Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide Most corporate laptop fleets consist primarily of PCs. However, there’s always a contingent of users who beg for Macs. Deciding who gets a Mac in your organization involves balancing IT’s need for simplicity, finance’s requirement to keep costs under control, and users’ desire to work with their preferred tools. According to …
Interesting, but what about a lack of marketing crap and unwanted features forced down your throat (or other orifice) compared to Win11?
Also while managing security is mentioned, how much difference does it make in practice in terms of avoiding ransomware? Macs are not immune but almost everyone seems to be rogered via Windows.
Meh, for me as a cheapskate I will embrace the penguin...
I worked at a marketing & promotions firm (primarily - I was in a market research team) that was all Mac, it was a fight to get a windows install on mine (as I needed some windows specific software for my role) and that absolutely kneecapped the laptop - touchpad features reduced to a single click from all the fancy wankery it did, unless you paid forty bucks for a third party app that put the drivers back in, problems with the display, keyboard mapping and power management. It really didn't want to have windows on it, they really should've just let me byod, I knew more than their IT head anyway (who recommended me for his job when he left, but f'that, what do I know about managing a fleet of macs...)
The point about leaving things behind is to keep the fire occupied. Leaving a coat is like escaping lizard leaving its tail. If fire has nothing to burn, but sees a human made of juicy meat and crackling fat, where it will go? It will go at the human, that's why it is important to leave things behind.
"first rule of getting out is leaving all your belongings and GTFO" that should be the first rule, however I worked in a company that insisted you take your laptop even if them meant spending time to unlock the cable lock. Fortunately most people ignored this as was evident at the next fire drill. The manager still tried to get people to comply though.
Years ago before Microsoft infested organizations like kudzu the Mac v PC divide depended on the particular industry or discipline in Universities.
Arts and architecture were frequently all Mac (and AppleTalk) while the physical sciences leaned more to the dark side (PC) but prior to Windows for Workgroups you had to source a third party networking stack which lead to oddities such as PCs with AppleTalk adaptors in mixed environments.
In AU Macs were always about twice the price of a "comparable" PC but I recall an admin in a Mac only environment saying that the more homogeneous hardware and longer usable life of Apple kit meant the TCO were comparable. PC hardware back then was a pain to support as no two boxes were ever the same.
Apple hardware in AU became far more affordable but the Microsoft applications and infrastructure services that most organization use, place barriers and irritations to the integration of Mac although none insurmountable.
and was surprised when an uber-nerd as myself took teh windows machine.
However my role was IT Manager and 80% of the staff were solid windows users. Since they were the cause of most support issues it made sense professionally.
The trade off was I have a rack of VMs I could spin up within seconds to play around on with LLMs etc.
>Once you go Mac, you never go back...
Nope. More complex than that.
I kicked off building my own PCs from OEM bits and buying old Macs that I could pimp up with used parts. Anything involving writing or DTP the Mac was better. Software compatibility and geek stuff, Windows. At Uni, I was happy to beggar myself for the first Mac Classic they had in, with Stylewriter, for doing my PhD on. For general use, later, I was still using homebuilt PCs and pimping Macs, including the lovely pizzabox LCs and a maxxed out IIfx. I went off Macs because they ditched the floppy (which was still viable then) and because I was sick of Apple treating its developers and customers like dirt and massively overcharging. I still used my LCIII for writing. Eventually I settled on one PC as I didn't have enough desk space, splitter boxes and power sockets for two. By now Windows was OK for writing.
I've used Windows since, but W11 with AI is just dog poop, so Linux or Mac or a tablet with a keyboard and an offline retro system are now the road ahead. W11 is too crappy to be an option.
It's interesting that some employers don't give a toss about employee preference, when a couple of grand is nothing in business terms. Placing such a low value on employee happiness would just see me walk. If you are good, there is always somewhere that will take you for the price of a Mac, or some other personal requirement. And good quality staff are really hard to find and keep. They are what keeps your business going. Treat your staff as disposable and switch to AI chatbots, and your QoS and customer satisfaction will plummet. It is quite easy nowadays for employees and customers to walk away from a crap company. As they roll out AI, the worst companies will discover this.
I think there's not a lot in common between the macs of the 90s and today's macs.
Personally, I was hooked on Macs in 2008, when I realized you could actually just close the laptop and put it in a bag, it would go to sleep immediately. Trying that with a Windows laptop would damn near melt the thing.
> Once you go Mac, you never go back...
I worked with Genuine IBM PCs, onto Sun & Apollo and then Mac (thin, fat & classic) Classic thence onto Mac II. When the time came to buy my next bit of personal kit (to go with the BBC Micro & Amiga) went straight to PC compatible rather than Mac and haven't had any urge to buy Apple since.
So that is my anecdote on the subject.
Well, except to say that, so far the only time I've had to take a fire extinguisher to a smoking computer was a Fat Mac (although that did then donate some ROMs I could use, with an adapter, in the Amiga, when/if I felt the urge to go monochrome).
I tried to go mac again a few years after OS X was introduced. I didn't last a week.
Which to be fair is better (better? more) than I managed with I think it was OS 7 which wasn't even measured in hours.
There's more sophistication in a lego set. Even Fisher Price Windows feels more grown up than any version of macos I've ever tried.
I did. Used a MacBook Pro (two, actually; the latter with the horrible “strip” in stead of the function keys) at work 2014-18. It became _tolerable_ -- certainly not better than Windows, but perhaps not _much_ worse either -- after a couple months of getting used to it.
Except for the “walled garden” and “our way or the highway” aspects, which at that time were even worse than Windows. (TBF, that's comparing to W7, which was what I'd used prior to that. Microsoft may have caught up on that nowadays.)
Mac has never been the choice of true nerds, only of people who adopt the nerd aesthetic for fashion reasons.
Hard disagree: Out of all choices, Macs are the least related to the nerd aesthetic. Windows is more nerdy. Even Chromebooks are more nerdy. Macs have been the choice of people who want to avoid at all costs looking like a nerd. Maybe that's why most Google engineers have Macs.
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Different definitions of “nerd”. Sure, most any other OS is more in tune with one (perhaps the dominant) definition of the term, but for the not-quite-overlapping set of people defined by “the nerd _aesthetic”_ -- i.e, “aesthetics nerds” -- the primary association is definitely Macs.
When I joined my current company the CTO gave me the choice. I said whatever works with our systems but I use a Mac at home.
He ordered me a Mac. That was five years ago, the same Mac is still going strong and as our IT pushed it out straight away I’m on Tahoe already without issues.
Colleagues with PCs are on their second or third PC now and they seem to get far more issues with Microsoft products such as Teams and Office compared to the Mac experience.
My only issues have been with sorting the management software our IT team use!
"they seem to get far more issues with Microsoft products such as Teams and Office compared to the Mac experience."
