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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.
...my neighbor had a PC, shes 70 years old.
...well..use the damn thing.
I supported her for several months on a weekly basis because of her virus woes and constant update and install issues. I was noticing that her computer was getting old and dated, and suggested for her to get a new computer. I suggested an iMac. (And interestingly enough, Im an Apple hater, I really hate macs!).
Why did I then suggest her one of those overpriced thingies? The darn thing cost her 2500 USD and didnt even come with an SSD in 2016. But the thing was, I knew she wouldnt get more worms and viruses...because Mac is like 10 percent of the worlds PC sales, and the viruses usually dont survive that far when the percentage of ownership is that low, so I thought...that ought to get her off my support case...
The only thing she ever contacted me about after that, was the bluetooth keyboard running out of battery juice after 3 months of not being plugged in, we fixed that and she was back to happy.
See the picture here? PC and old people = trouble because of the numerous technical issues, updates, plugins, viruses, worms etc...with her Apple...all she had to do is
Me? I still prefer PC, and I still hate the Apple company with a passion...but at least they got their audience right, idiots that cant figure out the slightest thing, and they pay the premium for it too!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Speaking as an admin, the number of mac users that request elegant peripherals is not trivial. Magic mouse? if one guy on the floor got one, youre dropping $80 a piece to make sure all your mac users get one. wireless headphones? sure hes the only guy in the office with Beats by Dre but pad your budget because everyone will want them at $300. add up all the magic trackpads magic keyboards and magic fuzzy accessories the average user wants and it starts to rival what you paid to buy and image a Dell. and if things ever get too hairy for a dell, your restore process is entirely automated in windows or linux. restoring a mac is nothing short of corporate witchcraft.
and remember, your fanboi doesnt want a used magic tracpad...he wants a new one.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The only people who doubt this story are those that have never used both Windows and Mac computers extensively.
I'd put one caveat.
*supported Win & Mac extensively.
I worked at a newspaper. We were 2/3 Mac, 1/3 Win. Windows users were at least half the support time, if not more.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
They're not self-selecting at a rate of 1300 people per week...
The IT dept is migrating them.
Don't act like you have more insight into IBM's support issues that the head IT guy at IBM.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Have actually worked in a real enterprise environment? They disable automatic updates and push their own patches. If they are having that much of a problem their IT department is incompetent.
love is just extroverted narcissism
That actually costs your company a lot more, then, not less.
The trick, of course, is that it's a hidden cost that is virtually impossible to tally on a spreadsheet: your productivity is lost while you fix that problem. Did it take you an hour, where a tech might have taken 10 minutes? Did it take you several days when a tech might have had it cleared up in an afternoon? Who gets paid more for their time, you or the tech? That's a cost that's really hard to quantify, and so gets completely ignored.
My favorite example of this is when I worked as a hardware depot manager for one site of a huge global corporation. IT management issued a mandate that said hardware depots could only keep X amount of stock on hand at any given time and could only order new stock when it was gone. New stock orders also required the personal approval of the #3 guy in IT management.
I regularly went through my stock in about a week, week and a half, and it would take two weeks or more to receive a new pallet of computers to refresh my stock. Furthermore, as you might expect, the #3 guy in IT is a pretty busy guy, so he would sometimes take up to a week to approve my stock orders.
In the end, IT saved millions globally because their stock orders were drastically reduced, yet on the local level you had engineers being paid upwards of $1000 a day to twiddle their thumb while they wait for their $500 computer to arrive. But IT doesn't see one dime of that cost. In fact, unless a department gets hit with a flood of new hires who need new computers, it's likely none of the local departments will see a big enough impact on their budget to formally complain to IT about the process. Yet the company's cost saving methods caused a $500 computer to cost upwards of $20,000, and all of it is hidden from the bean counters.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Who else's fault would it be that Windows requires 3x more support?
TFA does NOT say that Windows requires 3x more support. It claims that the TCO is three times higher. That is not the same thing.
Let's do the math:
I buy a low end Mac for $1000 and you buy a low end Win-PC for $500.
I need $500 worth of support from the Genius Bar, bringing my TCO to $1500.
If your TCO is three times that, then it is $4500, so you needed $4000 worth of support.
That is EIGHT TIMES as much.
Who else's fault would it be that Windows requires 3x more support?
The vendors who supply the 3rd party drivers.
Macs are more reliable/require less support because there is very little a corporation or end user can add to it, to customize it beyond built-to-order. I've been building my own PC desktop machines for decades and I have had very few problems because I tend to carefully select the parts and use "better" rather than "less expensive" parts. However my PCs are sort of anomalies in this respect. When helping friends and family "debug" their PC problems the BSOD was usually coming from a 3rd party driver, from a second tier low cost vendor. By maintaining a higher degree of control Apple is less susceptible to such problems.
The secondary benefit of my BYO approach is that I have had very few Linux compatibility problems over the decades.
Oh, and Windows has been running natively (dual boot) very reliably on my Mac laptops for many years now.
You have to spend a LOT on other stupid things to just begin to catch up with the cost of an Apple product.
IBM's "sample size" is undeniably large enough to be classified as "Statistically Significant".
They are not in the business of "shilling" for Apple.
They have run the numbers.
You are dead wrong. Period. And we Mac owners have been saying this for over 10 years. It's high time that somebody with some serious IT infrastructure took an honest look at the numbers.
And they did.
Now, Witness the Result.
Five minutes to put in a card.
One hour plus to decide which card to buy that will work best with your system and/or local network (and by one hour, I really mean "an entire evening of reading technical reviews" if I'm being realistic).
One to five hours to fix stupid driver issues that arise because of said new card that took only five minutes to put in... for every major OS update.
Sorry man but you can't get that kind of lie past me, I used to upgrade Windows systems also. I got off that damn train so that I could live life, and spend time doing things WITH computers instead of TO them.
And as for the $500 logic board upgrade - that's after three years, otherwise it's free. Or they might just give you a new system instead.
You keep popping cards in there and rooting through your OS though like some kind of animal, if you enjoy it more power to you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley