Heh, I guess none of his apple computers are more than a few years old. My 2018 mbp (purchased early in 2019) stopped working in 2023, less than five years old. My windows machine from 2016 is still running fine. My son uses it for playing minecraft and other games.
On the other hand, I bought a late-2013 MBP in 2014 when I started university and it lasted me through my whole school career and a few years after. It was no longer getting major OS updates but still ran acceptably enough when I replaced it with a 14-inch M1 Pro MBP when those went up for preorder. I don't think I knew a single one of my colleagues who was using a 6-year-old Windows laptop by the time I graduated in 2020.
I think Apple had some big reliability problems with their ultra-thin chassis design MacBooks they were selling from like 2016(?) to the design refresh that came with the M1 Pros. Thankfully they went thicker again and both my personal 14-inch and work-provided 16-inch have been fantastic so far. Best laptops I've ever used.
That 2016 era macbooks with the touch bar and horrible keyboard was the reason I ditched macOS and went ThinkPad and Linux.
That MacBook Pro lasted 2 months before the spacebar randomly flew off. To get any key fixed, you needed to replace the whole top deck. It was that inbuilt. So the first couple times (yes it happened more than once) I would have a key replacement, I'd lose the laptop for a couple days due to a backlog. This eventually got better. But that laptop was horrible.
It also helped me realise that apple tends to be somewhat of a cult.
The Delta CEO is referring to the software, not the hardware.
But main point aside, I'd agree that I get more longevity out of my modular PC hardware over my Mac hardware, although my oldest running hardware right now is a 2011 Mac Mini.
You could replace the back cover and screen guard of a 10 yr old iPhone and it feels right out of the store. I have had only one iPhone since 10 yrs and that says something.
That sort of experience comes when you have holistic focus on the quality. You need to put in deep care and work for the smallest things from screws and gaskets to long term software stability.
> My 2018 mbp (purchased early in 2019) stopped working in 2023, less than five years old.
2018 was a bad year :) I had one and besides the keyboard starting to act up at only 2 weeks from purchase, the display cable broke after a few more years. Apparently it was too short by default and thus exposed to too much stress.
The 2024 M3 pro seems just fine though. I guess because it's not thin.
So do the 2009 mb white and 2013 mbpro. They're still working perfectly.
So as long as Cook takes his dried frog pills in time and doesn't fantasise about thin devices, we'll be fine.
But you can't add a modern gpu to an old iMac and still enjoy the latest (and not so "latest") games, nor install a modern wi-fi card on an old macbook and enjoy fast wireless, among many other small upgrades you can do to keep windows/linux computers kicking.
i don't play video games. the WiFi works as fast as my router is able to handle, I have no need for anything faster. do windows people really upgrade hardware every other month like this? what do you do with all the e-waste?
I'm talking about extending the life of a >5 year old machine, not upgrading it every few months.
It's pretty common for people to have a, let's say, 10 year old notebook with wifi 4 which could be greatly improved by adding wifi 5 or 6 capability. On a congested place with lots of neighbouring wireless networks where the 2.4ghz band is exhausted all the time your wi-fi could go from 5mbps to 500mbps, it's a BIG deal. Obviously the ability to do that on windows/linux notebooks isn't guaranteed, but it sure as hell is much more common than macbooks.
oh is that 5ghz? I've had that since 2012, before I even had a router that could handle it. I don't think there's much better? anyway, I've never had any issues with the WiFi, I don't see why I'd want to replace it.
Yeah, my kid is happily using my old 2012 iMac. (I did replace the hard drive with a SSD). I've also got a 2017 Macbook pro that nobody is using at the moment, but they're happy with the iMac.
In my house we have 3 Macs: A MacBook (2007), a MacBook Pro (2009, the first unibody model) and a MacBook Air 11 (late 2012). The only hardware failure in all this time came from the MBA. The SSD got loose, but it was easy to fix. All of them still work fine. The MBP gets used daily. So that's 15 years of daily use with zero issues.
I dislike where macOS is going. In fact, 2/3 of my machines run Linux. But Apple hardware is pretty good, rugged and silent. I hate laptops that sound like hairdyers. I wish there were other manufacturers that had a similar focus on quality.
Perhaps Framework might be one to keep an eye on. Some ThinkPads are great, but they churn out way too many models and thus lack attention to detail. Plus, in EU sales and customer care have been outsourced. Prices are crazy and they are super hard to deal with.
Lol I just had the pleasure of trying to get a 2012 Mac reset for a client.
Reset device > device blocked from internet because Apple deems its os/software unsafe > Can't access app store to update device to safe/up to date os > have to manual download install for midway update > then update via app store to current distro.
Absolutely nightmare. Zero info from apple that this was the upgrade path/how it had to be done.
Psychotic. Huge reminder why I generally reject all apple work. Company is a nightmare to service machines for.
Also lol the 2012 intel Mac was being repurposed because the 2 year old Mac airs battery was rooted and it worked worse than the 2012 rig. Both lived their lives permanently plugged in like desktops being used for web browsing and email.