One of the orgs I support have their Windows laptops locked down. The stuff that can be installed is the default stuff added during the build, a very few optional items found in the Apps section of Company Portal or special requests needing management approval. That pretty much mean every user has the same make/model laptop with the same build, same programs and same level of Windows Updates. And yet there are still "issues" with individuals, such as audio or mic nor working, Teams crashing, Outlook shared mailboxes not connecting properly etc. It's quite confounding how two identical builds can have different breakages. The old adage about repeating the same actions expecting a different outcome being a sign of stupidity/insanity/whatever doesn't apply in this case because different outcomes from the same set of inputs is "just normal" :-)
If your company's PCs aren't lasting at least five years then they must be buying crap! Business-grade laptops (Dell Latitude, Lenovo Thinpad, etc) easily last longer than that unless severely misused. They are also generally much easier to repair than Macs.
My employer was "PC first, Mac as an Exception", but is now "PC Only".
The reason for the change was a restructuring in which they let go of half the IT department. The cost of that is that we simply can't afford to manage two platforms. Packaging & deploying software on one platform is a pain, doing it across two is much more so. And that's before we get to the additional expense of the tooling used for that. Servicing just one platform is always going to be cheaper and easier, and for us Windows is the platform that all departments can use - some departments have software which can't run (or run well) on Macs, so it was an easy choice.
To put it simply, going PC only made things much cheaper.
Our parent company deploys Macs, but they're much larger so can more easily handle the costs of that.
One observation I'd share is that on the costs in terms of managing the machines (not purchasing costs) is that Macs are oriented towards being managed by a user, PCs are oriented towards being managed by either the user or an organisation. GPOs aren't perfect, but you can do a lot with them. You often hit restrictions on Macs where Apple will simply say "we don't allow automating that for security reasons", and have to do things manually. And that's the right stance for individuals, but not for a fleet of hundreds or thousands of machines. I'm sure Apple are improving on that, but there's definitely a difference in mindsets when it comes to machine management.
Ultimately there's no single answer. It will be different for all companies/organisations.
Yeah, but really,
"for some tasks like design work and some development work, usersfind it more efficient to useare stubborn and inflexible and insist on using a Mac"
To be fair, Windows has become very enshittified of late, and Apple has weirdly become a less-worse option in that regard. But in truth, unless you're developing for Mac, there's never an actual need for a Mac other than unfamiliarity with alternatives (and of course pure vanity).
Except that the Windows admins manage to make any Windows machine utterly unusable. I don't use it any more but never had much of a problem with Windows at home. Work machines are another matter though. By the time the admins have finished with then they take about ten minutes to boot up, have random error pop ups about some dll or other interrupting me, run incredibly slowly and virus scan every new file on creation so compiling code grinds to a halt (you might be able to get an exclusion applied to some directory if you're lucky but it will be a hell of a process to get it approved and done).
For the past eight or nine years every job I've had has come with a Mac and it's a hell of a lot easier, though they are catching up now in terms of control freakery.
"The reason for the change was a restructuring in which they let go of half the IT department. The cost of that is that we simply can't afford to manage two platforms."
I hope those who went through the bereavement of losing their Macs included those who let half the IT department go.
Personally, I wouldn’t work for a company that doesn’t offer Macs (software/systems developer).
It boils down to this
1. macOS Is a polished, reliable *nix system that respects the user and gets out the way (e.g. it doesn’t try to coerce/trick you into using unwanted cloud services, browsers, ads etc.). It handles all roles perfectly (general office productivity, *nix-land development etc.)
2. There is nothing remotely competitive with a Mac in terms of “quality of life”. All of the benefits of Apple Silicon/vertical integration (battery life/efficiency, low heat, low fan noise etc.), plus long standing benefits like the amazing trackpads, high quality displays, high quality build/materials etc..
(e.g. it doesn’t try to coerce/trick you into using unwanted cloud services, browsers, ads etc.). It handles all roles perfectly (general office productivity, *nix-land development etc.)
You sure there? Certainly the first thing it tries to do is connect you up to iCloud (vs Drive), demands your credit card info (what?), and foists Safari (vs Edge) upon you.
Granted it's not constantly notifying you about XBox Games Pass, but I'd say the shitware creep is fairly high here too. I wouldn't exactly call it polished either- Apple's software quality has been degrading for over a decade. The difference between Apple and Microsoft is primarily that Apple have a slightly more coherent vision of what the OS should do, vs whatever the hell Microsoft are doing.
To your second point the hardware is often well made though, but I'd counter with the fact that these days basically everything is glued in, so maintenance/upgradability suffers.
I don’t see that kind of stuff with Mac.
I declined Apple Account/iCloud on first setup and that was it. It’s never thrown an unskippable “your data is at risk!!!” screen trying to scare me into accepting it, or silently reinstalled a client, or placed little “hey you should use iCloud!” prompts throughout Finder etc. Maybe it asks again when there’s a major macOS update? Not sure, but that’s about it.
Same for changing browsers. When I installed Firefox and changed the browser there was no fight. It didn’t obstruct me with an “Apple recommends Safari!” message or start warning me about my system being “insecure” for not using what Apple recommends. The default browser has never been touched through years of major macOS releases.
It’s never prompted for credit card details out of the blue either. I think it will ask if you install something through the App Store? IIRC, it requires payment details for all purchases (even free ones), I remember that as far back as the old iTunes days :-)
Not trying to glaze Apple here. There are instances where they cross the line but it’s a different kind of thing to what Microsoft does. For example, Apple devices will show a persistent AppleCare coverage reminder in Settings for the first few months after activation (like “There are X days left to extend your coverage”). It’s not great that they do that, but it’s one small prompt in the Settings app, it’s not preying on fear or trying to mislead the user.
In some versions of OS X there was the annoying Try the new Safari notification and you could choose to try it now or be bothered again later.
I also vaguely remember at one time there was a built-in NPAPI plug-in on MacOS which suggested you use Safari when run on non-Safari browsers, which I fixed by deleting. Maybe it was the same thing as above or something different.
For iCloud you are steered into providing credit card info and once given they're difficult to remove. From what I remember some apps allowed you to not give them or remove them but others didn't. Maybe it's improved now.
In a country which has consumer rights and therefore a guarantee of at least two years, why should people be 'reminded' to buy the manufacturer's own guarantee more than one time at most? A 90-day countdown is pretty annoying and is just Apple resorting to the Silicon Valley trope of "answer yes now or we'll bother you again tomorrow with the same question until you give in because we're entitled to your money".
macOS is probably going to disappear entirely in two to three years. The writing has been on the wall for a while.
Final Cut Pro is long dead, it exists in name only. Everyone I know who liked it moved on when it became "amateur" about ten years ago. There's now plenty of better options for short-form video.
Apple make their money from iOS, and Macs have been the poor relation for years, becoming harder and harder to develop for - documentation and support is basically Quinn "The Eskimo".
Xcode Cloud and the notarization Web API imply you won't need a Mac to develop for iOS for much longer, and once you can create iOS apps on Linux or Windows...?
