25 ms·

Macs are 3 times cheaper to own than Windows PCs, says IBM's IT guy

163 points by clifanatic 10y ago

wtfishackernews 10y ago
So they allow people to choose their platform since 2015 and then compare the support costs for brand new macs to all existing windows PCs? Not to mention the possible selection bias since people chose a mac themselves and were not randomly sampled.
linkmotif 10y ago
Don't know about the stats, but this has definitely been the case for me. My late 2010 MBA worked for 5 years then broke one day. Apple fixed it in under 24 hours for $304.80 (that's with 8.75% NY tax) and I'm typing on it as we speak. PS the thing is basically indestructible... I have no excuse not to buy another some time in the future. Can't wait to try the 12" MB.
- kerbalspacepro 10y ago
  I love my 2013 MBA, but I feel like switching between its screen and my MBP's Retina Display has been a significant factor in my deteriorating eye health.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
    I own a 2013 MacBook Air (13″), and the screen is definitely its worst feature. It's not even that it's not retina (the screen on my desk is just a 23″ 1080p monitor), but something about the vividness and viewing angles is straining on my eyes over long periods.
  - Scarbutt 10y ago
    deteriorating eye health The switching or the poorer screen of the air?
- freehunter 10y ago
  I agree but I would strongly hesitate to say "basically indestructible". Macs are incredibly destructible. They have a very thin glass screen, you could bend the chassis with your hands if you wanted to, and they're not even a little waterproof. How I would describe a MacBook is "quality". It's not especially durable, it just doesn't break down over time. Other laptops break in stupid ways. The hinges snap because it's metal screwed into plastic. The cheap plastic casings wear down, discolor, and crack as you touch it. The trackpad wears down because it's plastic. The logic boards stress with the constant heat flux and end up breaking. Macs don't often suffer from that. MacBooks aren't indestructible in any way. They're just built to a higher standard so they can withstand daily use. It's kind of sad that our bar is set so low, but many other laptops can't withstand daily use for years on end. Even Thinkpads, I've had the hinge areas crack because it's metal hinges screwed into a plastic chassis.
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    > The logic boards stress with the constant heat flux and end up breaking. Oh no. Macbooks do suffer from this! Remember the NVIDIA lead-free-solder fiasco or the issue affecting a boatload of MBPs with Intel GPUs? At least they fixed my Fall 2011 MBP free of charge (logicboard swap). Getting my old Windows laptop fixed with the NV disaster was a whole other story.
    - slantyyz 10y ago
      And more recently the spring 2011 MBPs with bad AMD GPUs, and that experience soured me on Macs about a decade after switching back to Mac.
    - freehunter 10y ago
      Which is extremely rare. On cheap-ass Windows laptops, it's expected.
  - rpazyaquian 10y ago
    > How I would describe a MacBook is "quality". It's not especially durable, it just doesn't break down over time. I've definitely noticed the same thing. Almost every laptop (and computer, for that matter) has broken down within a year to a year and a half for some random dumb reason. Two of my laptops died due to messed up power supply connections on the motherboard, two others died due to the hinges completely snapping off, and another died because the hard drive failed - and that one was an aluminum iMac that I pawned off to my friend, who replaced the HDD and it works just fine still. I've had my current MBP since 2012, and it's chugging along just fine - except for the hard drive, which I replaced with an SSD and have no problems with, and ironically enough the hinges, which totally cracked. I had to buy some replacement hinges off of iFixit, which I'm waiting on delivery for today. Apple computers have by far been the longest lasting and least likely to crap out on me that I've ever had. I'm very happy with my old MBP, and the only reason I'm considering upgrading to a newer model is because I can tell this one might be on its way out in general. The one thing stopping me is the price point... $1600+, yikes.
- paulmd 10y ago
  Apple doesn't have a monopoly on durable laptops. I'm still using a circa-2010 Thinkpad W-series (purchased refurbished in 2013). Needs a new cooling module (starting to overheat occasionally), and it's been through a couple battery packs and a keyboard replacement, but those are essentially wear items and it's otherwise still going strong. So far I've actually stepped right flat on the screen once (it fell out of bed while I was in the bathroom and I couldn't see it under the covers) and I'm going to need to unlearn the habit of picking it up by the screen since other laptops aren't going to tolerate that. The T- and W-series are incredibly, incredibly durable pieces of hardware (note: the new Edge, Yoga, etc series are built much more lightly). Previously I had a Fujitsu Lifebook T4220 convertible tablet from 2007. That was also very durable. It was built quite lightly but ironically the convertible screen would tend to pivot out of the way when you dropped it, which prevented damage, and since it was so light it tended not to pick up a lot of momentum. One day it just stopped powering up, probably some kind of electrical problem. Happened early 2013, so I got about 5 solid years of daily use from it. I have a broken T4200 I picked up for parts, I've been thinking about trying to troubleshoot it one of these days. In contrast my fiance had a unibody MacBook Pro (Core2Duo I think, probably circa 2008?) in college and I wasn't nearly as impressed with the design there. The emphasis on passive cooling and having as few fans as possible tended to lead to overheating. What finally killed it was the screen cable going funky (I think). Could probably be replaced, but eh, I'm tired of repasting the damned CPU every 6 months when the overheating dries it out. She has a Thinkpad just like mine now.
