Obviously you haven't read my reply. If you would you'd not have quoted the entire reply, you wouldn't have used the plural form of the word "post" and you'd definitely not have made the above statement as it would have been clear I put Apple, Dell, HP and other OEMs on the same level. The exact opposite of what you are doing: you're the one living in his own little world where certain manufacturers are all magical and special and others aren't. In the real world there is no such thing.
It is not about the operating system. These kind of machines are a complete package from hardware to software. That's what manufacturers of the actual applications you'd run on those devices will look at and certify.
Be careful with "everyday tasks" because it highly depends on the user. In our case it is mostly calculations and 3D work.
Exactly: enterprise hardware/software is all about the guarantee that it works. Consumer hardware/software isn't. Unfortunately that has the added side effect that some abuse this. Making sure things really do work means that you have to work with the software people since you need both hardware and software. Part of that is the certification process.
However, reality dictates that this isn't always the case. As one of the sysadmins it is my job to fix problems and we see lots of them. Software is quirky but so is hardware. We've seen crappy hardware support from HP and Dell as well as crappy software support where the company says it will work but in reality it doesn't. Graphics cards are notorious. Lots of bugs get fixed by installing new drivers. But you can't simply install a new version because there are different kinds of drivers. You need to know the software that has to run on the machine because some will only certify against a particular driver. Install the wrong one and things won't work. In some cases a new version of the software also requires a new driver version. These drivers can only be installed and used when you have the enterprise grade hardware that goes with it. You can't use these on the consumer version of the same hardware.
These guarantees work nice on paper but reality is a different beast. That last part is what you seem to be missing and that's why I called you naive.
Yep and you've just given a very good example to show that you do not understand the hardware nor what I'm saying
Remember that Titan-K6000? The same hardware: it has the same components, same architecture. Like I said, the only difference between consumer grade and enterprise grade is the guarantee that things work. In your example the more reliable version of the exact same hardware will get the enterprise grade stamp, the less reliable version of, again, that exact same hardware will get the consumer grade stamp. This is called cherry picking and they do it for consumer grade hardware as well (high end vs low budget). That's the reason why things will work with consumer grade hardware. It is just not guaranteed to work. The only thing you pay for is that little guarantee it'll work, the certification.Again, this works nice on paper but doesn't in reality. In our case we take use of the fact that the consumer grade and enterprise grade version are the same hardware. We can cut costs here by using the consumer grade version. This does not have an effect on the TCO, our way of administering the computers or the users workflow/business. We test in advance as we always did (we do not trust the manufacturers or certifications since we know how computers work in reality), we replace hardware as we always did (either the component or we get them a temporary machine to continue their work) and we fix software problems like we always did (and also here we can give them a temporary machine to continue working).
Nope, that isn't true at all. It is mostly about the certification because a computer is not purely hardware. A computer is hardware AND software. If you want a reliable computer you need to make sure that the hardware is at its finest as well as the software. That's what certification is about. You can only guarantee something works if you look at the entire picture. However, certification is part of the process. The other part is how you run your IT (take a look at ITIL to get an idea of what things you need to do) and how you arrange things like replacements and repairs (aka the support contract that you can't get with Apple but do get with Dell and HP).
Simply put: hardware is only one small part of the story. There is more to it, an awful lot more to it. Also, do not underestimate the quality and power of modern hardware. The quality and performance gap is very narrow.
