Most IT shops clueless about Macs?

The shop I worked at had little expertise with Macs. I had little Mac expertise too. I had to teach myself most of what I now know and use it to service clients' Macs. I'm going to keep learning and looking forward to Parallels Mac Microsoft SCCM to speed up routine work. How about you? Where when why and how did you learn most of what you know now regarding Macs? Have you experienced clueless IT shops when needing Mac services?

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I work for a company that is mostly Macs. Since I've been there I've become rather adept at supporting them, both hardware and software. I've developed various solutions for speeding up deployments and solving various common issues in our semi-enterprise environment.

I assume many shops without Apple Certified staff on-site won't get much Mac foot traffic. These days most Mac owners will just take them to an Apple Store or a very obvious Mac-centric repair place.

 

I find actually many shops can support many basic mac issues. I may be the exception as my husband has his own shop and supports a few thousand of them and is an ACMT ( among others that predate that )

as for how did I learn Macs personally, that would be from starting out on them on the Mac Classic and working my way through the whole line and all the OS's including OS9, which made Vista with bad drivers seem like a dream ) now I find myself not learning the newer features as much on 10.9 as I spend most of my hardcore work time on the dark side. and most of my OSX time doing e-mails and web work.

 

A lot of "Mom and Pop" PC shops in my area don't support Macs at all, they are Windows driven. They don't even support units with Linux/Unix/*nix operating systems. However, there are also a lot of personal stores (i.e. not corporate business owned) that only support Macs and nothing else. I think it all balances out in most big cities, you just have to know where to look.

My first, true Mac experience didn't come until 2011 when I purchased my first MBP. I had intermittently used them starting with the Macintosh back in 1990 but never owned a Mac until 3 years ago. Now, I think that's all I will ever buy for myself.

 

There used to be a store in my area called Connecting Point Computers. They did work on both Macintosh and Windows computers, but specialized in Macintosh services. The people that worked there actually knew about Apple computers and weren't the type that were just trying to get you to buy a new computer. That store was bought by a chain of stores called Computer Concepts. They claim to be an Apple Authorized Service Center, but the few times I went in there, I saw nothing but old, outdated, overpriced Dell and Compaq towers, a laptop or two, and nothing pertaining to Apple products. I was looking for an ExpressCard 34 SD card reader. When I asked the guy there if they anything like that in stock, he looked at me with this confused look, went in the back, and came up with a PCMCIA card reader. I wanted to ask him if he even knew what ExpressCard was, but I just said that it wasn't what I was looking for and left.

 

We had Macs at school (sometimes in the middle of the 90s...), so they were my first contact with the world of computers. I still feel kind of handicapped when I sit in front of a PC, suddenly things happen with these things and I never know where they came from.

 

Mac are easy and incredibly self-explanatory to use. I think trial-error method works incredibly well with macs, along with using google to solve any other needs with a Mac. Frankly, alot of the capabilities on Macs are incredibly pointless to standard users or business users. For instance Garage Band or Maps or iMovie? won't be using that...

 

Well, to be fair, most computer problems (regardless of OS) can be solved with a simple Google search. Or Bing or Yahoo, if you're a weird-o

 

Well where you say most, I want to say ALL for apple. But Apple products do have a server issue/problem with network printing for whatever reason. Now maybe it's based on my printer but I use a Samsung Laser Printer and it's a real pain in the butt to setup via shared networking printing.

 

Nothing's ever 100% in life, and IT-related stuff isn't an exception. I'm sure there are some things that you can't find very easily on Google about OSX.

 

I would pretty exclusively go to the Apple store for Mac issues. Just because I've had a history of good service and I would only go there if I absolutely could not solve the problem on my own. (The only times I've really gone there for repairs, it was a hardware issue anyway).

The main IT shop that I've used advertises that they're good with Macs. My friend sent one there to get a screen fixed--no issues.

 

Wow, that's interesting Korn, you seemed like me, been on Macs exclusively for 15 years. It's just the way you support Macs here that make it seem like you've used them for years. What I tend to find is smaller entities like a few law and tax offices that I personally know use Macs as their main machines. I would love to see more banking institutions using them as they wholeheartedly support iOS.

 

Nope, I didn't use them until I had a job and could actually afford one. Until then, I went with what I could afford or what my parents purchased. That was back when you could get a top-of-the-line Windows gaming notebook for $1500 or a lesser equipped PowerBook G4 (~2005) that didn't work with any of the programs required for my undergraduate degree (AutoCAD in particular). Now I can easily get away with it, I think the move to x86 and x86-64 architecture has helped developers release their programs for OS X as it's now a matter of changing OS code rather than modifying that and CPU instructions to fit the PowerPC line.

It also wasn't until Apple switched over to Intel when I really started looking at their systems. I then landed a job and picked up a 13" MBP in 2011. I don't think I would buy a notebook or desktop (I've been eyeing an iMac) from any other manufacturer now, I've become too fond of OS X and absolutely hate the direction Windows is going.

 

That's exactly how I feel--the main I use a Mac is because I much prefer OS X to Windows. I do like the hardware, but the hardware is not the main reason at all for me.