The Mac will die, and it'll be iPad with a keyboard instead.
That is just your personal preference. The security part between Windows and Mac is that they are both shit. Who has the better hardware changes every few month, except for repairability and upgradeability of Mac. And you talk about "cloud enforcement from MS", when you need an Apple account for nearly everything, and you are forced to use the apple store for a lot of your software needs, including license tracking, Is hypocrisy. MS ist simply following Apple here, and everybody is sooooo annoyed - but only 'cause more are affected. The difference is that MS is (trying) to take away the freedom you have on Windows which Apple has taken away nearly two decades ago.
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As windows is proprietary software.
"mac computers" are specifically designed to be extremely difficult to repair and have no upgradability - although technically with specialized equipment, you can replace components, apple themselves only does whole component swaps like board swaps and the only upgrades offered is entirely new computers (as the SSD is soldered down and the memory cannot be upgraded).
microsoft isn't really introducing any restrictions that didn't already exist - windows and macos are restricted just as hard.
Install GNU.
Macs have VERY good trackpads, nothing else I've ever touched has a trackpad that's better than "barely usable".
I do have a few clients that don't like trackpads and have Bluetooth mice, a few others that put the Mac on a stand and use external keyboards and mice. I've rarely seen a Windoze user who doesn't carry a mouse if they've got a laptop.
These days I find myself mostly using my MacBook Air even though my home office desk is crammed with big screens. It's just not worth the bother of going to the desk, I can remote everything from the MacBook.
You understand that there can be a big difference between "VERY good" and "something I can live with"? Notwithstanding that both are totally subjective judgments. As it happens neither the old man nor I have had any worries with the likes of HP kit and I daily drive an Asus without even thinking about the trackpad. I'd prefer a thinkpad nipple, though.
-A.
low fan noise etc?
Well the LC pizza boxes were always quite quiet but one of my retro machines is a 7200 Power Mac, purchased because having a machine with an internal CD-ROM drive and internal slots is handy. It sounds like a bloody helicopter when you turn it on. Apparently this model always did. Maybe it is the exception that proves the rule. In general, Macs have always been so much less fuss than PCs because they are so locked down [Geek = 'dull']. That was the point. And when I used to buy Macs, they came with a printed manual. Youngsters reading this can google the word 'manual' for an explanation.
FWIW, whenever building my PCs, I'd buy the cheapest, most basic components that I could, but would choose a reliable HDD and spend as much as I had to for a quiet fan. Fan noise may not matter so much in the workplace - more ambient noise, PC stashed away - but you should always spec a reliable, quiet PSU for a PC. They are almost always the first component to fail. And in the home, a loud fan will drive you nuts.
For me a Mac is a broken Linux box with a terrible keyboard and a worse mouse.
As the things are overpriced the screen is invariably too small. My trusty ten year old dell will happily drive a pair of monitors and show a screen independently, the Mac says - "I can't let you do that, Dave."
It makes an adequate SSH terminal into a proper machine, which these days is as likely to be a pod running on a Kubernetes cluster as it is a VM or bare metal server.
The one advantage is these god awful conferencing apps work reliably, which is a mixed blessing but, they like the remote wipe stuff, which you can as effectively have encrypted filesystems on linux, because any scrote stealing a laptop is going to format it for you.
We’re a mixed environment about 150 Mac’s to 8000 Windows machines. Mac users are mainly execs, IT or creatives.
Mac users have Admin rights and are meant to be self supporting.
I’m a Mac user, sit on the self help forum and our rollout has definitely gone too far - there’s probably 10 users who are responsible for 90% of the issues who should have their Macs forcibly removed. TBF 50% of the issues are with Adobe cCeative Cloud which appears to be Malware masquerading as software.
Just switched painlessly from Jampf to Intune so common-er admin console with the Windows fleet.
Our replacement policy is 4 years for Windows and 7 for Macs. Probably should be 6 for Mac.
The only bug I have is that we have an Mbp only policy and 50% of the Mac base only need a 50% cheaper MBA, so we are cutting off our nose cost wise.
I work for a very large company (>10,000 employees) and before covid we were pretty much entirely Windows. Our dev team had semi-official permission to wipe our HP Xeon towers and install Linux - which we naturally did. A few designers and video editors had Macs, but everyone else was on PC desktops or laptops.
Post covid, something changed and pretty much the entire company pivoted to Mac laptops. A few people clung on to Windows laptops, but they became increasingly rare. Our dev team moved to Apple Silicon Macs and Linux was forbidden (that's changed now, but no-one's moved back to Linux). Some devs complained, but the Mac's fine as a development machine. We can install Homebrew for any Linux command line utils that are missing from Mac OS, and all modern IDEs are supported. I'm fairy OS neutral between Mac and Linux (hate Windows through), but the Apple Silicon hardware is far nicer than any Intel laptop that I've ever used. I've also noticed that, at developer conferences, that many devs from other companies are now using Macs too.
I last "replaced" my PC in about 1999. Since then, I've just been able to gradually upgrade all of its parts as and when I needed to, and pretty cheaply each time (I think the current oldest part in it – a rarely used CD/DVD drive – is from about 2006; the newest is the processor, which was first produced in 2022; the motherboard dates back about 7 years). I strongly doubt anyone has been able to do that with any Mac from that era.
>Macs last longer.
They don't - the board designs are intentionally full of design flaws (Rossman has pointed out design defects that have caused a failure in many videos).
Computer hardware should last at least 10-20 years runtime before any failure occurs.
>If you add up how frequently you have to replace them vs PCs
I have never needed to replace a PC - at most I've had to replace a motherboard.
windows breaking or slowing down and making a WC unusable is quite easily solved by installing GNU.
>then add less malware
Those likely come with more malware than WC's;
https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-apple.html
https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.html
If you want no malware, you'll need to go for the GNU; https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/evilmalware.html
>better performance
It appears that comparable hardware of a comparable price is in fact faster?
>better comfort (no fan/heat)
Apple might exclude a cooling fan and avoid exhausting it to places where the user can feel it, but there's plenty of heat.
>ergonomics (best trackpad out there)
A mouse has far better ergonomics.
I have never needed to replace a PC - at most I've had to replace a motherboard.
That is like saying a have never replaced a car but I fitted a new engine, gearbox, final drive, fuel tank etc
You have replaced a core component which is the computer unless you have always replaced the motherboard and kept the cpu the same this is a Triggers broom situation
By that logic I had no new PC for decades since my 386 SX 16. Cause I always swapped components. Sometime the case, sometime mainboard, sometimes CPU+
Mainboard+RAM, sometimes storage, sometimes GFX card, sometimes PSU + GFX card and so on. The old parts were reused, which then is no "new" PC either, cause everything was already used by me - with that extended logic I can go back to my actual first 286 12 MHz PC, 'cause the 386 was my moms...
Trigger's broom is a reference to a gag in the sitcom Only Fools and Horses (very popular series for some reason). Trigger is a slightly dim character, who says he has had the same broom for 20 years. During which time it has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles.
I believe the US equivalent is grandpa's axe.
... doesn't run on Mac. Nor Linux. So the choice is simple.
If you have a MacOS-based workflow it makes sense to have Macs and stick to it. Otherwise it's just the need to show off - moslty, in management. The same who get iPhones because the standard company phone models aren't good for them.
Ok let’s start with the phone. Androids are like Windows, nothing is integrated and as a result it’s all very frustrating. Trying to run Android Auto, getting gmail to work with Exchange, even trying to get WiFi calling working. With iPhones it’s all built in and works really well. The number of personal iPhones far outstrips Android amongst my colleagues who are forced to have Android as a work phone. I even went BYOD because I couldn’t stand the works Samsung any more.
Then the Mac vs PC. Apple silicon Macs beat the heck out of Windows for speed, battery life and usability. Having managed W10 and 11 machines and the lengths to get them up, running and managed, I recently watched an Apple OOBE video for businesses and was utterly impressed. MS can only dream of that level of onboarding. As a small charity admin, MS do not allow you the tools to make them properly secure until at least one tier higher.
So yes Macs are higher cost, but you get what you pay for in battery life, better display and easier management. Oh and the antivirus is still needed (Malware Bytes is good) but a lot less heavy.
We have MBPs for technical & design staff (“design” where I work being mostly “front end web dev” so also technical in a sense). It’s mostly about the Unix underpinnings for us.
The hardware has been a bit hit-or-miss. 2017-2018 era MBPs weren’t great - keyboards in particular - but newer ARM machines are very very good.
Jamf is used on the management side and works well enough as far as I know. The hardware is on about a 6 year refresh cycle. I believe this is about a year longer than Windows hardware.
Quite a few technical staff would probably prefer a Linux but I’m not sure the group management features are quite there, at least for our support teams. WSL might be an option but at this point quite a few working practices have built up around Macs so replacing them would be disruptive.
Most of our development is on Linux. I've picked Ubuntu.
We need to deliver documents as word, so Windows for that and a low powered laptop for that!
After some issues with developers choices I'm now considering locking down choices on Window managers and IDE's.
It's difficult to onboard if everyone chooses thier own IDE and window manager as it then becomes difficult to configure, setup and debug. Especially if you need to tell them what they need to do and you are presented with yet another different configuration.
When things go wrong and they end up wasting days on trying to fix their non standard choices, resulting in a laptop returned to be reinstalled.
When they have forgotten yet again that they have fiddled with their setup and have to be reminded again that what was originally automated is now manual.
Yep, so called power users that should know better that choices have consequences.
When we refresh laptops I pick as high a performance I can get away with. OS is driven by project requirements. IDE by commonality and cross support.
Limitations driven by practicalities and previous bad choices.
We need to deliver documents as word, so Windows for that and a low powered laptop for that!
In my case I have a few Windows VMs for software that is only supported on that and/or on ancient versions thereof. Has the great advantage of allowing you to snapshot the whole VM and roll back if something goes wrong. Also easy to copy and spin up on another host if change of hardware is needed, etc.
"We need to deliver documents as word, so Windows for that and a low powered laptop for that!"
Confused about that statement- a WORD document in almost any format can be produced by most office suites, you don't need Microsoft for that. In that sense there's ben no such thing s a WORD document for decades.
There was a time when Windows laptops were significantly more expensive than desktop machines, even though often worse specified, and it was noticeable that the only people who had them at work were senior management. Over time the price differential eroded, and these days even ordinary grunts have lappies. So the senior management have macs. Gotta keep up appearances.
-A.
Last tech company was ~10,000 people with even split of Mac, Windows and Linux. Staff were given free choice of laptop or desktop and line managers could sign off on exceptions for big compute/memory specs as-needed. It took us a while to get to that point and when I started, a colleague handed me a Linux boot CD to splat over Windows.
After one consulting job, I didn't give a Sr. VP of a Fortune 150 the password to his brand new, triple-headed, US$7,500 desktop PC. This was back in 2007. He never even tried to log into it for the four years that it sat on his credenza, artfully cycling through screensavers. How do I know? Because I'm the only person who ever had the password. He never asked me for it, and his secretary refused when I offered it to her ... Over that four years, about once a quarter he called me up to take a look at it under warranty because "it did something funny". When I checked the logs, the last person to login was myself ... three months earlier. So I closed it down, opened it up, vacuumed it out, buttoned it back up, turned it on, cleared the logs and proclaimed it "fixed", The Boss thanked me every time. The secretary & IT staff also thanked me every time I came out, for keeping him out of their hair. I almost wish that I allowed them to renew the contract after the four years ...
As always, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions ...
...but I find particularly since covid that with 99% of meetings done over some form of VC, a decent camera, mic and speakers is critical.
I'm neither Wintel nor Mac (they're both awful in their own unique ways) but if I get a Mac, I'll guarantee I can unfold it in any situation, generally bark at it, and the other end will have a relatively easy experience seeing/hearing me (and not hearing themselves as an echo, or seeing a blurred smudge on the screen blending into the background, or hearing my audio as if I was in a 1970s phonebox or whatever).
Unfortunately with Wintel this is not guaranteed. It seems like it's pot luck, and it seems no manufacturer has figured this out and marketed on it. I was handed a updated but otherwise supposedly the same model of Dell that I'd previous good success with, and it was atrocious. They'd changed the quality of everything, while presumably maintaining the price and trading on a reputation. Cue a year+ of being completely ineffective in meetings cos people could not be arsed with the mental workout of keeping up with what I was trying to convey in shite audio. I've recently bought two admittedly aged but near top-of-the-range-in-their-day corp laptops and the quality for the other end on a video call is woeful. One is completely unusable for this. Buy the same aged MacBook Pro and the quality will be immense.
On the same theme I worked in a place that bought a fleet of 1000s of laptops without a second of integration testing. Not even if the Wi-fi chipset wasn't pure crap. Cue a massive worldwide workforce wading through some amount of treacle every day to execute.
My point? Bad choices result in bazillions of hours of less effective employees, for the sake of saving what? £1k maybe over a laptop's lifetime? Same problem with IT departments obsessively demanding their workforce bend to a particular model choice made in all circumstances pretty subjectively, then complaining about diva users. Madness, and the utterly wrong focus.
The laptop - and the phone - is definitively the employee's window on the entire world, all day every day. Why on earth would you not make that as good as you possibly could?
Of course it depends on your work tasks and the software you need to do your job!
Before I retired I worked in ASIC design. The tools for that (mainly from Cadence and Synopsys) were at that time primarily Unix/Linux native. We had a mix of machines including a few Windows for admin and front ends for X11 windows, a lot of Unix/Linux/Solaris machines for design and simulation, and the occasional Mac for front ends to the servers, since they interfaced with Unix and Linux so well. In the early days I had a Sparcstation on my desk...
