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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.
I mean, I'm sure our Linux users overall require the least tech support. But that's a function of who they are more than what they're using.
I don't doubt that Macs require less support, but 40% vs 5% says that something else is going on - and I doubt that sort of ratio will hold once people are converted in bulk.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
...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.
Why call bullshit? Macs generally require less user intervention to run, and don't have automatic updates to screw things up at inopportune times. Program installation and removal is generally much simpler.
The hardware is also of much better quality than most "enterprise" computer builds, so it would last a lot longer and not have glitches...
The only people who doubt this story are those that have never used both Windows and Mac computers extensively.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
I'm glad he made a point of saying Windows PCs rather than just PCs, as the world in general tends to do.
I've always hated Windows and found it far more awkward, unfriendly and non-intuitive to use than literally any other OS I've ever tried (which after 35 years of software development is a LOT). Windows started out as a messy compromise (anyone else remember yield()? )and has only gotten worse over time. It truly boggles my mind how most corporates and their IT departments still continue to push its use over other OS's.
*looks at post*
Get your asbestos underwear! Get your asbestos underwear here folks! Don't get into a flamewar without being prepared!
Macs are mostly given to software devs and graphic artists who are much less likely to do stupid things with their machine than your average MBA Powerpoint jockey?
Who else's fault would it be that Windows requires 3x more support?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Just think if apple had better hardware how dead windows can be.
But right now they have 3-4 year old hardware at new hardware pricing.
No real workstation
No power desktop
No gaming desktop
Well the new mac pro kind of fits the listed rolls but in a poor way with lot's of ext stuff needed to make it full.
No real servers or even a good mini server.
No tough book laptop
No all in desktop with easy to swap hdd's and ram.
No laptop with more then a few ports
No gaming laptop
No Mobile workstation laptop with workstation video and or high end cpus.
No dual cpu workstation.
No os rollback on new hardware.
Having worked at IBM before, there was a lot of legacy software than ran on PC which would often stop working because of a problem with a remote server. The only way to report such problems would be by calling the help desk. It wouldn't matter whether it was a problem with Windows, or whether you knew exactly what the problem was. It all had to be reported through the help desk.
I imagine that if you use a Mac then it means you don't need to run any of the legacy software. And if you don't need to run the legacy software, there's no reason to ever call the help desk.
I would believe if there were fewer hardware-related help desk calls with the Mac, but I have a hard time believing that PCs require more help desk calls simply because Windows/PCs sucks.
Lotus Notes / Domino and other IBM software that is mandatory on Windows laptops is to blame for much of this. Mac OS users are much more on their own, are not bogged down with all the company cr*p and just do their job.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Typical corporation lock down Windows PCs so much. No admin rights, no USB thumb drive allowed, custom firewall rules blocking everything but TCP port 80 outbound (and even there, they use a proxy server to block many web sites). When the same corporations get Macs, they leave them alone. So of course the users don't need to call IT to install software, they have admin rights to do it themselves.
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.
Wow, your anecdotal experience from 13 years ago is so relevant today...
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Well, why don't those users modify the code themselves and compile their own version of Linux in order to enable them to complete those simple tasks? /Slashdot
As an I.T. Support contractor, we call that job security.
This isn't really news. OS X is a good working unix, it is built and controlled by the same people who build the hardware. It's basically fully integrated into the hardware. It has always had a very clear separation of user and system space and Macs aren't plagued by bloat and shovelware.
You get a mac unpack it, start it and it works. That hasn't changed in decades and holds true to this very day. Not so with a PC. Just watching my colleague hassling with Windows 10 and Office365 at my shop has me stand in amazement over the eternal shittyness of the MS provided solutions that apparently holds to this very day as it did in the Windows ME days. Even today you can't get a basic Groupware from them up and running without a total messy frustration ensuing.
I remember thinking about the brand-new first ever iMac and noticing that you could get one, start it, and didn't even need to adjust the CRT monitor or resolution. A godsend for ordinary users and maintenance personnel. That type of integration and result oriented setup was lightyears ahead of any ugly clunky Windows box. And it still is.
That they are cheaper in maintenance is blatantly obvious IMHO.
A windows PC that doesn't suck is still a rare thing. Probably these surface books from MS themselves are what comes closest to a MacBook.
I've said it in the 90ies and it holds true to this very day: In terms of basic system integrity Windows combines all the disadvantages of Linux with all the disadvantages of a Mac. The only reason ever to get Windows was and still is to run programms on it that wouldn't run anywhere else. And those are pirated software, Games or some obscure CAD program for engineers that don't know anything other than Windows.
That's why Google is moving into their Groupware and productivity space and Chromebooks, as the poor mans mac, are taking over.
Not that I like the prospect of Big Google watching everything, but anything that removes MSes abysmal model from the body public is a good deed. It's not that MS would be any better. Only with Google at least it works and you don't have to pay for it.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Being inflexible while IT moves forward is not a good solution. Regardless of the tech or problems.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Read your post again. Now assume your time is worth more than $0...
