Since I’ve come on staff at NewPointe, the only Macs that I’ve purchased have been for production use (Pro Presenter, Final Cut, etc.).  To this point we only have ONE staff member at NPCC that is a full-time Mac user, and he bought his iBook before I came on board.

I’ve wondered now and then how long it would be before I’d get an actual request to purchase a Mac.  A couple weeks ago, I got my answer.  One of our end users has requested a MacBook to run Final Cut on, as well as ProTools for both offline and live use.  This unit would also serve as their “working” system, i.e. they would be checking email, writing Word docs, and doing everything else they did on their previous laptop, on this MacBook.

Now I don’t know if this request is going to go through or not, but it did get me thinking about support issues for Macs.  When do you actually begin to support Mac desktops and notebooks.  Do you wait until you have a certain number of them deployed?  Do you just wait until your users are so frustrated that you no longer have a choice? 

And what about getting your Macs to play nice on a Windows network?  Do a lot or organizations bind them to the windows domain, or are they just free-roaming machines that wander around on the LAN with no external management?

Let me get this out of the way.  I’m not AGAINST Macs.  Those who know me know that I’ve been editing on Final Cut for a few years now, so I could actually sit on either side of the fence on all the Mac/PC issues (cost aside, of course).  What’s on my mind right now is this:  On a Windows network, how much support time do you dedicate to your Mac users, and where do you draw the line on Mac support (if you have a line)?

I know many of you have different thoughts on this.  Share them if you have time.