I interviewed at one semiconductor company in Austin many years ago where the primary desktop machines were all Macs. That particular company sold a lot of chips to Apple at the time, so it was obviously a career-limiting move to request a Windows box in that particular environment!
In my last years before retiring I used a Macbook Pro at work, and it served me well during work from home in the Covid years. Macs were not standard issue, but I acquired a leftover from one of the software developers and managed to hang on to it. We got hit by a nasty network virus one weekend, courtesy of a recent corporate acquisition.
We came in to work on Monday morning to find all the Windows machines in our department had been forcibly confiscated by the IT department. The ones secured with cable locks had the cables cut to
ensure they all were removed. I and one of the other designers who used a Mac were the only people able to work for about two weeks until the others were able to get new Windows laptops...
It also has a port to the kernel, Linux (eBPF), which actually managed to caused Linux crash (which is meant to be impossible for eBPF programs), a few short weeks before the windows crash; https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/26/grafana_labs_interview/
The difference is that typically businesses that run GNU/Linux didn't give crowdstrike the ability to push out updates and did some testing before rolling out updates to all the machines (GNU/Linux also tends to be easier to recover - there was delay before Linux crashed, meaning that you could disable such eBPF program and reboot and the crashing/reboots would stop occurring), while croudstrike pushed out the untested broken update to almost all windows machines they commanded.
The proper solution to the problem is not to run proprietary software like crowdstrike.
With Windows you need to manage endless images of corporate builds which have to be constantly fiddled with.
To rhe extent one has to "fiddle" with Windows installation inages, the causes of the fiddling are corporate/governmental diktats, internal and external. Marketing decrees a new company color scheme, and that the default (and possibly user-immutable) background colour must now be 127/127/255. The company president wants the company fight song played during setup. MSoft buys out ASoft, and changes the licensing such that you can no longer legally use ASoft Reader via tour old company-wide license; you must now use ASoft Reader Lite, or some competing product.
These same factors apply to MacOS installation images.
Some things you don't have to immediately change the installation image for, but can patch in by using a network-based, post-image-expansion batch file or shell script, until you make/test/deploy the next version of the corporate MS-Windows and Apple MacOS images.
(For 12 years, a large part of my job was creating installation images for Microsoft Windows and then also for Apple OS X. In the early days, we were deploying System 6.x and the company-standard Mac apps via three floppy diskettes and AppleTalk. That ... was ... very ... slow.)
That's nonsense, we maintain one image for tens of thousands of machines and only then because it gives us control over the preload for machines which need a wipe and rebuild.
For brand new machines we use the factory installed Windows then enrol it, download apps, policies, certificates etc and activate it as Enterprise.
All of which means the enrolment of a Windows machine is slightly simpler for end users than that of the Macs we buy and it definitely causes fewer support calls.
I've had both Macs and various Windows laptops, they are a tool so I'm not hugely precious about what I use. Something that I've not seen anyone else mention is that containers/docker is WAY better on a Mac than windows.
Docker Desktop + WSL on a Windows laptop that you regularly hibernate is a fecking disaster. I've had to create a desktop shortcut to forceably kill the WSL subsystem, as it locks up and consumes all CPU cycles on a regular basis.
I have a relative who has retired from IBM - he was responsible for significant parts of their infrastructure. The information is now about 4 years old but he said that the majority of people he saw at work had Apple laptops (and usually at home too), the next was Linux. The minority Windows users were a (distant?) third - mostly for people who were supporting Windows customers.
Current gig, SOME devs in SOME regions get Macs.
But not us, because local security manager (*) is an idiot (no Linux either (**)) and because one big customer tells manglement that we aren't allowed anything but Windows. Yes, the customer dictates what the devs involved in working on "their" software get to use. Of course, I'm talking government - defense even!
(*) Of the "if we disallow it entirely, then nobody can break it, and we look good. Enabling people to get work done is not our problem" school of IT security. Mardoc, Preventer of IT style
(**) But then they let us install Linux VMs on our machines with either Virtualbox or VMware Workstation, so that most of us now only use Windows (recently forced to 11 :( ) as a bootloader and proxy.Because at some point they sort of recognised that we need to be able to do our jobs.
Mac hardware is really nice, it performs well and the battery life is great but for me the reason I run Mac’s isn’t any of those. It is just because it isn’t windows. On a Mac I barely notice the O/S, it is functional but low profile. Modern windows variants just seem to believe they are more important that the applications I am there to run. Windows seems to constantly be screaming like a two year old toddler for my attention - it is a total sinkhole for efficiency.
… then a PC running Linux.
The corporate In work for is thankfully very forward thinking.
Developers can choose mac , pc with windows or pc with linux.
Hardly ANY choose windows.
Designers can choose mac or pc with windows.
I’ve worked at corporate entities who demand only windows pc’s, it would’ve been fine if I didn’t have to request permission to install anything at all, productivity goes down the toilet. I did manage to convince the clueless IT department to install virtualbox for me, claiming it was for testing software. I installed debian and did all of my software dev in that instead.
We started offering Macs at my place pre COVID, no specific policy other than you need to make sure you can do your job and to that end we publish a pro/con list of advantages and limitations.
We had lower than 0.5% uptake.
It's rather telling that even the "creatives" overwhelmingly choose Windows PCs and the majority of the Mac users are in sales.
The early adopters who took up the Mac route have almost all moved back to Wintel.
I've worked in two places where they standardised on Mac and it ain't for me.
Maybe I worked too long in Windows (Since 3.x days), but I couldn't get along with it - muscle memory too strong.
To alleviate it, I downloaded keyboard remappers, and even the simplest things like lack of seperate minimise and maximise on its windows irked me substantially.
Couldn't fault the hardware, but the OS ain't my cuppa. For the same reason, I'm Android and not Apple.
In fact, it has reached a point that I ask if the use Macs or not in interviews. If they force a Mac, then I'll turn the role down.
The company I work at now is predominantly Mac - unless you specifically request a PC, or unless you have a role where the required software is Windows only (so that’s the accountants then). We don’t develop software for Mac - mostly its software (in Java) running on Linux. But the Mac does let us be more productive.
Caveat, yes, I’m a fan of the Mac. I used to be a PC fanboy, up until 1992 I couldn’t see the point of any platform that was incompatible with IBM. Then I had to get a Mac - and my eyes were opened. And I’ve been Mac ever since. I’m fortunate in that I have a bit of a reputation, and people want to work with me - so, since 1997, whenever I’ve said that if you want to employ me then you have to either provide me with a Mac or let me use my own I’ve invariably gotten my own way.
Never sign a contract without reading it and, if necessary, making amendments. Never put up with a platform you aren’t comfortable with. And never give your employer anything but your very best. Then everyone will be happy.
So, pretty much every company I work with regularly is Mac-only. They might have the occasional Windoze box for some specific purpose, but that's it, nobody gets it as a primary use machine.