> Reset device > device blocked from internet because Apple deems its os/software unsafe > Can't access app store to update device to safe/up to date os…
I can second OCLP — I've been running Sonoma on my daily-driver 2013 Mac Pro for the better part of a year (currently running 14.6), and with the exception of a minor graphical glitch (bits of the menu bar occasionally turn red until I switch applications) and Google Chrome not working with GPU rasterization enabled, it's been flawless.
My 2005 Mac Mini 1.25GHz PowerPC G4 still works. So does my 2006 Power Mac G5. Including the recapped Mac 512K.
I am both a PC and Mac user, with quite a bit of hardware over the last 20+ years. For me, my Macs typically have out lasted my PCs, with minimal quality and support issues. Almost all my old Macs which I collect (over 15, including Mac LC, Mac IIci, original MacBook Air, numerous MacBooks and iMacs and a Macintosh Lisa, all work).
my experience of macs and observations around me is that they either die the day after the apple care runs out, or you end up replacing them 10-15 years later because you want a new one.
My gut is they have far more computers in their fleet than any individual has exposure to? Such that, yes, there will be people that have short life cycles on computers they get. At large, though, anecdotal is very difficult to reason about.
That said, I'd be curious on what exact failure you saw? A 2018 model anything should still be running along fine right now.
I once worked with a woman who when through three different MacBook Pro's in one year. I still have no idea what the hell was going on there. I've never seen anything like since then, so maybe she just had whatever the opposite of a magic touch is.
I do wonder how long many newer units will last. My Mac Pro 2011 only died this year but it was a much more sturdy thing that a lot that have come out since. Only time will tell.
This is just "Macs don't get viruses" all over again. I have to run Crowdstrike Falcon on my work-issued Macbook and it is an absolute piece of crap. The problem isn't Windows but Delta's own device management and fallback strategy.
How does one solve for their own device management/fallback strategy? They are in an industry that is regulated to have endpoint protection. So even if they had a 1:1 DR zone they would have been running MS and CS on both, w/o safeguards in place that only Microsoft or CS could put in place for them (staggered rollout) both primary and DR would go down. It's really hard to put the blame on the customers (Delta) in this instance.
No industry is going to invest in 2 completely independently built and run systems that share zero components/vendors because that's what it would have taken here.
When their computers went down plenty of airlines started writing boarding passes by hand to keep things moving. Delta's operations meanwhile were completely frozen for a full week and cost them half a billion dollars. So it's not like the problem was unavoidable or unsolvable. Everyone but Delta managed.
Delayed update rollout is an enterprise level windows setting that’s used by my company (as well as on my personal windows machine through regex edits) specifically to protect business critical systems from this scenario. While Microsoft and cloudstrike should not have pushed this broken update, are they actually responsible for Delta or anyone else’s losses? My opinion is no, but we’ll see how a lawsuit shakes out.
I’d say test rollouts before rolling them out? I have about 10 stand alone machines at work that test updates a day before they go out, and in emergencies at least a couple of hours. Basic tests after an update “run some software, do some reboots, run a couple of benchmarks”, and I’m by no means an IT genius, and I would have caught this fk up.
These were self-managed servers. Delta manages them, and Delta selected/installed Crowdstrike. Delta had a poor DR plan, particularly around crew management disruptions (even in spite of other airlines going down in the last five years and it also costing THEM millions).
This is Ed Bastian deflecting. This type of disruption was foreseeable, and he had years of notice between the double Southwest crew management problems in 2022 and this outage.
While it was started by the Crowdstrike error, that took roughly 6-hours to resolve, the other week+ of Delta disruption (and 2K+ flights cancelled) was purely policy/planning/DR issues which the CEO is personally responsible for.
I legitimately believe Ed Bastian needs to fall on his sword for this one. You lose 500-million by gross incompetence you need to go.
PS - Apple also don't even offer an appropriate product in this space, so this is also technologically ignorant. If he had said Linux or even AWS/Google Cloud/etc it would make SOME sense (still misses the point though).
Said CEO: My sense is they’re probably the most fragile platform within that space. When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?
I don't even know where to start with this. Apple's stuff doesn't even fit in a rack anymore[0], extrapolate from there, Delta CEO. Even the interviewer thought to ask about the number of enterprise deployments of Apple gear versus Microsoft kit. "Bastian avoided the question..."
I'm not saying he's wrong, but I am saying he wouldn't know one way or another.
And about Apple: I haven't verified myself, but others here on HN were saying that Crowdstrike's stuff was apparently taking out Apple machines a month or two before. But no one noticed because...yup, the world doesn't run on macOS.
There's nothing different than what Delta did and what most F500 corporations did, other that many companies don't use Crowdstrike.
After that it's all the same stack with the same liabilities on it. All the while hoping your security office and vendors don't fuck up.
E.g. Will that security software mark the latest update of MS SqlServer as malware and quarantine it? What happens to your enterprise DB if that happens?
That's not true - other airlines were hit and Delta was hit far worse. There was a comment on HN discussing how Delta has the least disaster recovery planning of any of the airlines, and as a result they were wholly unprepared to respond.