That is why macs cost less.
My own time I defiantly consider to be worth more than $0.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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.
...at a medium sized company that supports Windows, Mac, and Linux desktops. I'm more on the programming side, but I stay on top of the support issues for various departments. Macs need tech support largely for the same reason Windows users do: because most users aren't terribly computer savvy, aren't confident enough to just try plugging things in, make dumb mistakes, and generally don't know where to find easy answers.
From my experience, Macs need very little tech support when we give them to, say, the publications department - but become much more problematic for field staff and managers (especially to start) because things aren't where they've grown to expect them to be, because of limited software availability, and because of more limited "local guru helpers" (ie. that guy in cubicle 4 who's into computers).
So when I say that I wouldn't think IBM will see this sort of support benefit ratio as they move to wider roll out, I'm doing so based on experience, and also on a suspicion that IBM has motivation to present this information in an exaggerated way (a suspicion confirmed by insider perspectives in other comments).
But now that I know that you, personally, haven't had problems with your Macs... well that changes everything. Thanks so much.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
A lot of what you just described are costs required to run the business regardless of platform.
I worked for IBM. My windows laptop was not what I would have preferred but it never gave me any real trouble.
What it cost the mothership to maintain is an entirely different matter. I don't think I ever did anything to maintain or upgrade it.
You have to spend a LOT on other stupid things to just begin to catch up with the cost of an Apple product.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I have never seen a company so good at breaking functional OS installs with updates.
After installing any new version of Windows, all PC users get used to having a small percentage of Windows Updates fail to install. As time goes on, 'update rot' causes an increasing percentage of updates to fail, always for some reason the user knows nothing about. Windows Update even has a 'hide this update' feature intended to prevent endless attempts to install a failed update.
Eventually, update rot on some PCs eventually turns into total update death, in which every boot of the system begins with the message "Installing Windows Updates..." You have to watch the machine grind through half an hour of installing the same series of updates that all fail, followed by restore from a pre-update restore point. This is generally when the user starts budgeting for a Mac to replace the cursed thing.
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
And therein lies the REAL problem with the placement of Macs in the Workplace: Fear of the Computer Priesthood.
The most common compliant I ever got about Macs is the preference file for iTunes becoming corrupt. Deleting the preference file fixes that problem. But I'm also obligated to remind users of corporate policy that they're not supposed to have terabytes of personal media files on their system. However, it's the PC users who screams bloody murder when the hard drive dies and the only copy of their media library is gone.
Do not even try to deny it. I have had more than one Windows Admin. tell me exactly what you said.
The current network I'm overseeing has 80,000+ workstations. Out of a team of 35 people, one specialist handles ~2,000 Macs workstations and another specialist handles ~2,000 Linux workstations. Everyone else handles Windows workstations. Having one person to handle Macs and/or Linux is fairly typical in most Windows shops I've worked for. If Macs ever did overtake the workplace, I'll get a Mac certification and keep on working.
I'm having some trouble wrapping my brain around that. Maybe I'm just tired.
Is '3 Times Less' the same as 'one third'?
I have a recipe book nearby and I can't seem to find any instance where an ingredient should be '3 Times Less'. What, for instance, would be '3 Times Less' than a teaspoon? It's probably just me struggling with the grammar of marketing. I notice that it is popular today to dramatize changes by saying that the (somethingorother) 'increased by 100%' rather then the paltry 'doubled' or 'two times' that just doesn't make a great headline. 1,000% sounds much more impressive than 'ten times', don't you think? It also helps that slashdot gives every word in a headline a capital letter. These are really important headlines!
...omphaloskepsis often...
Selection bias.
The sort of person who is going to demand a Mac will be the sort of person who doesn't need as much support.
Same as people who use alternative web browsers -- if you know enough to care, you are probably the sort of person who doesn't need help.
The data is only relevant if the people getting Mac and the people who get PC are chosen at random.
Macbook pros have been using the latest released CPUs and are ahead on SSDs. Their screens are also incredible. I'm sure that by now Dell et al have managed to come close. The XPS-15 with QHD+ screen and SSD comes in around $2100, which is very similar to the 15" retina MBP. If you add the Apple Care Service and the closest you can get from Dell, the XPS-15 actually costs more than the MBP. Since you can drop Linux on one of these, IIRC, we won't discuss software. I've owned and worked on a number of laptops from Dell, IBM (now Lenovo), Toshiba, and HP (work and family - gotta love being the family tech). Absolutely none hold a candle to the MBP in build nor component quality, and haven't for the past 10 years.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Curiously, not being manufactured by IBM has utterly failed to disqualify Macs. The ThinkPad is a pretty robust piece of hardware even under Lenovo; I imagine the devs at IBM who use them just think of it as outsourcing.
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