It keeps their IT costs pretty low, none of them have in-house IT, they've got me. It's a mix of businesses, mostly medical and legal offices these days, with the odd tour company, lubrication oil service company, trade show exhibit company, architect, and graphic design house thrown in. They're all small businesses, none over 50 employees. I do get the occasional call from the local TV stations, a few other random places that have a few Macs when their IT staff can't handle something.
At home I've got mostly Macs and Linux boxes, with a couple Windoze boxes that I mostly use for games (which I rarely play, so they're mostly not touched) and occasional troubleshooting for Windoze issues.
My couple of jobs were mostly Mac first companies. Usually peeps in finance got the exception, as they need "real" Excel.
I guess El Reg hasn't asked "Silicon Valley" because that's where I work and all you see is Macs.
(Alas because I dont like macOS at all so I have to install a Linux VM on the thing. MacOS is not good at virtualization so VMs need to be left smaller than under Window or Linux which get by with less CPU and RAM for the host OS and thus more for my VM)
Working for an organisation that is BYO tolerant, I can use my personal Mac. My observations from doing this from time to time are:
- Nicer developer experience (whether you're using an IDE or developing in the terminal).
- But there are minor Office incompatibilities and differences.
- Not to mention you are buggered if you need Visio (but we're edging towards diagramming in Markdown, or just abusing PowerPoint).
More recently I've come to the conclusion that Desktop Linux is better than the Mac for development, but only good enough for Office if the web apps are good enough for what I'm doing (Word for web is weak with our corporate templates). Then again, other cats in the herd have argued for writing tech specs in Markdown (or similar), using Office as a presentation layer.
I had a (brief, thankfully) contract job at a large financial services company that was Windows ONLY several years ago after my start-up fell down. We actually used Citrix VMs and the base machine (a reasonably powered i5 with 16gb of RAM and a discrete graphics card) did NOTHING but RDP into the Citrix. HUGE waste of money providing gear that did nothing. Could have done the same work with 200 dollar Walmart laptops. But I digress.
First thing I did day 1 was put Cygwin on that Windows VM. Our project lead (basically architect but they didn't call them that there) had spent 2 WEEKS trying to automate a test of SCPing a file from the test machine to the web server to the Netapp filer. She bought several COTS Windows products to do it, and none of them worked quite right for what we needed. I got it working in about 30 seconds. She gasped on our morning SCRUM meeting and asked how I did it. I said, "Well, OpenSSH and a little BASH script."
If you won't let me run Linux on my machine, that's fine. I'll just make Windows act like Linux with Cygwin.
I use cygwin, but not install it. On regular intervals i extract rsync, wget and fetchmail out of the current cygwin. Extract in the sense of: Get the main executable and all the dependencies it has manually out of the repo, so i can use it stand-alone without the need to install. So far I only do it for those three. I tried it midnight commander over a decade ago and gave up since that one is too big with too many special dependencies to use the just-extract method.
For your SCP-example: That project lead must have really been weirdly incompetent, 'cause, well, putty and several other command line tools including powershell can do that easily. Not in thirty seconds though, cause I don't type as fast as I once did.
It was a ferociously incompetent project. I had to explain what "Race conditions" were to the lead developer and that NFS 3 did not have proper locking synchronization... We couldn't use Putty -- it was on the no-no list. We could only use products specifically approved or, for open source, only for testing (which this was, so no problem). Was a real sh*t show. 30sec may have been an exaggeration, but I finished the script and had it emailed off before I even finished half my coffee.
And the Cygwin install is kind of a hot mess, but I like being able to pull up a powershell/command prompt and type ls and see something. My final Windows machine is going out of service in 2 days -- going to get air gapped just so I can play the SIMS and Alpha Centauri and old games. Then I'll be Windows free (at home. . . my accountant clients both use Windows and Office).
When did Powershell get SSH??? Sorry, as alluded, I am a Linux guy, and this was like --- oh, God, I'm getting old -- 7 years ago.
>make Windows act like Linux with Cygwin.
Cygwin does not have a single byte of the kernel, Linux in it.
It is in fact GNU ported to windows - including a port of GCC and binutils etc, so you can go any compile GNU programs; https://gnu.org/software/ and programs for GNU, like the port of openssh into an .exe and run them.
MSYS2 is a similar GNU port - with things seemingly less broken and nicer things like a runtime package manager - although such kind of programs always fall short of running real GNU (GNU/GNU Linux-libre).
You are entirely correct. I was slovenly in my description. I meant it acted like Linux, which acts like Unix, and that there are a lot of common tools that have been developed mostly through GNU that are shared between BSD, Linux, MacOS and many others. I apologize for my personal bias. I don't much care for BSD, and AIX makes my skin crawl. Solaris wasn't so bad until . . . you know, it turned red.
I tried mingw for Windows back a bit . . . okay, more than a bit. It was Windows 7 term. I found it far less functional than cygwin. I did a df, and it did nothing. I did a ls -alrt | grep, and it threw up. I'm sure, if I wanted to build my own GNU tools from source, it would have been fine, but I gave that up in my Slackware age. I'm too old and busy to spend all my time hand crafting my kernels and ./configure make make install everything.
Cygwin is yucky on Windows. Everything is yucky on Windows. Except a couple of games, which is why I still have a (air-gapped, turned off) Win 10 machine.
The last thing I'd want from a company is a laptop. That implies I'll have to do my job at work AND from home. I'll not beg for a Mac. It will be one of each depending on the work I'll be doing with a Mac as the default. I've been using a Mac as a daily driver for many a year now. I know where it puts things and can find them quickly and put them where I want them if I don't have the choice up front.
In my home office (self-employed), I have several copies of Mac, a couple Linux and a Windoze box. Horses for courses. I prefer the Mac but there isn't anything industry standard on it that can keep up with Solidworks and some other CAD/CAE software I use. For photo and video work, it's Photoshop and Davinci. I don't care if those have Win versions or not. If I'm tethering on site, I drag out the MBP with Capture One Pro. I don't need to edit video on location. If I did, I'd charge the moon and buy a maxed out Studio and bring a good sized monitor to go with it. There's no requirement to run on battery power for any of the stuff I do. No plug = No coffee and that's unacceptable.
Windows user since the beginnings until 5 years ago. I love my mac since I was forced to switch. Great integration with iPhone, Apple watch, Apple TV etc...
However when working on advanced financial modelling and forecasting, Excel on MacOS lacks essential features and capabilities.
That's when a Windows workstation comes in handy.
A tool is a tool is a tool.
I do wonder if hobbling Office programs on a Mac is deliberate. All office progs in Mac have little differences to the Windows version, leading to your situation above. There is no reason why they need to be like that, even with different UI regimes.
We started out as a mostly MAC business.
I had a personal preference... but over time they just became harder & harder to integrate into the business.
then MS started F***ing about
and killing functionality in the 365 applications.
Apple did nothing...
