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Apple @ 50

Resurrecting my blog for a special occasion…

So, Apple. 50 years old today and I can genuinely say that I wouldn’t be where I am today without them. And that “where” is in New Jersey, visiting my partner who I met over 25 years ago when we both worked for the same Apple reseller and she came to he UK to train some of my Windows using colleagues how to support Macs.

My Apple journey started in 1986, when I arrived at Aston University and first used a Mac. Aston was part of the Apple University Consortium and even had an Apple Reseller based in the Guild of Students, more about them later, so there were Apple suites all over the place. The first time that I got on the Internet was using an SE/30 in the library and logging onto sites such as FUNET and WUARCHIVE to download fonts and sound clips. Not that we could download them directly back then. First you had to get on a VAX terminal, log onto the site remotely, get it to push the files to Imperial, from where you could download it on to the Mac.

Come 1989 and we bought a Mac Plus, with a second-hand 400K external drive, from Ruth and Dilip in that reseller in the Guild. Two years later I would find myself working alongside them at Second City Systems. Originally I was there providing temporary cover for someone who had gone to Afghanistan to get married and never came back, the rest is history as they say. I think he was offered a large tract of land as a dowery, or something like that. That was my second attempt to work for them after Jon Tack declined to hire me to work in sales, and I ended up doing demos for the person that got the job. I was tasked with learning an early version of Quark XPress in a day or two so in order to demo it.

After SCS were wound up I moved on to Leicester Computer Centre and I have to thank Steve Birch for vouching for me when Nick Lowe called him to see what I was like.

Hard at work at LCC

LCC was fun and I not only go to play with kit like the QuickTake 100, which was used to take the first pic (above) that I have of my journey, behind a Quadra 700 with a portrait display and early CD writer, but I also set up two of the not very many AWS 95 servers (running AU/X) that ended up in the UK as well as getting to design and implement a rather hacked together system which regularly dialled up to Demon Internet to download email and then distribute it to the QuickMail servers at the three offices by having them dial each other a couple of times an hour. This was cutting edge stuff at the time.

After LCC it was on to MicroWarehouse / MacWarehouse and more new tech to play with when we launched the first iMac at The Capital Cafe in Leicester Square. It was about a week after the US launch, which meant that by the time we ran the event you could actually print to a USB printer as the relevant drivers had been updated. After NeXT were purchased by Apple I was sent not only a copy of OS X Server 1.0 but also a multiport ethernet card to play with so that I could familiarise myself with things like NetBoot. Having a room of 20-30 multi-coloured iMacs all booting up together from a Blue & White G3 for a client who was setting up a web publishing business was a sight to behold.

It may not look like it but there is a Mac under the desk

MicroWarehouse was also where I got to learn how to run a phone queue when we were descended on by a number of colleagues from the US who came to tell us, as we saw it, what we were doing wrong. All my PC colleagues were cross trained on Mac, the Mac support people already having to cover Windows, by Melissa Drew and my head was certainly turned, though we weren’t to actually get together for another 17 years or so, and we bonded over Apple and sci-fi.

Apple didn’t have any courses for OS X to begin with, so I convinced my boss to send me on RedHat training, on the basis that OS X was BSD UNIX under the hood. My AU/X experience also helped and it was Zero to RHCE in six weeks flat.

There was more NetBooting, plus NetInstall, in 2008 when I used it to deploy 50+ MacPro video editing workstations for a satellite broadcaster. These were editing directly off an Xserve over ethernet. Performance was OK but it would have been much better if we had deployed Xsan. Never mind, I got to put in a few Xsan infrastructures and even got called into Abbey Road to fix one that another company had set up. I always liked playing with the new stuff.

I also got my first taste of product management and marketing after the UK arm of MicroWarehouse were bough by DSG and I was tasked with taking all of the packaged PC services that DSG offered and making replicas for the Mac. Artwork designed, products merchandised and training for a lot of field engineers organised. I also got my first taste of writing commercially, regularly contributing multi-page articles to the MacWarehouse magazine as well as having a monthly column in MacFormat.

In the Tech Centre at MicroWarehouse Runcorn

On to Insight as Technical Manager and, later, Apple Business Manger. Where I was regularly writing advertising copy, presenting to customers and colleagues and even coming up with the concept for several stands at client showcases. I also got to architect and manage what was, at the time, one of the the largest iPad deployments in the UK, something which also took me to Singapore and Hong Kong to teach the local teams what we were doing.

