My workplace has announced the end of BYOD policies. It means, for me, after over a decade of using Mac laptops (mostly MacBook Air), I will be forced to use a company issued laptop. Possibly a Dell Latitude or Thinkpad T series. I'm angling for the T series Thinkpad. I'm not sure how I feel, I've dabbled with Windows on and off but I have always come back to using my Mac.
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BYOD Era Over
- Thread starter engbren
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i used a Dell XPS 13" in 2018 with Linux Mint for a graphic design project that was a nice experience.
the commands were complicated and trackpad limited at first, but the rest of the cropping, photo enhancing and organization was fast and easy. I was using a macbook air 11" all that decade.
I fi used that macbook, photoshop and a thumb drive i would have finished faster, but they forbidden freelancers to use their own computers, so i feel your pain!
the commands were complicated and trackpad limited at first, but the rest of the cropping, photo enhancing and organization was fast and easy. I was using a macbook air 11" all that decade.
I fi used that macbook, photoshop and a thumb drive i would have finished faster, but they forbidden freelancers to use their own computers, so i feel your pain!
Just out of curiosity… did the company give a reason for this? From what I’ve seen most companies have been going in the other direction, i.e. encouraging more BYOD - especially when it comes to phones.
I do MDM so I’ve had my hands on most of the Dell hardware and Macs of the last few years… The current-gen Latitude and T-Series are both decent enough machines, but stay away from the older Latitude or XPS models, some of which have spectacularly crappy keyboards and trackpads that are borderline unusable.
Windows is still Windows… Microsoft still can’t figure out how to handle high-DPI displays properly… but in this day and age when most things are done in the browser anyway I tend to notice those flaws less and less.
I do MDM so I’ve had my hands on most of the Dell hardware and Macs of the last few years… The current-gen Latitude and T-Series are both decent enough machines, but stay away from the older Latitude or XPS models, some of which have spectacularly crappy keyboards and trackpads that are borderline unusable.
Windows is still Windows… Microsoft still can’t figure out how to handle high-DPI displays properly… but in this day and age when most things are done in the browser anyway I tend to notice those flaws less and less.
Something to consider, and disclaimer: I'm a systems administrator, who from time to time has to create such policies, let alone have to adhere to them myself.
I can understand where a company comes from with this; having a company issued laptop makes maintenance for such equipment not only uniform, but drastically cheaper, let alone the support for everything. Think about it like an airline; an airline can keep costs low (read: not pass on extra costs to the consumer) by having fleet commonality. Having the same model of aircraft for their entire fleet keeps maintenance costs and training low.
Wash/rinse/repeat here. If they have the same model of laptop or similar model of laptop from a given vendor, the cheaper things will be for the company, as well as being able to take that money and give the employees more benefits/wage increases, because they will have the extra money available.
Having that versus employee convenience shows you where the company is going and why they are doing it.
That said, this is a huge bonus for you. Think about it this way: If you are an application developer, systems engineer, graphics designer, etc., and you are coding applications for that company, by nature of the agreements you have with the company, your work is their intellectual property, and as such, you hold no personal claim to that property, despite the fact that you coded all of it yourself. That code is sitting on your personal computer, which they would have the right to take and make sure you do not have any versions of said code that you could take to another company, in violation of your employment agreement.
By having all of that code on a company laptop, you are providing all physical and legal separation of your personal work and company work. What is on your Mac STAYS ON YOUR MAC, and there would be nothing that the company could do to get that data or that code. Having personal work and professional (employee) work on the same piece of hardware is a major invitation to legal issues that an employee definitely does not want. It would be better to have the inconvenience of having more than one computer to haul around than to have those legal issues hanging over you, especially if it came to a very nasty separation of you from the company.
In all honesty, this is a blessing, rather than an inconvenience.
BL.
I can understand where a company comes from with this; having a company issued laptop makes maintenance for such equipment not only uniform, but drastically cheaper, let alone the support for everything. Think about it like an airline; an airline can keep costs low (read: not pass on extra costs to the consumer) by having fleet commonality. Having the same model of aircraft for their entire fleet keeps maintenance costs and training low.
Wash/rinse/repeat here. If they have the same model of laptop or similar model of laptop from a given vendor, the cheaper things will be for the company, as well as being able to take that money and give the employees more benefits/wage increases, because they will have the extra money available.
Having that versus employee convenience shows you where the company is going and why they are doing it.
That said, this is a huge bonus for you. Think about it this way: If you are an application developer, systems engineer, graphics designer, etc., and you are coding applications for that company, by nature of the agreements you have with the company, your work is their intellectual property, and as such, you hold no personal claim to that property, despite the fact that you coded all of it yourself. That code is sitting on your personal computer, which they would have the right to take and make sure you do not have any versions of said code that you could take to another company, in violation of your employment agreement.
By having all of that code on a company laptop, you are providing all physical and legal separation of your personal work and company work. What is on your Mac STAYS ON YOUR MAC, and there would be nothing that the company could do to get that data or that code. Having personal work and professional (employee) work on the same piece of hardware is a major invitation to legal issues that an employee definitely does not want. It would be better to have the inconvenience of having more than one computer to haul around than to have those legal issues hanging over you, especially if it came to a very nasty separation of you from the company.
In all honesty, this is a blessing, rather than an inconvenience.
BL.
There is only a ban on BYOD for laptops - mobile phones are still allowed with MDM profiles installed. It does make me curious about using something like Samsung Dex. The main reason given is that this is a tightening of the information security posture of the company in order to comply with certain standards that our clients are demanding.
I like the enthusiasm and positive spin you've put on this situation. I don't agree with it but we can have differing opinions. I will point out though that your take on IP is very much a blanket statement that doesn't apply to everyone. I know several people with specific variations to IP clauses in their employment contracts as they already had their own business on the side.
I'll throw this out there. A previous employer I worked at dealt with the issue of mobile devices (read: iPhones). Because employees didn't want to carry two separate phones with them, they offered to give them an iPhone, and port their phone number over to that new device. However, that device was owned by the company, and as such, the ported number would also be owned by that company. So if the employee was fired, furloughed, or left the company, not only would they not keep that company-issued iPhone, but their number would be gone as well, including all of the contacts and data they have from that device (assuming that none of those employees backed up their iPhones, which most of them didn't).
Those people who were separated were not happy with losing all of the data that they had: personal/private, business, or otherwise, because all of that data existed on a company-issued iPhone, owned by the company, along with the phone number they may have had for 15+ years.
It doesn't always work out well, which is why such a separation of personal work from professional work on a single device is needed.
BL.
Using my work issued Windows laptop makes me appreciate my Mac. 
Using my work issued MacBook Pros make me appreciate my own personal Macs.Using my work issued Windows laptop makes me appreciate my Mac.
That sucks to hear. I'd also love to use my MacBook at work but it's not allowed even though our external employees may do as they please.
If your company have Office 365 subscription, subscribe to your own personal (or family) subscription and both OneDrive storages can be used on the company laptop. Hence, it makes it easier to move data back and forth.
Special emphasis on can but not should.
Special emphasis on can but not should.
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iPads might be another option depending on your use case. Most orgs treat iPad as just another iPhone so you might have a little more leeway. Since a pretty big portion of my everyday workflow has moved to cloud based services, I probably get more done on my iPad Air than my frankly terrible work issued MSI.
I’m actually jealous of your work issued Thinkpads/Latitudes because that would be what I would get too if I had my choice of work PC.
That's weird. I work in IT Support and we have hundreds of customers and none of the companies have such policies. I had never heard of BYOD policy before.