Then there were the continual issues with integration into the AD & authentication.
so now after being about 100 macs in the business.... there is less than 10
Honestly these days I would want to be paid at least £20k a year more for the hassle of working with Microsoft shite day-in, day-out. Unless I was absolutely desperate. Thankfully I'm senior enough and experienced enough to generally be able to pick and choose my gigs, and desperation hasn't come into the equation at any point recently.
Pffft. “Who gets a Mac,” gimme a break.
To be honest, I was issued the standard Dell laptop surveilled by Windows 11. That lasted only until lunchtime.
Then, I went to the parking garage in the basement, looked through the obsolete electronics discard box, and brought up every laptop I found down there. Two of them were Macs.
I repurposed every single one with Linux Mint (because I don’t care). So my workstation has about 7 different laptops and only one of em has the Windows.
BYOD, indeed!
Ahh, The self important type. I used to do desktop support in a large NHS hospital, everybody had windows because that's what all the end user systems ran on. One of the Surgeons, If i remember correctly he was a liver transplant specialist, had to have an uber expensive Apple thing to run a piece of specialist imaging software, couldn't do his job without it, patients would suffer, blah, blah, blah. After months of arguing (not with me, way above my pay grade) the Apple thing arrived, I delivered it to his office, unboxed it and left as I knew nothing about it and didn't really have time to learn with a 1000 other users to support. Of course the support tickets started coming in as it needed networking, his important software installing etc. I asked one of the other Techs to have a look as he owned Apple things. Later that day I was informed that the software was to view standard dicom images and had to run on windows under parallels. Tax payers and charitable donation money well spent.
"He said that most of his employees get Dell Precision workstations that cost around $1,200, while the MacBooks cost his org between $2,400 and $2,800, which is more than double the price."
I guess they didn't factor in the medical bills for the employee who has to lug the Dell around? (Paid by the employee, or the health care system (taxes).
>comes with a Unix-style terminal that can run Bash.
macos is a Unix - as apple has paid for Unix certification and passed the extremely proprietary POSIX test suite.
GNU Bash has been ported to many platforms - there is even bash.exe
>While Windows 11 doesn’t exactly have this capability, users can run Windows Subsystem for Linux, which allows you to get to an Ubuntu (or other Linux flavored) command line.
"WSL1" didn't have Linux in it - it was GNU without Linux.
"WSL2" are glorified GNU/Linux VMs that don't really do much more than what virtualbox+guest extensions did for years (unlike "WSL", certain versions of virtualbox and guest extensions are partially free software).
The only command line Linux has is to pass options (see GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" in /etc/default/grub in good GNU distros) - what "WSL" provides is access to GNU bash and other GNU programs and also many other programs that work with GNU.
Generally, if a business isn't handcuffed with proprietary software, it's actually easier to run GNU instead (as you no longer need to deal with WC problems).
For reference, here's some data demonstrating the opposite. Note: I searched on neutral "TCO Mac vs Windows", not anything biased like "why Mac offers better TCO".
"Because Macs tend to cost more, at least historically"
I'd love to see some data backing this up on a TCO basis."
That might not be a good metric. If some tasks or people are more efficient using a Mac, the cost of that machine goes out of the window. Adapting <https://xkcd.com/1205/> to fit can show that saving a bit of time on each task every day for a year makes the cost differential meaningless.
I've run the calcs to see if buying a newer faster computer is worth the money spent and if doing so yields more earning potential (more work/jobs done in a day). It's pointless if you don't have the money, but if it turns out that I'd be able to do 20 more jobs in a year, it could be worth making some sacrifices to upgrade and sets a goal.
As per usual, no one mentioning all the anti's that windows demands and NEEDS. I have yet to hear of a Mac user suffering from a Ransomeware attack. Howemany Mac users actually install install anti-virus or anything anti for that matter? To my knowledge only those where the Windows irks demand it incase the Mac should infect their PC's. And of course when you look at the speed of the processor, it's not beholden to running all the anti's before you start work so it ever likely the Mac user is more proficient because their mac is actually more productive! Freedom of Information. How many £millions were paid out in 2024 to the ransomeware brigade? How much of that was paid my Mac users?
In the grand scheme of things, a Mac's price is not too far from thtat of a Lenovo. So it's not (much) about the per-unit cost.
It's just that in any large enough company, good luck managing a substantial amount of Macs via SCCM, when the rest of the hardware is integrated in SCCM.
Support time is x5 in time spent and /2 in efficiency when you try to assist someone at home on a Mac. Open Quickassist ? Oh wait. Screen share via Teams ? Yeah, about that. Control in Teams is abysmal, the second you look at the mouse pointer the remote control is lost. Ok, I'm'a gonna guide you, click there no wait wait WAIT not that there - the other there. Let's start over again.
Oh, and about the PFY helpdesk that you just hired for peanuts - he thinks JAMF is a rapper. The one who knew JAMF you did interview, but he actually asked for a living wage - THE HORROR !!!
Most data science geniuses will want - and deserve - Macs. But if you have those, you'll still try to wring them through a WSL setup first.
"Support time is x5 in time spent and /2 in efficiency when you try to assist someone at home on a Mac. Open Quickassist ? Oh wait. Screen share via Teams ? Yeah, about that. Control in Teams is abysmal, the second you look at the mouse pointer the remote control is lost. Ok, I'm'a gonna guide you, click there no wait wait WAIT not that there - the other there. Let's start over again."
That's an old argument and applies to people that need a load of hand holding. Many Mac users in a corporate environment have needed to be far more self-sufficient. If somebody is a real noob, they should get whatever tech support can easily support. When I was in aerospace, I had a Mac running MacOS, Win and linux via Fusion at the same time. I wore a lot of hats. Remote support is also different than local in-person support as well. I've got two Macs at home that run headless that I remote into from my iMac or MacPro. The windows machine isn't allowed on the network and I keep the chrome box isoloated. I've never worried about accessing the linux machine remotely as when I'm working on that, I'm doing specific things that make sitting at that station the best option.
The company I work for appears to use Macs as the default - I don't know anyone in the company who uses a Windows machine (although there may be some lurking in upper management of accounts or something), and our IT team seem to know what they're doing with JAMF or whatever they're using.
Pretty much all of our documentation and management is through cloud-based things like Atlassian, Slack and Google, and we use Zoom for conferencing etc.
The tech stuff is all cloud (AWS etc. and other providers, source code in GitLab), usually running Ubuntu Linux increasingly on ARM processors, so Apple Silicon MacBookPros are great for dev work.
And my M4 MacBookPro sits very quietly on my desk with several DevContainers and other stuff running, whereas my wife's Lenovo with Teams running sounds like a hairdryer.
Ditto. Macs are great for what you describe, and are the right choice.
Get into some weird fintech setup where you depend on some arcane Excel add-in that costs more than the workstation and software combined, add another few similar add-ons, and you're chained to Windows.
