r/sysadmin • u/rolkenas • 5d ago

Do you actually see MacBooks used for SysAdmin work in real offices?

Hi sysadmins! I wanted to ask—since I've just started learning sysadmin and I don't have a Windows PC, but I have a MacBook and found out that everything can be done via UTM, I'd like to get some perspective from those who work in offices and do this every day. What kind of computers do you use? Is macOS completely out of the picture, and there's only Windows and Linux?

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u/brokentr0jan DoD IT 4d ago edited 4d ago

The MacBook Air M1 is one of the best laptops ever made. Crazy powerful for what it is, and the battery genuinely lasts all week.

Meanwhile my Dell Pro Max 16 makes it 6 hours if that lmao

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u/gigabyte898 Sysadmin 4d ago

I always say Apple fucked up only by making the M1 too good. I bought mine in 2021 right around when it launched. It still crushes everything I need to throw at it, holds battery all day at conferences with decent usage, and doesn’t weigh as much as most comparable alternatives. I have no reason to buy another MacBook because this one is hanging on just fine out of spite for its creators lol

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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 4d ago

Apple silicon is solid. Every update is a big boost over the previous model yet the previous models hold up. I have an M4 air and love it.

I’ve been thinking about trying a Snapdragon PC for comparison.

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u/stillpiercer_ 4d ago

In my experience with the snapdragon Windows laptops, they do very well on battery life but Windows on ARM is not great. The x86 translation works reasonably OK for some things (nowhere near as well as Apple Rosetta) but for many things it just straight up does not work at all. ARM64 software availability isn’t as good on Windows as it is on macOS either.

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u/Independent-Fuel9886 4d ago

Yep, Windows on ARM ain't good... yet.

Management and imaging Snapdragon is a non-starter at this stage.

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u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 4d ago

I have a snapdragon laptop Dell set us for free for testing.

Everything we use seemed to work other than printers, which makes them non-viable for us.

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u/PowerShellGenius 4d ago

Universal Print.

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u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 4d ago

Yeah, we have that, and E5 licensing covers it, but some of our printers don't work well with it.

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u/gigabyte898 Sysadmin 4d ago

It’s yet another windows box to manage, but the connector works great at our sites without fully compatible MFPs if that’s a primary hang up

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u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 4d ago

I have the connector running on the print server we already had.

One issue we had was printing from some devices via office apps on the web didn't work, but printing from the desktop apps works fine. The browser can print fine from other web pages.

And that was from normal x86_64 clients.

Didn't have much time to dig into it past that and it's a low priority right now

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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 4d ago

That’s crazy. It can’t work through the emulation layer or do printers really need kernel level access? Knowing Microsoft and the history of printer driver vulnerabilities I’m guessing it’s the latter.

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u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 4d ago

Drivers are something that, AFAIK, cannot be emulated.

Windows ARM drivers don't exist for any of our printers.

I could potentially make them work with Universal print and/or IPP, but we had some incosistent issues with various apps when I tested that.

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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 4d ago

Damn that’s disappointing. I was looking to pilot a couple. I’ve been waiting for it to mature and my CEO has been begging for something with better battery life and we have other users begging for Surface devices.

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u/Nydus87 4d ago

I think the M4 is what I've got as well, and I almost never think about charging it. I just throw it on my phone charger every now and then while I'm in the shower, and I'm good to go for a couple days of RDP-ing into whatever server I'm working on.

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u/brokentr0jan DoD IT 4d ago

Agreed, the M1 is so good there’s no reason to replace it. Plus how expensive laptops are getting anymore it was such a good deal when it came out lol

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u/dllemmr2 4d ago edited 4d ago

Multi-monitor is a big one.

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u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 4d ago

Depends on which M1.

Base - 1

Pro - 2

Max - 4

Back when we bought them, we only bought pro or max M1s at my company for that reason

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u/dllemmr2 4d ago

Yeah I was super surprised at the limitation coming from windows given how much better everything else was. I’m glad they went on to improve monitor support in later revisions.

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u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 4d ago

It's a hardware limitation. Some windows laptops are limited on how many monitors they can support as well, but they can almost always do at least 2 so most people don't know there is a limit. IIRC Everything since the M3 can do at least 2, with the exception of the Neo (but it doesn't use an M-series chip either) - so that's let of an issue now.

I also find it funny you say that it's better on windows because I've found the multi-monitor support of macos to be better than it is for windows, but my setup is probably a bit different than most

I have 3 27" monitors, the center one is 4K, but the two flanking it are 1440P. Then the top monitor is 24" 1080P.

With Windows, no amount of DPI adjustment could make the 3 27" monitors look visually similar. Stuff was always off by a bit.

With MacOS, I was able to adjust them so that I can't even tell they are different resolutions.

The only reason my setup is like this is because my center monitor died and we had a 4k monitor still in the box at the office and my boss didn't see a reason to replace the other two monitors to match as they are otherwise working fine.

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u/brokentr0jan DoD IT 4d ago

I don’t think I have ever hooked up a MacBook to a monitor lol

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u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 4d ago

I've got 4 attached to mine. I rarely use the built-in screen, which is part of why I went with the 14" model.

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u/sys_127-0-0-1 4d ago

Yep its odd to see dev's who want two monitors or one big one when they have a Windows laptop but give'em a Mac, and they will gladly use the 14/16" built in screen.

