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Macs End Up Costing 3 Times Less Than Windows PCs Because of Fewer Tech Support Expense, Says IBM's IT Guy (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report on Yahoo (edited): Last year, Fletcher Previn became a cult figure of sorts in the world of enterprise IT. As IBM's VP of Workplace as a Service, Previn is the guy responsible for turning IBM (the company that invented the PC) into an Apple Mac house. Previn gave a great presentation at last year's Jamf tech conference where he said Macs were less expensive to support than Windows. Only 5% of IBM's Mac employees needed help desk support versus 40% of PC users. At that time, some 30,000 IBM employees were using Macs. Today 90,000 of them are, he said. And IBM ultimately plans to distribute 150,000 to 200,000 Macs to workers, meaning about half of IBM's approximately 370,000 employees will have Macs. Previn's team is responsible for all the company's PCs, not just the Macs. All told IBM's IT department supports about 604,000 laptops between employees and its 100,000+ contractors. Most of them are Windows machines -- 442,000 -- while 90,000 are Macs and 72,000 are Linux PCs. IBM is adding about 1,300 Macs a week, Previn said.
The problem is that not everyone is you. At a former job I supported PCs and then the director of marketing decided that he liked Macs so he unilaterally switched his group to Macs. Anecdotally I'd say the users had just as many problems that needed my help as they did when they were on PCs, and in addition had additional problems they needed sorting out in the first couple of weeks following the switchover due to their lack of familiarity with OSX. Most of their day to day problems were software related, so the underlying OS didn't factor into that one way or the other, and these peoples' self troubleshooting skills were practically nonexistent so it meant just as much work for me, and in some cases more as I was also then tasked to find them alternate software to do a given task.
For the average users, once you get past the enthusiasts skewing the numbers the IT savings will probably not be as significant as this article makes them out to be. People are still going to be having trouble mapping a drive, sharing a folder, logging into an SFTP site on Windows or OSX.
Hardware wise, the Macs generally use decent hardware that lasts, but also charge a premium for that. If offices used PCs that weren't the cheapest thing that fell off the turnip truck they'd see as good or better failure rates than the Macs. And Apple hasn't been 100% immune to shitty hardware slipping out the door so spending more on the Mac isn't a bulletproof guarantee either.
We have both in our household. I've bought two laptops ($450 HP, used for ~4 years; $750 lenovo), replaced my desktop monitor ($200), upgraded the desktop CPU ($150), upgraded the desktop GPU ($150), replaced the desktop motherboard ($100), added more harddrives ($225)...Totalling $2025.
Yep still cost less than the wife's 2007-2008 macBook Pro ~$2300.
Within 2 years, the MacPro's headphone line went out. According to Apple, fixing that requires... wait for it... a new motherboard: $500. Anectdotal of course, but three different members of the family have taken Macs in for inspection|repair, and every damned time are told "motherboard" $500+ to fix. In one case all that was *actually* required was a new power supply.
I am sure the same is true at my company. The IT department locks down and otherwise messes with the Windows PCs ... because they can. This impulse to control leads directly to IT support tickets. They don't lock down the Macs because they are not tied into the domain like the PCs are. Most Windows users in my company have to put in a help desk ticket to get new software, update existing software or even add the new printer that IT just installed down the hallway. This is not true for the Mac users. The difference in the way the IT department treats Macs and PCs is the source of the difference in the number of tickets per device-type not the device-types themselves.