I'm a Windows sysadmin so always use Windows for obvious reasons. Don't have an issue with there being Macs in the environment as long as they are (as Malcolm Tucker would put it) NOMFUP and are managed by JAMF or whatever.
IME though, the biggest "use case" for getting a Mac is "do you know who I am?" or an unspoken "I need a shiny device to make it obvious I'm not a pleb."
....should probably be applied, as jamf is an app for managing groups of Macs, but they're claiming, as the internal user IT group at IBM did a decade or so ago when they started allowing users to decide between Macs or PC/Windows for use on the job, that the life cycle costs (initial purchase plus support) is lower for Macs in enterprise deployments. the basic argument, as I recall from the IBM slide set, was that is took ~ 1/3 the number of IT professionals to care and feed Mac users as a similar number of PC users. And people, as we all know, are a lot more expensive, year by year, than whatever a laptop or desktop costs.
https://www.jamf.com/blog/total-cost-of-ownership-mac-versus-pc-in-the-enterprise/
Anecdotally - any non-Mac first company giving people macs had terrible security on their Mac estate. But it was deemed low risk because they were the minority of users so exposure was considered low.
So yes, less people supporting, but strongly suspect if they scaled up the control requirements to those of the windows estate the savings reduce massively.
Anecdote only and I've not seen those reports so they may address/counter this perspective.
And I know Jamf policies can counter a lot of this, but for my experience these were usually devs and local admins and really not chosen to be all that locked down (often given local admins for example on wintel laptops too). The additional controls were applied more rigourously to the more general admin workers, so not those with the macs.
Wonder if they're comparing apples and oranges there.
Surprisingly little mention thus far about the impossibility of upgrading RAM on Apple’s machines.
For some of the things I do, a MAC is a none starter owing to the lack of memory. If you want to get down to some proper number crunching, it’s Windows or Linux or FreeBSD on non-Apple hardware.
"Surprisingly little mention thus far about the impossibility of upgrading RAM on Apple’s machines."
On the newest machines, especially laptops, yes. I've been running OCLP to let my older, more upgradable Macs run the latest MacOS, but that's coming to an end. I am too so we'll see which hits which wall first. I'm not interesting in spending money on any Apple computers with no RAM/storage upgrade path. Apple charges so much for upgrades at the time of order that it makes no sense and buying the base level kit means very little resale value. They'll either have to change or people are going to need to go elsewhere to afford their computer.
My employer offers, windows, Mac or Linux machines.
The engineers go mostly with Linux or Mac and windows seems to be used more in IT and support roles.
However in my department when I started 2.5 years ago only one other person had a max (I was the second) now about 70% have them. We notice that in a meeting the first thing the windows users do is plug in to charge the battery, where the Mac users don’t need to bother. I regularly can get a full day on a single charge unless I am on video calls all day at which point I still get about 7 hours useage.
We are the inverse: Macs by default, PCs only for engineers with specific needs. As a tech company, we have different priorities, and nothing we run is Windows-based. Cross-platform asset management is straightforward. The long-term upside has been reliability and cost savings; many employees are still using the Mac they started with.
Of course it depends on your work tasks and the software you need to do your job! Before I retired I worked in ASIC design. The tools for that (mainly from Cadence and Synopsys) were at that time primarily Unix/Linux native. We had a mix of machines including a few Windows for admin, a lot of Unix/Linux/Solaris machines for design and simulation, and the occasional Mac for front ends to the servers, since they interfaced with Unix and Linux so well. In the early days I remember having a Sparcstation on my desk...
I interviewed at one design company in Austin many years ago where the primary desktop machines were all Macs with at least one but more often at least two 28" monitors. That particular company sold a lot of chips to Apple at the time, so it wasn't a smart move to request a Windows box in that particular environment!
In my last years before retiring I used a Macbook Pro driving three monitors at work, and it served me well during work from home in the Covid years. Macs were not standard issue, but I acquired a leftover from one of the software developers and managed to hang on to it. We got hit with a nasty virus one weekend, and came in on Monday morning to find all the Windows machines on our floor had been forcibly confiscated by the IT department. The ones secured with cable locks had had the cables cut to ensure they all were removed. I and one of the other designers who used Macs were the only people able to work for about two weeks...
It is indeed horses for courses. Though, Macs are no longer suitable for long RAM-hungry courses with their unupgradability.
WSL is working well here, lots of different distros on tap and easy to have multiple version of the same one. I've never felt the need for a Mac for its unixness, it's been either Solaris or Linux on a Sparc or PC or just a VM on a PC. For dev in particular, I find the ability to freely mix Windows and Linux tools with WSL particularly handy. There's just some tools that Windows has (like, Scooter Software's excellent Beyond Compare) that has no equal on Linux (e.g. Meld tries to match Beyond Compare but - in my ironic opinion - it's no comparison). Notepad++ isn't equalled on Linux, and MobaXterm is entirely unmatched on Linux. Easy integration of Windows tools and Linux files (and vice versa) is a useful mix.
As a sys admin the base cost doesn't concern me. What does is the extra overhead managing PC's and Mac's. It doubles the workload for many tasks and especially in an Azure environment many things are far easier and secure.
Easy example was disabling USB storage devices, it's just a tick box in an intune policy but with a Mac I had to setup a bash file to remove the file that lets USB drives work. What concerns me is a savvy Mac user could easily copy that file back and use a USB drive before the script checks again and removes it.
From a security perspective I'll always prefer PC's in an Azure environment.
I interviewed at one semiconductor company in Texas many years ago where the primary desktop machines for front end design and simulation were all Macs. That particular company sold a lot of chips to Apple at the time, so it was obviously a career-limiting move to request a Windows box in that particular environment!
Work for a company that allows free choice.
We have, almost every year since Mac inception (around 2014), proven that the TCO for Mac is LOWER than any windows laptop
Was in the line at WWDC a few years ago, speaking to a teacher who refreshed his iPads every year. I was in amazement until he mentioned that the residuals on them were so high, it was cheaper than sweating them
Everyone has one, usually a Lenovo but sometimes an M$ surface.
And then some of us got macs... It's used to be because it was outside the reach of the corporate security overlords, these days... It's because they're still more open than the M$ machines to allow us to actually do our jobs (even with WSL we often find dependencies blocked for inane reasons or ports locked because... Well just because) and we can at least justify that they'll last us longer than a windows machine so there's always that.
I can precisely tell you why opening a port, especially if your run an HTTP(S) server behind ist, is not allowed by default on Windows for quite some years. It is a security measure to make botnets more difficult to run without admin rights. The command to allow is netsh.exe http add urlacl url="http://$YourIP:$TCPPort/" user=Everyone, you can use an * in place of your IP. Check with netsh.exe http show urlacl, remove with netsh.exe http delete urlacl url="http://$YourIP:$TCPPort/".
Whether we like it or not, at least it is understandable that non-admins are blocked to run an http server on any port. But it is documented how to deal with it and easy to find.
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