be cost effective.
2. Sell through a program to large corporations only. They have the resources to take care of their own hardware/OS IT issues.
Apple is now taking large corporations seriously as customers. This would be a fantastic way to remove barriers to Mac OS adoption in a way that quickly leads to Mac hardware adoption.
Apple has to grow, and this would be a big change. But by handling it right Apple could do this without undercutting their customer focus, product focus or margins. And it could lead to a huge boost in sales and new happy customers within big organizations.
How is this different to when Apple allowed Mac clones in the mid 1990’s? It was a failure then and Steve Jobs shut down the program shortly after returning to Apple.
The cost of a decent PC isn’t much different to the cost of a Mac, while the lower cost of running and supporting a Mac makes it more favourable over the longer term.
If customers want to experience Macs, they need to get proper Macs. A simulated Mac running on a random PC will never be the equal of a proper Mac and could well put people off because they would imagine that what they were using was a Mac in all but name.
It’s hard to imagine any upside for Apple in allowing this sort of thing to happen.
Buy Macs and run virtual Windows in Parralels, Fusion or use Boot Camp. Businesses never upgrade the computers they lease, so Macs iMacs would be fine.
I think this product is closer than you thin. I would not doubt that they would call is Icloud Desktop , or something similar.
If someone’s enterprise budget is so limited, then why should Apple consider them important?
While the situation is very different now, it seems they tried this once and almost destroyed the company.
The IBM/Apple enterprise team will do much to continue the switch to Apple products in the enterprise.
I use a Mac at work running Windows. I run AutoCad, Revit, Office and a few engineering specific, Windows only, apps from vendors. My Mac runs Windows better, faster and with fewer issues (none really) than the Dells and HPs we have in the company. If an Apple Computer runs Windows better than a “PC”, why would anyone expect a PC to run Mac OS well?
just build a 21″ and 27″ iMac with a door to change out the hard drive/ssd and memory.
and team up with a monitor maker to make a 20″.24″,27″ and 30″ monitor to match the mini and iMac.
and team up with parallels and microsoft to pre load win7,win8 or win10.
Virtualization and thin clients on an enterprise scale is an absolute nightmare for performance and bugs. Avoid it at all costs. I never want to see this happen. Let windows dominate that market because it just creates more frustration with windows which will eventually convert more users to Mac.
a leased mac mini is going to cost less to operate over 3 years than a PC capable of running business software at productive speeds. When you put a PC on someone’s desk, even it were to be running virtualized OS X, it’s still going to fall apart faster than a Mac – you get what you pay for.
Not to offend the rabidly faithful…
But I for one would like to see a limited number of configurations approved for OS X.
I have an older Mac Pro with multiple PCIe cards, internal hard drives, optical drives, interfaces, etc… (all still needed) that I would love to update. Unfortunately the overpriced, closed, new Mac Pro could only be used (for me) with a world of dongles camped outside of the otherwise neat “can”.
I would love to have a new, fast, versatile tower. And I don’t care if it says Apple on the outside, as long as it runs OS X.
You could always buy the new Mac Pro and add a few expansion chassis via Thunderbolt. They’re only about a grand each. 😁
The new Apple has been turning Macs into locked down, non-expandable appliances and it’s going to alienate long-time Mac users and send them to Windows or Linux before too long. Personally I’m greatly irritated that my 15″ rMBP has a top BTO memory configuration of 16 GB while the CPU is able to use twice that.
I’d jump at the chance to legally run OS X on a nice expandable box regardless of the name on the box.
You guys missed this part:
“But there’s a snag – enterprises are limited by available budgets and Apple wants them to buy iOS devices, so why not offer virtualized OS X desktops on a per seat basis through approved suppliers?”
That’s VIRTUALIZED OS X desktops, not physical. So your iOS device is your primary machine (or whatever – you could even Bring Your Own Device) and you connect to a virtualize OS X desktop. No driver issues. No hardware to speak of. A virtual machine that runs OS X and is not dependent on physical hardware.
Today we can’t do that with OS X as Apple wants it tied to hardware rather than a specific user. This gives Windows a big advantage in the Enterprise.
John Sculley would become an Apple board member before that ever happens. Apple’s desktop hardware is only getting MORE integrated into is OS X user experience (Force Touch, pinch-to-zoom, etc.) so as time goes on any virtual OS X will become farther removed from the best desktop experience Apple can create. Not in their DNA.
I would not do it if I was running Apple. It would be opening Pandora’s Box.
If you’re an enterprise and can’t see the massive RoI on Apple hardware, you don’t deserve to run OS X.
What would be the point? How would it earn them any money? It wouldn’t make people any more likely to also use an iPhone or iPad. If the level of performance was any good why would they then buy Mac hardware? If performance was poor then why would anyone use the virtual machine? Allowing it to run on any hardware just makes them microsoft – and they’re fucked from doing essentially what this suggests, hence why they’re trying everything else under the sun.