One of the first stands that I had a hand in designing
In between presentations

For a couple of years after I was an independent consultant, helping resellers navigate working with Apple and businesses understand how to get the most out of their investment in Apple.

One of those clients took me on full time with the goal of sorting out their Mac device management, which is how I find myself now working for BluePrism and lately SS&C Technologies after they purchased them.

In my New Jersey home office, where I spend around half the year

Today I spend almost half of every year in the US and fill my time with using Intune to manage PCs, iOS and Android, though I still work on a Mac and I’m using everything that I’ve learned from working with Apple for over 30 years to make the experience for my users as good as I can. Just because they use Windows doesn’t meant mean that we can’t make their experience as good as possible.

And all thanks to Apple.

admin

Reflections on an Apple Keynote*

Six years ago today, or so Facebook tells me, I wrote:

“Apple product announcement coming up shortly. I am about to drive to Manchester where tomorrow I need to be on a stand and talk Apple all day. 

I did not choose the timing of these two events. Remind me why I do this again?”

iOS 7 was about to be launched and, if it was made immediately available then the clients that would be coming to the event would, no doubt, expect that all the iPads we were showing would be running it. This was in the days before Caching Server and when a trade show stand would have been lucky for have a couple of MB downstream.

A year prior I was in the middle of one of the biggest iPad rollouts that Apple UK had seen with a client that hadn’t tested beta versions of the OS, even though they had a developer account. The release of iOS 6, and the inability to stop users upgrading as they pleased lead to the brakes being put on the rollout mid-stream, when it was discovered that a critical part of their deployment wasn’t properly compatible with iOS 6. Oh yes, and when the new iPads were announced at that same keynote all the old models, which the client had been planning their deployment around, suddenly went end of life and were replaced with shiny new ones. Shiny new ones that only ran iOS 6 and which, both for the above mentioned reasons and because having some of nearly 10,000 users receiving the latest model when others had the “old ones” would have caused discontent in the ranks, would not be suitable. Cue senior management making heated calls to source sufficient quantities of the old, now discontinued, iPads.

Did I mention that we had warned the client that this was likely to happen as experience told us what might happen re hardware changes? No? Well we did and continued to do so for the next few years, but that didn’t stop them placing large orders at the same time of year and constantly seeming to be surprised at what happened. The same with other clients who nearly always seemed to time their rollouts around product launches of some kind.

In the years that have passed most, if not all, of those problems have gone away.

We no longer have to image iPads and then manually configure them for each user but, instead, can have them automatically enrol into an MDM via Apple Business Manager or Apple School Manger, which also deploys all the relevant apps to them.

The settings which we had to have stored in a backup can now be delivered via a configuration profile and well written apps can be personalised for each user via AppConfig instead of a technician having to set up each one by hand.

Caching server has made over the air installs to a large number of devices on the same network less dependant on bandwidth to the internet and App thinning means that the actual binary which is downloaded can be considerably smaller.

While clients can still get access to beta releases if they are registered developers, the AppleSeed for IT Program provides a much more formal way for organisations to evaluate forthcoming releases and ensure that there will be few, if any, issues come go-live.

Finally you can now stall an OS upgrade for up to 90 days if there is a critical part of your deployment that is not yet ready for the upgrade.

It’s been 7 months since I left resellerland and in that time a lot has changed for me too. To begin with there were long periods when I hardly paid any attention to what was going on in the Apple world and it has been good to step back from the constant pressure, giving myself a chance to “decompress” as they call it today. I’ve taken on some new stresses though. Being a single father who has now taken over as the primary carer for his 12-year old son, who has some significant challenges of his own that he could do with help on. I initially said that I wouldn’t jump at the first job I saw, that I’d take my time and find something that was right for me. After a while, though, you start thinking that sooner or later you are going to have to take something just to keep the lights on. You then start wondering just how flexible jobs in late 2019 have become, and how easy is it to work around the school run etc.

And then today, as Facebook popped up that memory from 6 years ago, I see a vacancy at a company that I would love to work for and for a position similar to one that I have interviewed for previously, and got down to the final few for. Part of me wants to jump at it, as it could give me just about everything that I want. The other part reminds me that it almost certainly wouldn’t allow me the flexibility that I need. Lots to ponder on.

Just when I think I might be done with this industry once and for all, it reminds me that it might not be done with me just yet.

*but not the one you are thinking of