You are considering the wrong type of disaster recovery. Disaster recovery in this case means IT DR - failing over to other systems, data centers, etc.
The other airlines that were impacted by Crowdstrike were able to come back online much more quickly than Delta was. That is a fact.
Scheduling recovery is dependent on those systems, but an entirely different process. I have worked on those recovery systems before.
Right, so do you, or do you not, run the same security stack on your DR systems? If you do you're f'ed. If you don't you might also be f'ed particularly if you're in the middle of an attack.
DR isn't in and of itself the solution. Would it have better to run linux? Well no, since crowdstrike did the same thing there.
And DR includes the literal recovery portion. American had IT ready to deploy and quickly fix the problem at the actual terminals, Delta didn’t.
We have baselines for airlines doing this better, why are you defending Delta so aggressively? They didn’t invest in the people, tools, or tech to recover from a severe outage and the CEO clearly wants to pass the blame.
If this had only happened to them due to some vendor they relied on, the argument makes sense, but it didn’t, it happened to multiple airlines of similar scale.
The rackmount Mac Pro seems to be aimed at studios, not server racks. But Delta's troubles were hardly confined to their server racks, so it doesn't really matter.
MBP is not an Enterprise Product or service. It’s a consumer device that an Enterprise permits. Sales force, PowerBI, CRM, GSuite - those are Enterprise services. For example, I don’t see a FaceTime for Work or iMessage for Work product. They are first class consumer services as they should be.
How many businesses would be affected by having iCloud Private Relay on? Apple even provides guides on how to simply block 2 DNS records to disable it in your organization.
Well, go on, migrate your entire business to Apple, then!
You'll get forced to run Clownstrike on much shinier hardware, it will be fun!
But, by no means, step back, look at how you're running your business, and decide it's time to treat processes, never mind people, with the respect they deserve. Because the shareholders wouldn't have it, you know...
Security compliance requires all sorts of "invasive" tooling to ensure your client workstations and servers are "safe". Sadly it's mostly a checkmark and often times has dated and arbitrary requirements. As far as I know CrowdStrike was one of the easier ones to setup albeit expensive.
A. Doing security is expensive and viewed as a cost burden at a lot of non-technical focused companies. Lots of businesses hedge their bets hoping that a security incident won't be as expensive or detrimental as having a great security posture. Sadly often times they aren't wrong either.
B. Security compliance standards are dated and opinionated, requiring rigid solutions to complex ever changing security threats.
Both of those can drive the narrative of pushing for tooling that offers the least amount of resistance to implement and be able to claim "secure".
Additionally IT and Operations teams are constantly getting more duties and can be some of the first teams to get rightsized and viewed as "cost centers" in some companies. I've seen teams reduced 50-80% over the years with expectations higher and security compliance becoming the last on the list and then gets the least amount of energy and attention.
Oh, and to address the "why Windows" thing: because it works, generally speaking.
All the device drivers you need to talk to 8K displays, boarding pass printers, passport scanners, et cetera are actually there. Not necessarily good, but they're at least, like, available and sort-of tested.
Then, the "centralized IT management" story is actually quite decent for Windows. You have AD (no, sorry, Entra Ultra-Secure, or whatever it will be called next week), group policies, deployment kits, kiosk lock-down modes, controlled updates[1], and what-have you.
All of that is, ehm, sort-of lacking on other platforms. Actually, the worst that can happen to a well-meaning IT person is having to deploy and manage some proprietary "ultra-secure" Android abomination, especially after the single source of that goes inevitably bankrupt...
([1] Except, of course, when the outsourced elite security ninjas feel the need to chase down dangling pointers in kernel mode in realtime. They, of course, get to do whatever they want because, hey, National Security!)
Well, not everyone, it was just, like, 10% of all Windows installs.
But here's how things work from the perspective of a small-ish airport, healthcare, or finance operator (DMM is a D*mb*ss Middle Manager as employed by a regulator, WIP is the well-meaning IT person on said operator's end):
1. DMM: You're critical infrastructure! It's imperative that the Bad Guys don't take over your PCs!
2. WIP: Well, I'm pretty sure that our locked-down kiosks are pretty secure? We have separate VLANs without Internet access, basic anti-malware and basically only allow our TN3270 and digital signage stuff to run?
3. DMM: Oh, sweet summer child! You will connect to the Internet to share operational details with us and to show all-important public service notices at all times! And, you will employ an elite ninja strikeforce to keep Al Qaida out of all of that!
4. WIP: ehm, yeah, well, I'm pretty sure we can't actually afford any elite ninjas? I mean: we run, like, an entire nation from a run-down office in a low-wage country?
5. DMM: Nevermind, my lad! Here is a list of Approved Vendors that will Keep You Safe (and, most importantly, pay my humble consulting fee on the lowdown)
6: WIP: Err, that just looks like a badly implemented rootkit?
7: DMM: Well, it is what everyone runs to stay secure! And we do want to stay secure right? Let me talk to your CEO -- I see we're set for a round of golf tomorrow...