Why do most people use Windows? Because it’s what they use at work and they’re already familiar with it.
That’s the point.
The problem is one of the two reasons why Windows is the mediocre OS and near catastrophe that it is. (Other than idiotic MS senior management, that is.)
Microsoft needs to support millions possible variants of hardware and software with the Windows OS. Sometimes I wonder how they get a new version of the OS out the door at all — even if it is very sub optimal. Then Microsoft is expected to support that OS on those multiple million variations. So you end up with the crappy MS support or you get the finger pointing, “It’s not a Windows problem. It’s an AMDdriver problem. Call AMD! Then… It’s not our driver problem, it’s a hardware problem. Your PCIe is glitch. Call HP. Then… It’s not our problem here at HP, it’s that ASUS video card you bought. Call ASUS!” And on, and on, and on it goes.
So if Apple were to actively support porting Mac OS X to other non Apple platforms, even in a virtualized manner, Apple’s support costs would soar — or the level of support would suffer in the extreme.
Beyond even that, certain aspects of Mac OS X that are tuned to Apple’s hardware (assumption that there is a Thunderbold connection, etc.) will have to go away.
And, just for us that are keyboard centric — how do you train people to do keyboard shortcuts such as “Command-Option-Shift-V” or other multiple modifier keystrokes to get things done faster if they are stuck with Windows centric keyboards?. You’ll have people complaining “There’s no ‘Command’ key!”; “There’s no ‘Option’ key!” The training alone will be a nightmare.
Hmm… me thinks it seems MDN doesn’t understand what a VM is – otherwise they wouldn’t make a comment about hardware and drivers since it’s not applicable…
Dumb. Idea. And where’s the profit for Apple in this? I can see it now. Some IT guy gets it in his head that they can just virtualize OS X on something like VMWare ESXi, or another platform. Users would be logging in using a piece of crap PC and then bitching about the lousy over the network performance. Dumb. Idea.
I’ve worked in thin computing implementations of Windows, so I’ve got some experience with both sides of this debate.
First, if Apple wanted to have thin client virtualisation of OS X, they would have to hugely change the way OS X screens are shared. VNC is fine for those smaller tasks or when both machines are on the same LAN, but VNC needs to be able to scale with network conditions (eg. Disabling animations, transparency for the sake of performance). Windows has had the ability to turn off its interface bells and whistles for thin computing, so it’s possible to run dozens of simultaneous RDP sessions over unimpressive links to data centres etc.
As for servers: there are definitely some legit uses for OS X in a server environment, and the whole idea of just using physical servers is dumb by today’s standards in enterprise. While I respect Apple’s decision not to allow a “full” OS X VM running on third party hardware, I would love a version of OS X with a headless UI that can be controlled by remote server management software and SSH.
“But would it really work as well as a real Mac? Or would issues with hardware, drivers, etc. cast a negative light on OS X that would never happen on real Macs?”
Methinks you’ve never actually used a virtual machine; have you?? Hypervisor OSes provide a very smooth interface to OSes; hell you can install OS X in a VM today in Parallels or Virtualbox. I’d imagine running it on a Xen or Hyper-V server would make it even better.
The thing is: Apple isn’t an ‘enterprise’ company. They’re a hardware company. OS X, IOS, Apple Music et all are all just things designed to get you to buy Apple hardware.
No “Legal” virtualization option for OS X creates lots of development headaches.
Quick Example
QA Testing a website on 6 versions of windows and 12 browsers is easily accomplished on a standard ESXi cluster (or similar) that most companies already have.
If you want to test multiple version of OS X and you’re stuck deploying mac mini’s and using a desktop level VM solution.
A Hardware/Software integrated Mac is still Valuable as an End User Client. Running an old PC laptop with a remote connection to an OS X VM, doesn’t make that PC laptop a mac.
The reality is that lots of people run OS X on ESXi, VMware Workstation/Player today. Its just not “licensed”. All the hooks, and drivers already exist.
Funny enough most people who become avid users of a hackitosh usually end up with a macbook.
“As for servers: there are definitely some legit uses for OS X in a server environment, and the whole idea of just using physical servers is dumb by today’s standards in enterprise. While I respect Apple’s decision not to allow a “full” OS X VM running on third party hardware, I would love a version of OS X with a headless UI that can be controlled by remote server management software and SSH.”
Its a great idea, but most mac software, even server applications requite the OS X Graphics subsystem to function. Otherwise you might as well use Darwin.
You could include the graphics subsystem without providing a full UI. Kind of like Recovery Mode.
So there could be options like shutdown/restart, disk utility, terminal, vital stats, and preferences like TCP/IP.