Re: People are people
With all due respect, I have worked with electronics from age 10, and that was more than 4 decades ago. I have built everything from an Apple II to my own PCs until I got bored with it. In that process I have used probably every form of *nix from Xenix onwards, and every version of MS-DOS and Windows until Windows Vista at which point I gave up and switched to Apple. I have used Panasonic, Sony, many, many IBM ThinkPads, Dell and a few Toshiba's before that happened, and in between some servers from Sun Microsystems as well (still love the engineering of their pizza boxes).
I also know how to incorporate everything into a realistic TCO figure - including the effort it costs to keep a machine up to date, and how to support international users that travel a *lot*.
Here's the fun news: in a full TCO model, Apple's stuff comes out on top. It's irrelevant if the hardware alone is "better" or "worse" (relative terms to begin with), long term you're winning, especially if you're dealing with volume. We've dealt with spare laptop stocks which is a %^$# pain every time a new model comes out or a different brand is introduced, and that's not mentioning the f*cktastic driver mess you're always dealing with (or you have a loadset that takes several GBs extra) or you have an OS version change, and fat chance doing a rebuild or replace on remote.
Those problems don't exist with Apple, and the very time you save is where the numbers become very interesting for even the most pernickety bookkeeper. The amount of time you do NOT waste on fighting problems that the PC world should have addressed years ago is where the motivation hides to stick with Apple. That management likes their shiny, fine, but from a CAPEX and OPEX perspective they're cheap.
From a global support perspective you have every Apple shop plus authorised affiliate dealers, and if recovery is not possible we can authorise a local purchase (the only variable is the keyboard layout) and provide a local loadset or have the portable, encrypted backup disk be pushed back onto the machine - no driver fights, no "extra" software to zap - we can get people fully on their feet on remote. Add to that better usability and less exposure to malware (not "no", "less", I don't believe in miracles, nor count on them) and they save us a lot of time.
Time is where the money sits. Not hardware or software costs, but time.