I've heard in the past one theory for IT departments favoring PCs (besides all of the pro-PC marketing aimed at them) might be that the Macs are very cheap to administer and thus don't require much IT support.
I thought this was an interesting response to this news, over at the AppleInsider forums:
"I work for one of the largest corporations in the world. Surprisingly, they don't do anything to block access to network services, but they don't necessarily encourage other platforms either.
I work on a team of 23 people. The company provides Dell or HP laptops running XP or Vista (Windows 7 is still being 'evaluated'). These laptops would cost a normal human about $600, but for some reason my company leases them instead. We pay about $150/month (if memory serves) over the course of a two-year lease term. You do the math...
Four years ago I paid about $700 for a Mac Mini. I run Office 2011 (and previously ran 2008 and 2004) for Exchange Server connectivity. I occasionally use Word and Excel, but generally prefer Pages and Numbers. For presentations I exclusively use Keynote (PowerPoint is a festering pile of poop). I am a systems admin who supports applications running on both Unix and Windows 2008 Server machines. For Unix I use iTerm and X11, and for Windows 2008 remote server administration I use the RDP client that comes with Office.
My computer currently has a monthly ownership cost of (700/48) about $15. One-tenth that of my laptop. In the past four years I've had exactly zero minutes of unplanned downtime, while every single one of my 22 peers have had their machines out for days at a time for reimaging due to OS corruption, most of them more than once.
The downside is that the $150/month in lease charges covers hardware service. Still, since over four years the cost of ownership is $7200 vs $700, the company could replace my Mini six times over four years and still save money, not taking into account the money saved from productivity.
Executives who don't consider using Macs are simply bad at math."
With a solid/easy backup system like Time Machine, don't even need a proper service plan:
* Buy an external HD, set up Time Machine.
* Keep an identical spare Mac.
* If you're paranoid, buy a second external HD; rotate it and the first drive for TM backup every week-ish (keep the inactive one next to your spare Mac)
* When the Mac dies; toss it, get out the spare, plug in the TM drive and restore. Totally back in business in an hour or three. Buy another spare.
You only need two computers for every employee if you expect an event where all employees will need to swap out their computers at once. On a personal level, you would need two, but on a company-wide level you don't need that absolute redundancy.
Nowhere did he claim "two computers for every employee". Like any company with centrally managed IT, it'd be wise to have hot spares of any and all hardware. That doesn't imply "buy 2x of everything!", it means to prepare for failure and minimize downtime (of any hardware) by having spares that can be quickly swapped.
Well, I certainly looks to me that that is what he was saying, and given the opportunity he did not back away from that position, he doubled down on it in his response. So, downvote away I guess. But the whole thrust of this argument seems ridiculous to me. There is nothing special about macs that enables this strategy, and it's a stupid and expensive strategy that gains no benefits over a standard backup routine.
For an enterprise you can do time machine to a lion server connected to your big storage. Then just keep a few spare machines like you would for your PCs.
Over the course of the 2-year lease, they pay $3600 for a $600 machine (according to the OP).
Let's assume his math is way off. It's a $1000 machine, and it's only $100/mo for 2 years. That is still $2400, 2.4 times the value of the hardware.
I fail to see how the proposed solution could be any LESS cost-effective.
This also is only discussing raw costs of equipment, and not employee downtime. You could likely recover an employees productivity in HOURS instead of DAYS.
Seems like a great solution overall, which is most likely why it would never be implemented.
> These laptops would cost a normal human about $600, but for some reason my company leases them instead.
For some reason the corporate world considers money spent in big blocks to be a different kind of money to that spent over an extended period of time. Unless they have a really good interest rate on their bank accounts I have no idea why, but spending more money in smaller amounts over an extended period is the holy grail.
If you buy a computer, it becomes a company asset and, from an accounting PoV, the money was not "spent". If you lease it (and give it back at the end of the lease) you only had expenses (and, from accounting's PoV, money spent).
Various factors may make one option preferable to the other. Taxes, executive bonuses etc.
If part of the yearly bonus is tied to investing less in infrastructure, an exec may opt for leasing hardware. OTOH, if the bonus is tied to lowering expenses, the exec may consider buying it.
I work in an almost exclusively Mac shop (an agency) and to say that they don't require much IT support is laughable. The worst part is that when they do require support, it is much more involved than with PCs.
A lot of IT shops are accustomed to crippling the computers they manage, as a way to reduce need for servicing individual machines. Macs might not fit into that existing workflow, which make them appear harder to support. Just the prospect of having to loosen their policies incites all sorts of doom scenarios. Macs may be easier to manage, but it takes a brave IT manager to actually try it.
Also, many IT managers have dozens of Microsoft certificates, but little knowledge of Mac management. Noone wants to aide in their own replacement. It would be like John Henry suggesting the use of steam powered hammers.
I've heard in the past one theory for IT departments favoring PCs ... might be that the Macs are very cheap to administer and thus don't require much IT support.
If true, that's a mighty dysfunctional IT department.
Perhaps it's the company I work for: if there was a desktop machine that was cheap and required little support, we'd be all over it.
I thought this was an interesting response to this news, over at the AppleInsider forums:
"I work for one of the largest corporations in the world. Surprisingly, they don't do anything to block access to network services, but they don't necessarily encourage other platforms either.
I work on a team of 23 people. The company provides Dell or HP laptops running XP or Vista (Windows 7 is still being 'evaluated'). These laptops would cost a normal human about $600, but for some reason my company leases them instead. We pay about $150/month (if memory serves) over the course of a two-year lease term. You do the math...
Four years ago I paid about $700 for a Mac Mini. I run Office 2011 (and previously ran 2008 and 2004) for Exchange Server connectivity. I occasionally use Word and Excel, but generally prefer Pages and Numbers. For presentations I exclusively use Keynote (PowerPoint is a festering pile of poop). I am a systems admin who supports applications running on both Unix and Windows 2008 Server machines. For Unix I use iTerm and X11, and for Windows 2008 remote server administration I use the RDP client that comes with Office.
My computer currently has a monthly ownership cost of (700/48) about $15. One-tenth that of my laptop. In the past four years I've had exactly zero minutes of unplanned downtime, while every single one of my 22 peers have had their machines out for days at a time for reimaging due to OS corruption, most of them more than once.
The downside is that the $150/month in lease charges covers hardware service. Still, since over four years the cost of ownership is $7200 vs $700, the company could replace my Mini six times over four years and still save money, not taking into account the money saved from productivity.
Executives who don't consider using Macs are simply bad at math."
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showpost.php?p=1975818&po...