jamf:
In 2015, IBM let their employees decide – Windows or Mac. “The goal was to deliver a great employee choice program and strive to achieve the best Mac program,” Previn said. An emerging favorite meant the deployment of 30,000 Macs over the course of the year. But that number has grown. With more employees choosing Mac than ever before, the company now has 90,000 deployed (with only five admins supporting them), making it the largest Mac deployment on earth.
But isn’t it expensive, and doesn’t it overload IT? No. IBM found that not only do PCs drive twice the amount of support calls, they’re also three times more expensive. That’s right, depending on the model, IBM is saving anywhere from $273 – $543 per Mac compared to a PC, over a four-year lifespan. “And this reflects the best pricing we’ve ever gotten from Microsoft,” Previn said. Multiply that number by the 100,000+ Macs IBM expects to have deployed by the end of the year, and we’re talking some serious savings.
Those of you who have worked in IT probably already knew this and many of us have known or suspected it for years. When I worked for Apple 20+ years ago, we had a slide deck that showed this ROI. I never understood why Apple never took advantage of the data they had on it.
I imagine there’ll be a few holdouts in some traditionalist shops, where angry die-hards are still clutching to their myths.
It’d be a relief to know that corporate Mac users no longer had to convince IT departments of this themselves.
Wow, only 5 admins supporting 90k Macs, unbelievable.
What’s sad about this confirmation, though, is how so many people believe, to their core, that a PC is a better value in terms of hardware, and how caustic their rhetoric gets when bashing Apple.
I’ve been a devout Apple user for my adult life and I’ve gotten so much grief from PC ‘believers’ about using Apple products. I have no doubt those same ‘believers’ will cry foul on this data, right before they destroy their perfectly good MacBook Pro:
Because, you know, their complete idiots.
Some are probably worried about job security. Many shops deliberately maintain complication to keep their budgets high, and thereby justify their “importance.” Microsoft itself used to reward CTOs handsomely for their loyalty.
I remember years ago (decades? Way back before Macs even tried to be enterprise friendly) when J.C.Penney’s headquarters was divided between PCs and Mac desktops at a ratio a little over 2 to 1. The had a full-time department for the support of the PCs who never had enough manpower to keep all the Windows boxes running. They had three guys to keep about 1500 Macs running smoothly. I was told they worked three days a week.
There have been total cost of ownership examples like this before – this isn’t really a new thing. The problem is that this logic is really only relevant to businesses who have to pay for IT people to support their machines. For individuals, the argument is discounted because people either slough off support onto a friend, just live with the issue, or fix it themselves. In the first and third cases, they don’t value the time taken to deal with the problem and since it’s time, not actually out of pocket money, it’s not real to them.
Combine that reasoning with the fact that you CAN put together a PC for pretty cheap, especially on the desktop and some people will never accept this.
I’d like to know what changes needed to be made in the infrastructure and what abilities people had to give up in order to go to OSX?
They must be fully cloud based, and not integrate with any industrial software.
That’s an excellent comment. You obviously know IT.
I think it’s obvious too. Hear hear.
I think most people reading the story focus on the Mac vs PC part of the story. Which is real. But it sounds like Mr Bestwick and yourself understand the type of IT infrastructure needed to make this possible. I would bet that it’s not only a Mac friendly infrastructure, but a more cost effective one too.
So you can repurpose the MACs and put linux on them? Oh wait.
“only 5 admins supporting 90k Macs” I had a friend who used to be the Head Mac Guy at the University of Pittsburgh. He had 10 guys supporting 15,000 Macs and he said they spent most of their time thinking up ways to be better IT guys, not putting out the fires they saw their PC brethren (25,000 PCs, over 200 support staff) constantly running around fixing.
Hobbyists who take pride in their maintenance skills don’t care about TCO.
If you’re spelling it in all-caps, I think you answered your own question at least twice.
Well there’s your problem right there: you’re a “devout” user. Never say that unless you want to imply that Apple is your religion.
MAC OS is not linux. You don’t have access to the kernel. Its diet linux.
What can I say, I’m a true believer, more so when Jobs was there, but don’t think I’m as fanatical as the videos portray:
I know I risk ridicule & parody, but what the fuck, I don’t care.
I’m fairly certain the IBM VP is aware of that. But why don’t you write to him personally about how Linux can meet his company’s specific needs, just to make sure.
Quite a few, if your solutions are on-prem. Many of our aftermarket solutions required to integrate Macs into our infrastructure easily outweigh the cost benefit of the client device. Said OS X devices are also a lot more expensive upfront.
This isn’t really fair. If you give your high-ups a report like this, they’ll take it out of context and use it as justification to simply spend less on IT staff. Sure, the client devices may be managed by only five people, but if there’s any expectation in your org to perform deployments and end-user support (the vast majority of them), you still need a regular department. Five people are not deploying, managing and supporting 90,000 computers.
I also dispute the cost of ownership in this report, but that’s another matter entirely.
“Ah kin make me a ‘puter fer a hunnert fitty bucks.”
“… and what abilities people had to give up in order to go to OSX?”
They had to give up Norton Anti-Virus.
Ambitious wording (i.e. poor writing):
“PCs drive twice the amount of support calls, they’re also three times more expensive.”
I bet some people are reading this as saying the PCs are three times more expensive.
Most bloggers are not that steeped in tech knowledge. So they really need to write better. Otherwise, what is their competitive advantage?
Fair to whom?
Yes, you still need a regular department to maintain your infrastructure, but you won’t need as many people to support the Macs that replace the Windows boxes.
Yes, higher-ups will spend less on IT staff. Your department head’s budget will be reduced, he’ll feel less important at meetings, and there’ll be slightly fewer bros in the server room.
I understand your resistance to the idea.
It’s not a fair assessment of the situation. I understand the first thing you imagine “IT” to be is a bunch of lollygaggers sitting around reading Reddit all day instead of doing work, but the reality is that most instances of IT are a small handful of people stretched thin and often on call because the CEO of their midsized business views them as an expense, not an investment.
The timestamp on this article is new, but the study isn’t — JAMF first posted about this months and months ago. It’s also important to understand that they’re a Mac OS X vendor selling enterprise management tools. We use them for some small MDM deployments, and are quite familiar with what they’re about. JAMF is also very expensive (and that’s an understatement). It’s in their interest to paint Macs in a cheaper light in the enterprise because all that money (and then some) is going to them instead. If you’re a titanic presence like IBM, the automation and support tools are worth the trouble and cost to integrate into your enterprise. For smaller outfits, this can sink their entire annual budgets with little to show for it.
Trust me, I love my Macs too… but they are not as cheap as PCs in the enterprise, and hardly anywhere near as flexible in terms of upgrades for longevity. For example, every time a fusion drive-based iMac takes a shit (and they do, quite frequently), I have to either replace it outright or spend inordinate amounts of time slicing it open and replacing it with inferior hardware. Apple refuses to use standard M.2 PCIe SSDs, leading to third party authorized shops to charge $500 for a 512 GB stick and $1000 for a 1TB (OWC SSDs can only support 2012 and older). Conversely, virtually all enterprise PC AIOs can be upgraded in about 5-10 minutes with nearly anything you want. Our Mac Pro trash cans were fabulous 3 years ago, but now have no paths to longevity that their masterful tower-sized predecessors had because upgrading the GPUs are impossible.
There are a multitude of reasons JAMF can claim Macs are cheaper in the enterprise, and many more reasons not measured by JAMF that they’re not.
I’ve worked alongside IT teams at a bunch of worksites over several decades. Each of them exhibited a very different culture. All may have been underfunded and overworked, but the best were posted at ad agencies, in mixed-OS environments. The worst were traditionalists whose first-tier techs would barely look a Mac user in the eye.
I have seen this radio! Macs on the Desktop and Linux servers running the on air station! The one employee that wanted a Windows computer it took me over 48 houtprs to install, secure and get it on the ok’d 2008s2 Domain. That is being replied soon with a Linux server too!
I’m actually the IT manager of a manufacturing company.
Our GM is a fairly solid Mac proponent. Our company has been predominantly PC based since it’s inception. Even though we have a Cisco/Sonicwall based network, every Mac gizmo that I’ve been asked to integrate has forced me into fully supporting all of the underlying services required for integration.
Something as simple as “plug in this AppleTV” was a massive undertaking to ensure that the mDNS services (which are otherwise not needed) routed the packets correctly across our firewalls and subnets.
Another issue that is flatly ignored by these comparisons is the change in workflow. If a company (such as IBM) is already working on a cloud based platform, and doesn’t use apps which require a network drive as their file sharing method, then the transition would be easy and seamless.
However, at our company we:
A) Use Solidworks and other software which doesn’t have a Mac version.
B) Still have legacy software which is PC only.
C) Our workflows are based upon drive levels and folder structure.
For this, going to an OSX environment would cripple our company and require a complete redesign of our entire work flow and working environment.
Another thing shamelessly ignored by this is the fact that if you aren’t cloud based, you will need to use AD in order to provide some level of security. Sadly, OSX just sucks rocks when it comes to an enterprise level of management.
Anyways, I think I’m just venting at this point. 🙂
This is a safe place to vent. 😉