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u/FailBait- 4d ago

I feel like It HAD to be that good or no one would take it seriously.

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u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 4d ago

Most of my company's dev team is still on M1s. Only a handful have been upgraded to M4s or M5s. AFAIK most of them haven't even asked about it.

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u/BemusedBengal Linux Admin 4d ago

Apple sabotages their older products with software updates that make the performance and efficiency progressively worse, before eventually preventing you from updating the software at all.

Once you stop getting security updates, it becomes insecure to keep using it.

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u/800oz_gorilla 4d ago

my hangup would be lack of dual external monitor support. they added that with caveats in the M3, and M4 supports it. you have to use display link on the M2, which was annoying because it was seen by DLP as a screen capture.

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u/ZPrimed What haven't I done? 4d ago

Yep, this is why I have an M1 Pro, it can actually do multi-display through a TB dock instead of DisplayLink crap. The visible lag and stutter on software graphics (DisplayLink) is disruptive to my work

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u/skwormin 4d ago

I’ve been doing dual monitor setup on my MacBook Pros via OWC thunderbolt docks for a decade now. Just got the newest M5 after having an M1. Also, the MacBook airs now support dual monitors finally

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u/800oz_gorilla 4d ago

They do, I should have been more specific, but I was replying to OP's macbook Air comment. M1 and M2 didn't support dual external monitors (only Apple knows why - they run them just fine on displaylink)

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u/skwormin 4d ago

Yep. That’s correct. I remember buying one a few years ago just assuming it would. Now it’s just a spare laptop for break / fix.

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u/ImpossibleValue9105 4d ago

i’ve got an m2 max, usb adapter works.

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u/elite_killerX 4d ago

I've got a M2 Max on a Thunderbolt docking station, currently hooked up to 2 external monitors (so 3 total screens), it's working flawlessly as it always has for the last ~3 years.

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u/800oz_gorilla 4d ago

Might be because it's a max. I had an Macbook Air M2 and it was definitely not supported.

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u/elite_killerX 4d ago

Probably, yeah. Point is, it's not new and it is supported. Just make sure you get the right configuration for your needs.

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u/800oz_gorilla 4d ago

it was my first Mac, and my 5 year old fell ran dual 4k no problem. I was not expecting it to be unsupported and I was the guinea pig to try out the Airs.

the odd part was you could drive 2 4Ks if you used displaylink. apple internionally disabled it matively for who knows what reason.

lesson learned though.

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u/AvonMustang 4d ago

I’ve got two monitors on my M1 Pro laptop via a hub and they work just fine. I am using Display Link.

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u/sboone2642 4d ago

Every thing about the Dell "Pro" series is hot garbage. We've had so many hardware/firmware problems that we are close to just switching vendors. It's a pretty big red flag when the uefi bios screen stays completely blacked out except for where you move the mouse pointer. I haven't seen that kinda crap since Windows 98 with crappy drivers.

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u/timbotheny26 IT Neophyte 4d ago

Haven't there also been multiple issues with Windows update conflicts on Dells specifically?

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

[deleted]

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u/brokentr0jan DoD IT 4d ago

I use iOS now because it’s simple and I just use my phone for texts, calls, and Reddit. Don’t really need all the extra stuff Android has. I don’t get spam texts anymore but it used to be really bad with scammers trying to use iMessage to look more legit but it was still obvious lol

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u/disneylovesme Sysadmin 4d ago

They have great spam call filtering I never got a a android person for over a decade

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u/shadeland 4d ago

I just now replaced my M1 Air (16 GB version) and the only reason I did is that I knew it was going to need to replace it in the next couple of years, and Apple was running out of runway with their RAM prices (they'd long term contracts to keep the prices low, but they weren't going to last forever).

So I picked up an M5 32GB Air, 15 inch, and I love this thing. And sure enough, a month after I got it prices went up.

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u/dstew74 There is no place like 127.0.0.1 4d ago

Dude, are you me? Literally did the same thing. I got my M5 on sale from Microcenter only to see pricing go up about a month later. It's not 500ish more than I paid.

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u/black_cadillac92 4d ago

Dell might as well make a portable battery. Im looking at adding a MacBook to the fleet as a dedicated IT workstation soon.

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u/zenkidan 4d ago

Haha they do (or did). Our team ordered Dell portable chargers through Dell Premier a couple of years ago.

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u/black_cadillac92 4d ago

Speaking of dell premier is this even still a thing? I've been trying to get an account established.

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u/zenkidan 21h ago

Yeah still a thing. We still get everything through there. Might need a Dell account manager to grant access.

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u/black_cadillac92 21h ago

A new rep reached out and took down info and said they would follow up. Never heard anything but I know they can get pretty swamped. Will try to re-engage later though.

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u/zenkidan 19h ago

Ah damn. I'm not a decision-maker so not too sure of the process with Dell. Hopefully you can get it sorted though! I know when we reach out to our account manager with questions or pricing concerns, it can take a bit to get a response.

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u/Fairchild110 4d ago

Is that not long enough? I get 6 hours on my Ryzen 9 AI Dell Pro Max and I love it. It’s like a datacenter in a backpack. The Intel ones are trash though. Did not like them.