Leasing is beneficial from a tax perspective and an organizational perspective.
If you lease equipment you don't own it. You are borrowing it. This means that it is not considered an asset and it is not depreciated over a depreciation schedule (the schedule is not 7 years, it is changes, and can be as short as 2 or as long as you want). Not having assets is a good thing for most companies when the assets depreciate so fast they they are not worth keeping up with. Technology is generally seen as an asset that is hard to book.
Computers are also seen as a cost without an associated revenue, because the revenues that come from it are indirect (if you are offended, office supplies are also not associated with revenues). Leasing the company keeps it as an expense rather than an asset that was purchased which can make the books look cleaner and better.
Finally and most importantly for most small companies, leasing means that the cost is spread evenly over the same period of time as the use of the equipment. If you $20k in servers and PCs, you can financing it through a leasing company rather than paying $20k outright (from capital) or getting a loan from a bank for $20k (which is very difficult).
For a larger company, this is not the case as capex can be easily absorbed, and the main reason for doing it is isolating cost centers and keeping assets (which look like revenues) off the books unless they are actually resellable assets.
Unfortunately, as a fellow mac user, I could not say that most mac users are smarter than PC users.
I work as tech support at an ISP, and as the self proclaimed "Mac Guru" I get most of the mac calls. Not only can mac users not easily operate an extremely easy to use OS, they usually cannot express their problems with any fluency. They are the most difficult to work with, most out of touch people I talk to on a daily basis. Most of them try to explain "can't check my email" as something ridiculous like "the stream won't continue" (to quote the most recent user in memory). I can forgive not knowing jargon like OS and application, but how in the world can you expect a person to understand you when you don't say anything about your problem. PC users on the whole are much more effective and concise in their communication, despite not being able to follow directions quite as well.
But the worst problem with mac users is that they will not stop clicking. If you try to walk them through anything at all, say opening safari it's "Hold on, let me see something" "hmmm" "what does x mean" where x has absolutely nothing to do with the problem, is in an entirely different application (usually Control Panels/System Prefs). Inquisitive is a good thing, but if I tell someone to click on 1 button, and they click on 20 different other things instead, how can they expect to have their problem fixed?
If you're going to typify people by the computer they use, then mac users are the spaced out hippies that stare off into space and say "what?" every time you talk to them.
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Leasing is beneficial from a tax perspective and an organizational perspective.
If you lease equipment you don't own it. You are borrowing it. This means that it is not considered an asset and it is not depreciated over a depreciation schedule (the schedule is not 7 years, it is changes, and can be as short as 2 or as long as you want). Not having assets is a good thing for most companies when the assets depreciate so fast they they are not worth keeping up with. Technology is generally seen as an asset that is hard to book.
Computers are also seen as a cost without an associated revenue, because the revenues that come from it are indirect (if you are offended, office supplies are also not associated with revenues). Leasing the company keeps it as an expense rather than an asset that was purchased which can make the books look cleaner and better.
Finally and most importantly for most small companies, leasing means that the cost is spread evenly over the same period of time as the use of the equipment. If you $20k in servers and PCs, you can financing it through a leasing company rather than paying $20k outright (from capital) or getting a loan from a bank for $20k (which is very difficult).
For a larger company, this is not the case as capex can be easily absorbed, and the main reason for doing it is isolating cost centers and keeping assets (which look like revenues) off the books unless they are actually resellable assets.
Unfortunately, as a fellow mac user, I could not say that most mac users are smarter than PC users.
I work as tech support at an ISP, and as the self proclaimed "Mac Guru" I get most of the mac calls. Not only can mac users not easily operate an extremely easy to use OS, they usually cannot express their problems with any fluency. They are the most difficult to work with, most out of touch people I talk to on a daily basis. Most of them try to explain "can't check my email" as something ridiculous like "the stream won't continue" (to quote the most recent user in memory). I can forgive not knowing jargon like OS and application, but how in the world can you expect a person to understand you when you don't say anything about your problem. PC users on the whole are much more effective and concise in their communication, despite not being able to follow directions quite as well.
But the worst problem with mac users is that they will not stop clicking. If you try to walk them through anything at all, say opening safari it's "Hold on, let me see something" "hmmm" "what does x mean" where x has absolutely nothing to do with the problem, is in an entirely different application (usually Control Panels/System Prefs). Inquisitive is a good thing, but if I tell someone to click on 1 button, and they click on 20 different other things instead, how can they expect to have their problem fixed?
If you're going to typify people by the computer they use, then mac users are the spaced out hippies that stare off into space and say "what?" every time you talk to them.