  - santaclaus 10y ago
    Is Lenovo shipping laptops with high dpi displays?
    - drd93 10y ago
      Writing the response from my 3200x1800 13.3" screen. High enough for my tastes.
      - paulmd 10y ago
        The 3K screens are seriously drool-worthy. I don't have a really pressing need to upgrade, but that 3K screen has gotten me wistfully playing with their laptop builder a couple times. It's literally quadruple the real-estate of my current screen (1600x900).
- greggman 10y ago
  Everyone has their own anecdotes. I've owned 1 Toshiba (5 years), 2 Vaios (both still work, one from 2000, the other from 2006), 3 Macbook Pros (2008, 2012, 2014). Of those only 1 broke. The 2nd Macbook pro about 2 years in the GPU died. I didn't buy the service contract and Apple told me my only option was to buy a new one full price.
  - weaksauce 10y ago
    my gpu was failing and they did a full replacement of the motherboard and replaced the battery because it was out of spec for 300$ flat-fee out of warranty repair. Not sure what the conditions of that were, maybe it required to have a bootable mac. The few times I have needed to repair my macs it has been quite painless.
    - scarecrowbob 10y ago
      I had the gpu die in my 2011 MBP about 12 months ago, and they even waived the $300 when they fixed it (and replaced the battery). It had to be gone long enough that I ended up purchasing a new MBP (I'm a freelance dev and couldn't afford any down time), but it came back a-okay. I dunno the whys and hows of getting them to do that kind of thing, but I'm still using the computer. Which is way better than the toshibas that I have owned over the years which last about 3-4 years as my daily drivers.
      - weaksauce 10y ago
        That particular time I had to pay it but there was a recall on them later and I got my money refunded a year or so later so that was nice. I imagine you got that fixed during the time the recall was active.
- orf 10y ago
  Not everyone's experiences are the same. My macbook has been in for repairs a total of 7 weeks this year, for basically the same problem
- gaga666 10y ago
  Writing this from hp prBbook that worked 7 years changing 4 users without any single issue.
- werdna123 10y ago
  Why would you pay $300 to fix a 5yo MBA? Just dump it on eBay or CL and buy a new one...
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    Because new MBPs have their RAM soldered and instead of SSDs weird NVMe sticks which you can't just put into an old Mac Pro/iMac and keep on working (or trivially upgrade). Oh and you can't just simply swap the battery (I needed < 5 minutes). Oh, and the new ones don't have basic stuff like Ethernet connectors, DVD drives, Firewire connectors or connectors in general. I don't want to carry around a box of flimsy adapters! Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick to my trustworthy Fall 2011 MBP.
    - slantyyz 10y ago
      >> Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick to my trustworthy Fall 2011 MBP. You're very lucky you don't have an early 2011 MBP. Infamously untrustworthy. If I had waited a few months to get your model or the 2012 model, I'd probably still be a Mac user.
      - sosborn 10y ago
        > You're very lucky you don't have an early 2011 MBP I have one. Still works great.
        slantyyz 10y ago
        15" with Quad Core i7 and AMD GPU? -edit 13" models did not have this issue
      - mschuster91 10y ago
        Funny enough, we have about 50 Spring 2011 MBPs in service, no major failures yet except people drenching their MBPs in coffee and letting them fall (disks broken).
        10y ago
- allemagne 10y ago
  My own issues with my mid-2012 Unibody MacBook Pro: I've had to replace the main SATA cable twice for about $60 each time. Also, a couple years ago updating to a specific version of OS X while LaTeX was installed caused the update process to freeze indefinitely, forcing you to reinstall everything. I had everything backed up, but it was a pain and could have easily caused me to lose important stuff if I was just a little bit lazier. Still, everything runs smooth and great. Actually noticeably better than the 2015 hp ZBook I use for work.
- to3m 10y ago
  My old Macbook Pro was very good. I had it for 5 years, and it was hard-wearing and reliable. I'd probably still be using it, only it turns out that, while durable, it wasn't splashproof. Most of the "savings" for me over that period came in terms of reduced hassle and bother. OS X proved reliable and low-maintenance, minimizing the amount of time I had to spend playing IT man. And, unlike Windows, it didn't fuck up over time, even proving resilient to upgrades (I did every step from Leopard to Mavericks), so the regular reinstalls that I was used to doing weren't necessary. (And, unlike Windows, it had a decent backup tool supplied, so when I bought an SSD, which was the closest I got to needing to do a reinstall, I had to do little more than leaving it running overnight, unattended, once.) Of course, things progress, and Windows vs OS X is moving closer to parity... thanks to efforts from both companies. But I replaced my soaked Macbook Pro with a new one anyway, on the basis of my experience - it certainly wasn't the sticker price, that's for sure - and it's working out OK for now.
- vbezhenar 10y ago
  On the other side, my macbook is the worst notebook I ever own. Faulty SSD (replaced by warranty, but still 1 month downtime because of terrible service), faulty battery after 3 years (which can't realistically be replaced), non-working audio port and speakers (I'm using USB headset), faulty keyboard (half of keys don't work as I'm typing it using Keyboard Viewer), 1 failed charger (worked 2 years), 1 charger will fail soon (cords are peeling off). There were various issues with Asuses, Lenovos I owned, but never so much. I used to own 25-year old BMW which was failing every month or two, so I had to constantly repair it and always guessing which part will fail next. I have the same feeling about Macbook, I never had so unreliable device.
- jordache 10y ago
  what was wrong with it? mechanical failure or failure of the logic board? I've opened up my MBA 2013. It's basically a large battery, smallish logic board, speakers and CPU fan.
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >My late 2010 MBA worked for 5 years then broke one day. I had the same experience with the 2011 model. About 6 months ago the motherboard went, computer is non functional. And yet...I have 13 year old Gateway laptop (first laptop I ever owned), and a 10 year old Dell that both still boot without a hitch. And that Gateway has some miles on it (bought it to play World of Warcraft). But, as someone else here said, the "quality" difference between the Apple and PC products is immense.
- walterstucco 10y ago
  I still run desktops with Windows 2000... does that make Windows desktops Immortal?
gramstrong 10y ago
*for a corporation. For a single user who knows their way around a Windows machine, they are not.
- protomyth 10y ago
  yep, but add some relatives and it all goes bad How are Chromebooks for people who have to deal with "family / friends" support issues?
  - spullara 10y ago
    How do I run Minecraft on this thing? Goes badly.
    - Shengbo 10y ago
      That's a very specific problem.
    - protomyth 10y ago
      Ah yes, the one true app doesn't work syndrome. I know it well.
- TYPE_FASTER 10y ago
  I do not agree. My 2009 MBP lasted much longer, and required way less maintenance time, than any PC I've owned or used.
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    Of all the laptops I've had, and PC laptops vastly the outnumber Macs, I've only had one fail catastrophically. And that is my 2011 Macbook Pro, which failed right after its AppleCare expired. It had already had its logic board replaced once under AppleCare. Thousands of 2011 Macbook Pro owners had the same, now infamaous, problem, and Apple pretty much pretended the problem did not exist (until after my AppleCare expired and forced me to buy another laptop, which was not a Mac).
UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
Worth saying that IBM has a large financial interest here as they're selling enterprise Mac integration.
- nmstoker 10y ago
  You're absolutely right to highlight this. I didn't wish to sound cynical but their motive is pretty clear.
patwolf 10y ago
I'd like to know what percentage of help desk calls are related to hardware vs OS vs software. I can believe that the Mac hardware is more reliable. However, a lot of help desk calls I remember making were because some legacy software wasn't working which wasn't directly related to Windows, e.g. I can't read my lotus notes mail because there's a problem with my remote mailbox configuration. I'd like to know if those calls get marked as a PC problem. I'm sure much less of the legacy software runs on Mac and therefore they get fewer help desk calls related to it.
- jgforbes 10y ago
  There could be other biases too. For instance, if the Mac users at IBM were in largely technical roles (e.g. working on their MacOS integration service) vs large non-technical departments working on Windows machines (e.g. HR and accounting). It wouldn't be very surprising that technical departments had less help-desk complaints than non technical departments.
  - busterarm 10y ago
    Not always. One of the software/hardware architects at D.E. Shaw Research (with a Ph.D. from MIT) was _legendary_ among our support team for filing and expecting followup on scores of internal support tickets for minor and often non-reproducible issues like the behavior of his laptop touchpad buttons or weird one-off website behavior. He filed tickets for everything and almost always for things we couldn't do anything about. I'll never forget his name for that reason alone. He was, and I imagine still is, a serious drain on the support staff. Totally brilliant though.
    - dwidget 10y ago
      He probably just figures it's delegating minor roadblocks so he can get to the 'important stuff'. If I could get a whole team dedicated to smoothing the highway in front of me of every little thing I probably would stop differentiating what was a pebble vs a tack. If he's the source of enough funding to pay for more than all of the man hours then it's more or less justified even if frustrating/frivolous. He's a cog and tripping up the workflow costs money. Idk, I've seen a lot of dev guys try a lot of fruitless troubleshooting on systems when it would have been better to blow away the entire install and load up only necessary components...the troubleshooting cost a lot more because of the disparity in their paycheck and the revenue they brought in vs. the IT departments. The IT department should want calls since it reduces the disparity in earned department revenue, better showing the value of IT staff. Unless there isn't interdepartment accounting, in which case 'screw those time wasters, lol'.
ben_jones 10y ago
/r/sysadmin had a good discussion on it [1]. TLDR; the study is hardly conclusive and knowing IBM is aligned with business goals. [1]:https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/58j88j/ibm_claims_macs_less_expensive_than_pcs_for_their/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/58j88j/ibm_claims...
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  Wow, this is a nice quote: "Yeah I was wondering about the Linux base. I was denied a Mac when they introduced this policy as I was what they call a privileged user (most sysadmins will be)."
jmknoll 10y ago
"Previn says that while a Mac initially costs anywhere from $117 to $454 more than a similarly configured Windows PC, over four years IBM saves between $273 to $543 per Mac compared to a similarly configured Windows PC." Its late over here, and I could be misinterpreting this, but this feels like meaningless clickbait. 3 times cheaper to own is based on 117 * 3 ~= 543? Taking the extreme low end of one value and the extreme high end of the other feels dishonest. Perhaps a more appropriate title would have been "In the long run, you'll probably save about $25/year by buying a Mac."
- greedo 10y ago
  No. The minimum savings was $273/4 years = 68.25/year The maximum savings was $543/4 years = 135.75/year
  - jmknoll 10y ago
    Are those savings already including the fact that "a Mac initially costs anywhere from $117 to $454 more than a similarly configured Windows PC"? Looking at it again, its not entirely clear from the way that its worded.
    - greedo 10y ago
      Lifecycle TCO would naturally take into consideration the initial purchase price. Just preface think of it like this: "Despite a Mac costing anywhere from $117 to $454 more, it's cheaper than Windows."
rdtsc 10y ago
OS licensing is probably cheaper as well come upgrade time. I understand macOS license is tied to the hardware so for a new version don't have to pay? With hundreds of thousands of machine that can add up.
- eosrei 10y ago
  Windows 10 is effectively now the same as MacOS, but with rolling updates: http://www.winbeta.org/news/windows-10-last-version-windows-not-end http://www.winbeta.org/news/windows-10-last-version-windows-...
  - rdtsc 10y ago
    Ah interesting, that does level the playing field there I suppose.
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    >> Windows 10 is effectively now the same as MacOS MacOS has one big thing going for it that Windows doesn't - there is only one desktop edition. None of that "Home" and "Pro" crap.
FollowSteph3 10y ago
It's because most PCs people use are bottom of the barrel cheap. If you compare similarly priced PCs to Macs with similar business class builds (keyboards for laptops, etc) I highly suspect everything will balance out, at the very least be minimal.
- greedo 10y ago
  If you look at the full reports, it's readily apparent that IBM isn't comparing an expensive Mac to an el-cheapo PC.
  - raesene6 10y ago
    But they could well be comparing a new BYOD MacOS environment to a old corporate legacy windows setup, which isn't really comparing the performance of the OS so much as comparing BYOD with old-school centrally managed windows domains.
- DINKDINK 10y ago
  Increasing the costs of a PC would make the comparative cost worst. The article claims equivalently spec'd systems >Previn says that while a Mac initially costs anywhere from $117 to $454 more than a similarly configured Windows PC,
- bdcravens 10y ago
  I believe this comparison isn't public at large, but large IT use case.
rvanmil 10y ago
It's only anecdotal, ofcourse, but I used to own Windows machines and as a result so did all my relatives with me being the "tech guy" in the family. Not a week would pass without me fixing a relative's PC. Now, about 7 years later, everyone in my family including myself has switched to Macs and I can't even remember the last time I was called to fix a machine.
- rayiner 10y ago
  This. The only person I still do tech support for is my dad, who is on Surface/Windows 10. My mom got an iMac about 10 years ago and now uses an iPad and iPhone. She set up Facebook, gmail, etc. by herself and never calls me for help.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  And you know, fixing, helping, is fine to me, even regularly, but Windows problems are such fake ones. I stopped using Windows for a while, was cringing on linux papercuts and lack of skilled GUI, but the minute I had to use windows, bloatware jumps at your throat and you regret it right away.
- knz 10y ago
  Chromebooks have a similar experience is you want an even cheaper alternative. Applications beyond the browser are more limited (photo management is awful on Chromebooks) but it's hard to beat the price and functionality for most users.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Was trying to sell my dad on getting a Chromebook, but he insisted on getting something with a numpad...
    - sqeaky 10y ago
      Tape on of these to it: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=usb+numpad https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Da...
sickbeard 10y ago
IBM reduces IT staff by 30% next quarter
cloudjacker 10y ago
> "The challenge is, all the people that still have Blackberries can fire me, so it's hard to force it from them," he joked. in tears
wineisfine 10y ago
And some day, it might take a few years, some smart guy will quote me that Android is like Windows, back in the day, and that Apple is still Apple.
pythonistic 10y ago
Ex-IBMer here: until 2015, Macs weren't an option for people upgrading their PCs. They're deploying new Apples as laptops age out, and employees will then have a choice of a MacBook/MacBook Pro (depending on job role), a Lenovo laptop (configured for job role), or for the special snowflakes with sufficient budget, some custom configuration. BYOD is alive, well, and encouraged at IBM. Most IBMers with Macs were using their personally owned hardware (as was the rare IBMer using a Microsoft Surface). Early adopters (before the end of 2014) were supported internally through the community, and starting in 2015 we were required to install a configuration program that would add an IBM app store and configure the machine so it complied with the internal security rules. Many of the day-to-day headaches on the Windows machines (e.g., printing) were eliminated with the IBM development Mac tools, but other things were impossible or required a VM to do, like using an IBM internal SOCKS proxy application to connect to customer sites. IBM has a very active and dedicated Linux community as well. I can't speak to support numbers, but the tooling was more mature and more tools were available on the RHEL distribution.
lostlogin 10y ago
Institutional computer usage seemes designed to cost the institution money. I have to log jobs for basic installs, have 2-3 follow up calls and emails to clarify what I want. Then I wait for the team who install that category of software to be free (usually the person I need is on leave). It's easier to find a workaround, even if it makes the job take hours rather than minutes. Random machines can't access the internet for updates even if the admin password was available - internet access is an attack vector to be minimised. Maybe other large institutions are better. I see the odd Mac user and I'm sure it's cheaper for the department as Mac users get an admin password and a "dunno how to help you, youre on your own". I want this too.
Shivetya 10y ago
Sorry, but Apple still needs a dedicated docking station solution provided by them. It can simply connect through a single port (USB3/Etc/Etc). I use my current work laptop for home and work and have full setups at each and its a simple one step to activate it all. Now what I am curious about is being able to do pushes that are corporate team just loves to do and ease of connection to to z, i, and p, systems. IBM recently moved 5250 emulation to a pure JAVA solution that works on Mac/Linux and I am sure z 3270 has its solution too. A lot of IBM system admin tools have been moved to JAVA just so it would be platform independent
- wmf 10y ago
  The Thunderbolt Display acts as a dock; it currently requires two cables but there may be a new USB-C version next week that uses one cable. Third-party docks also exist: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TCDOCK11PSG/ https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TCDOCK11PSG/ Just don't expect IBM to buy one for you.
roryisok 10y ago
my first reaction is to not accept this and share anecdotes of my experiences, but maybe he's right. I don't run an IT dept. I've not done any cost benefit analysis. I just know my second hand thinkpad was cheap, works well and I won't trade it for a mac any time soon. Maybe if I was loaded I'd buy my folks and siblings macbooks, but I'm not, and I'm happy enough to fix the odd issue on their cheap windows laptops. one or two reinstalls a year while I watch some TV in the background beats convincing them to spend money they don't really have on top of the line hardware but like I said, different story if you're making financial decisions for a big Corp
- stOneskull 10y ago
  for sure. there's a huge spectrum between a person and a small business and then massive IBM. for IBM it's three times cheaper. for me, it's probably cheaper to use debian on a raspberry pi than debian on a free second hand desktop that originally came with windows xp or vista, just based on electricity cost.
- j2bax 10y ago
  My own little anecdotal experience... I'm a producer at a small agency of ~30 employees. In addition to my more than busy schedule producing interactive content I also manage the Mac hardware/software for our team. I wouldn't consider myself much more than a Mac hobbiest at best, but I rarely have an issue I can't figure out. I was a PC/Windows guy that switched to Mac in college when I was doing a multimedia degree. So by no means a Mac expert and probably about as much experience with Windows at this point. That said, one thing I'm certain about is that there is no way I would take on managing a Windows network for ~30 people in addition to my fairly non-related position at the company. It's honestly very rare that I have to mess with anything with our network, computers, server etc. after having set everything up initially. This has been over the past 6-8 years.
- narutouzumaki 10y ago
  ... that's because of the cheap second hand thinkpad, which is a marvelous piece of engineering, and probably the best the Windows/Non-Mac world has to offer in competition to Macbooks. Even though there have been some questionable redesign approaches and a slight (perceived) slump in QC in recent years, Thinkpads IMO are still THE best machinery out there to just get stuff DONE. They are reliable, full Linux compatibility, easy to service and have the best non mechanical / Notebook keyboard out there. Tbh the only thing I envy the Macs for are their brilliant screens. But we have red nipples on our keyboards, so yeah...
fnordsensei 10y ago
The company I work at is small, at 32 employees. We standardized on macs in the mid 00s for the exact same reason: maintenance costs. Being a consultancy, the ROI calculation also included hours lost due to malfunctioning hardware or software problems, and it became very easy in the end to justify the initially higher expense of giving someone a mac instead of a PC.
- joshmanders 10y ago
  I came to the same conclusion after 15 years as a Windows user, 2 years as Linux and now going on 4 as Mac.
greedo 10y ago
I use a Mac at work, and we've started giving managers the discretion to choose a Mac for their employees. I've been using Macs since OSX, so fairly familiar with their flaws in a corporate environment. I have to laugh at anyone who thinks Windows would be comparable or cheaper in cost to a Mac. Everyday, I hear a continual litany of woe and despair from our helpdesk about drivers, and anti-virus, and AD issues etc ad infinitum. Fortunately for me, my only interaction with the "Windows" environment is via SMB to our fileservers. This works reasonably well. The rest of our applications are either Java based, have a web interface, or use a console. My immediate coworkers are all sysadmins with years of experience, and even they still have to cope with BSODs, crashing applications, and all the usual crap that Windows users continue to put up with. It's sad; they actually think it's normal. I run into the same issue when they talk about Windows server issues (I admin the *nix systems). They don't believe me when I say I don't run into issue xyz...
- talmand 10y ago
  >> I hear a continual litany of woe and despair from our helpdesk about drivers, and anti-virus, and AD issues etc ad infinitum Sounds like human error to me. My two young children seem to handle Windows just fine without me having to constantly monitor their machines. Edit: what? my anecdotal evidence isn't as good as everybody else?
  - jakobegger 10y ago
    You should know that anecdotal evidence is frowned upon on Hacker News when it doesn't support conventional wisdom.
    - salamisultan 10y ago
      Shutup you dirty nigger
    - sqeaky 10y ago
      I thought his anecdote was the conventional wisdom? It lines up pretty perfectly with my experience swapping in Ubuntu for Mac OS. When I have a problem I can troubleshoot it down to a specific line of code or piece of hardware, on windows.... well, I would rather not troubleshoot anything on windows.
KirinDave 10y ago
I wish I could talk more about this but I'm not sure I can go into detail today. But I can say: - Part of the reasons macs are cheaper is that they're massively less instrumented than PCs. - Most orgs have not migrated to Win10 because they're totally convinced they need that instrumentation on windows. - But they don't need that instrumentation on OSX, so it calls the entire premise into question. It's also the case that people negotiate cheap block sales of SKUs from "trusted" partners to help pre-bundle all that instrumentation. But as this data shows, it turns out that buying less customized devices with better overall specs is actually a cost savings and per-unit cost. Finally, I'd argue that employee satisfaction is almost directly a result of not having a heavy-handed and almost entirely arbitrary series of mandates forced onto their computer. I won't talk about my employers efforts, but I know OTHER people (friends in IT) who are experimenting with mass deploys of Win10 and Surface books with a "let's throw EVERYTHING out and pretend these are a new platform" approach, and they tell me that they see benefits. As the conversations are casual, I cannot go further. It's sort of amazing what happens to overall cost if you accept the premise that the vast majority of IT tooling and monitoring is in fact bad, wrongheaded, and not fulfilling real security and auditing requirements.
- raesene6 10y ago
  This very much chimes with my experiences of enterprise IT. The change is in throwing out the new platform and putting in a new one, not in what they old and new one actually are. I'll be interested to see if the waves of BYOD and lightly managed systems give way to a return to centralisation again, when people realise what they don't have any more, or if it turns out, as you say, to be that they never really needed it in the first place.
StillBored 10y ago
Well, if IBM's PC image is anything like it was in the early 2000's probably > 50% of their PC issues are self inflicted by the IT people who built the image. From buggy unsigned drivers, to crapware for security/etc, I stabilized my machine by uninstalling a bunch of things that should never have been in the standard image. If you compare the PC vs MAC images at the last couple companies I worked at, you will find that the PC's are far more heavily modified with crapware/bloatware than the macs were. Usually because having checkpoint/norton/whatever was an absolute requirement from a security perspective on the PC's but apparently the MAC's didn't even need disk encryption enabled much less virus scanners...
- treve 10y ago
  > Well, if IBM's PC image is anything like it was in the early 2000's probably > 50% of their PC issues are self inflicted by the IT people who built the image. I'd argue that most issues people have with Windows PC fall in the category of 'self inflicted', but the point is, is that this is much harder to do on a Mac (apparently). I never heard someone building an image for a mac for example.
  - raesene6 10y ago
    So it would sound like the answer is to improve the IT practices in use, rather than necessarily blame the underlying OS...
  - washadjeffmad 10y ago
    Not in the Windows way, but we maintain (read: throw together, once) separate images for fusion drives, on/off domain, and some other minor use and test cases. But no one here is patching kernels or blacklisting modules to fix hardware issues on Macs, or working around some Intel security technology that disables xhci controllers on Skylake if you aren't on Win10 because the last LCR didn't cull enough of the incompatible hardware to upgrade from Win7. Things like that are why our Mac group can support as many systems as the PC team with 1/5 the staff. And that's not including Service, who deal almost exclusively with PC issues by volume.
  - 10y ago
tjpaudio 10y ago
Am I the only one here getting a warm fuzzy nostalgic feeling from reading this, a lengthy "mac vs. pc" discussion?
infodroid 10y ago
I wonder whether this is a premature conclusion due to sampling bias. I suspect that the early Mac adopters at IBM were mostly developers and expert users, people that didn't need a lot of support anyway. This makes it look like IBM's Mac users are cheaper to support, when in reality the true support costs won't be known until the user base is more representative of the company as a whole.
usingpond 10y ago
To contribute some anecdotal findings to the larger IT discussion in the thread, a lot of it comes down to this IMHO... There are three levels of understanding of personal computers and how to manage them: A) Basic understanding, the vast majority of users/clients B) Intermediate understanding, you often find yourself walking your relatives through setting up their mail client C) Expert understanding, you have deep knowledge of networking and user permissions for each computer on this network. You don't use apps to figure this out, you have set it up, tried it, and are proud of a system you have designed to make it all work. I've found that many issues arise from folks working in IT whom are B that think they are C, and the frustration from not having Macs work identically as their Windows networking wizards causes friction. I think as people are getting better trained in BYOD, and the fact that there's no way around better IT training to accommodate it, is causing a sea change in adopting Macs.
rajanikanthr 10y ago
purchased my Thinkpad T520 in 2011.. still running strong :)
makecheck 10y ago
I’ll take “headlines you would never see in 1990 for 800, Alex”. :) Sadly, even today, using a PC laptop, the process is something like this: 1. Open lid and start work. Actually no, the battery managed to drain itself again due to the power-inefficiency of the system; better go find a cord and plug it in first. 2. Open lid again and start work. Actually no, the fancy “resuming Windows” animation has appeared. Check back after several minutes. 3. Try to start work. Actually no, Windows has required updates and needs to install and reboot. 4. Try to start work. Actually no, the previous update was apparently just the first; Windows has to reboot again and install something else. 5. Repeat step 4 about 3 more times. 6. Try to start work. Actually no, “something” in the background isn’t done screwing with the machine yet so everything I click on is unresponsive. 7. Try to click on something. Damn it, I forgot the built-in track pad is garbage and half the time I accidentally click on things I don’t want. Let me go find a mouse and plug it in. 8. Try to start work. Oh right, even the simplest applications take inexplicably 30 seconds to launch on a “modern” computer. 9. Begin work, probably an hour later. This happens literally every couple of weeks but usually more often. Fortunately I only have the machine because I occasionally have to sync my development to compile with Visual Studio and so the entire system is mostly a distraction. Meanwhile, on my main Mac machine, it’s virtually instantaneous to start working in all respects. Open the lid, the OS is READY and the apps are either already open or they restore nearly instantly. While the Mac can certainly have restart-worthy updates, it’s way smarter about this and I always retain FULL CONTROL over the process (including the “let the message sit there forever until my work is done” option). And that’s before I even start listing the Unix tools, the awesomeness of "brew", reasonable terminal emulation, etc.
gjolund 10y ago
Linux is even cheaper. I am constantly dumbfounded when I see "lean" startups shelling out for macbooks. If you really want to save money and run a lean operation go linux.

163 points by clifanatic 10y ago

So they allow people to choose their platform since 2015 and then compare the support costs for brand new macs to all existing windows PCs? Not to mention the possible selection bias since people chose a mac themselves and were not randomly sampled.

linkmotif 10y ago

Don't know about the stats, but this has definitely been the case for me. My late 2010 MBA worked for 5 years then broke one day. Apple fixed it in under 24 hours for $304.80 (that's with 8.75% NY tax) and I'm typing on it as we speak. PS the thing is basically indestructible... I have no excuse not to buy another some time in the future. Can't wait to try the 12" MB.

kerbalspacepro 10y ago
I love my 2013 MBA, but I feel like switching between its screen and my MBP's Retina Display has been a significant factor in my deteriorating eye health.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  I own a 2013 MacBook Air (13″), and the screen is definitely its worst feature. It's not even that it's not retina (the screen on my desk is just a 23″ 1080p monitor), but something about the vividness and viewing angles is straining on my eyes over long periods.
- Scarbutt 10y ago
  deteriorating eye health The switching or the poorer screen of the air?
freehunter 10y ago
I agree but I would strongly hesitate to say "basically indestructible". Macs are incredibly destructible. They have a very thin glass screen, you could bend the chassis with your hands if you wanted to, and they're not even a little waterproof. How I would describe a MacBook is "quality". It's not especially durable, it just doesn't break down over time. Other laptops break in stupid ways. The hinges snap because it's metal screwed into plastic. The cheap plastic casings wear down, discolor, and crack as you touch it. The trackpad wears down because it's plastic. The logic boards stress with the constant heat flux and end up breaking. Macs don't often suffer from that. MacBooks aren't indestructible in any way. They're just built to a higher standard so they can withstand daily use. It's kind of sad that our bar is set so low, but many other laptops can't withstand daily use for years on end. Even Thinkpads, I've had the hinge areas crack because it's metal hinges screwed into a plastic chassis.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  > The logic boards stress with the constant heat flux and end up breaking. Oh no. Macbooks do suffer from this! Remember the NVIDIA lead-free-solder fiasco or the issue affecting a boatload of MBPs with Intel GPUs? At least they fixed my Fall 2011 MBP free of charge (logicboard swap). Getting my old Windows laptop fixed with the NV disaster was a whole other story.
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    And more recently the spring 2011 MBPs with bad AMD GPUs, and that experience soured me on Macs about a decade after switching back to Mac.
  - freehunter 10y ago
    Which is extremely rare. On cheap-ass Windows laptops, it's expected.
- rpazyaquian 10y ago
  > How I would describe a MacBook is "quality". It's not especially durable, it just doesn't break down over time. I've definitely noticed the same thing. Almost every laptop (and computer, for that matter) has broken down within a year to a year and a half for some random dumb reason. Two of my laptops died due to messed up power supply connections on the motherboard, two others died due to the hinges completely snapping off, and another died because the hard drive failed - and that one was an aluminum iMac that I pawned off to my friend, who replaced the HDD and it works just fine still. I've had my current MBP since 2012, and it's chugging along just fine - except for the hard drive, which I replaced with an SSD and have no problems with, and ironically enough the hinges, which totally cracked. I had to buy some replacement hinges off of iFixit, which I'm waiting on delivery for today. Apple computers have by far been the longest lasting and least likely to crap out on me that I've ever had. I'm very happy with my old MBP, and the only reason I'm considering upgrading to a newer model is because I can tell this one might be on its way out in general. The one thing stopping me is the price point... $1600+, yikes.
paulmd 10y ago
Apple doesn't have a monopoly on durable laptops. I'm still using a circa-2010 Thinkpad W-series (purchased refurbished in 2013). Needs a new cooling module (starting to overheat occasionally), and it's been through a couple battery packs and a keyboard replacement, but those are essentially wear items and it's otherwise still going strong. So far I've actually stepped right flat on the screen once (it fell out of bed while I was in the bathroom and I couldn't see it under the covers) and I'm going to need to unlearn the habit of picking it up by the screen since other laptops aren't going to tolerate that. The T- and W-series are incredibly, incredibly durable pieces of hardware (note: the new Edge, Yoga, etc series are built much more lightly). Previously I had a Fujitsu Lifebook T4220 convertible tablet from 2007. That was also very durable. It was built quite lightly but ironically the convertible screen would tend to pivot out of the way when you dropped it, which prevented damage, and since it was so light it tended not to pick up a lot of momentum. One day it just stopped powering up, probably some kind of electrical problem. Happened early 2013, so I got about 5 solid years of daily use from it. I have a broken T4200 I picked up for parts, I've been thinking about trying to troubleshoot it one of these days. In contrast my fiance had a unibody MacBook Pro (Core2Duo I think, probably circa 2008?) in college and I wasn't nearly as impressed with the design there. The emphasis on passive cooling and having as few fans as possible tended to lead to overheating. What finally killed it was the screen cable going funky (I think). Could probably be replaced, but eh, I'm tired of repasting the damned CPU every 6 months when the overheating dries it out. She has a Thinkpad just like mine now.
- santaclaus 10y ago
  Is Lenovo shipping laptops with high dpi displays?
  - drd93 10y ago
    Writing the response from my 3200x1800 13.3" screen. High enough for my tastes.
    - paulmd 10y ago
      The 3K screens are seriously drool-worthy. I don't have a really pressing need to upgrade, but that 3K screen has gotten me wistfully playing with their laptop builder a couple times. It's literally quadruple the real-estate of my current screen (1600x900).
greggman 10y ago
Everyone has their own anecdotes. I've owned 1 Toshiba (5 years), 2 Vaios (both still work, one from 2000, the other from 2006), 3 Macbook Pros (2008, 2012, 2014). Of those only 1 broke. The 2nd Macbook pro about 2 years in the GPU died. I didn't buy the service contract and Apple told me my only option was to buy a new one full price.
- weaksauce 10y ago
  my gpu was failing and they did a full replacement of the motherboard and replaced the battery because it was out of spec for 300$ flat-fee out of warranty repair. Not sure what the conditions of that were, maybe it required to have a bootable mac. The few times I have needed to repair my macs it has been quite painless.
  - scarecrowbob 10y ago
    I had the gpu die in my 2011 MBP about 12 months ago, and they even waived the $300 when they fixed it (and replaced the battery). It had to be gone long enough that I ended up purchasing a new MBP (I'm a freelance dev and couldn't afford any down time), but it came back a-okay. I dunno the whys and hows of getting them to do that kind of thing, but I'm still using the computer. Which is way better than the toshibas that I have owned over the years which last about 3-4 years as my daily drivers.
    - weaksauce 10y ago
      That particular time I had to pay it but there was a recall on them later and I got my money refunded a year or so later so that was nice. I imagine you got that fixed during the time the recall was active.
orf 10y ago
Not everyone's experiences are the same. My macbook has been in for repairs a total of 7 weeks this year, for basically the same problem
gaga666 10y ago
Writing this from hp prBbook that worked 7 years changing 4 users without any single issue.
werdna123 10y ago
Why would you pay $300 to fix a 5yo MBA? Just dump it on eBay or CL and buy a new one...
- mschuster91 10y ago
  Because new MBPs have their RAM soldered and instead of SSDs weird NVMe sticks which you can't just put into an old Mac Pro/iMac and keep on working (or trivially upgrade). Oh and you can't just simply swap the battery (I needed < 5 minutes). Oh, and the new ones don't have basic stuff like Ethernet connectors, DVD drives, Firewire connectors or connectors in general. I don't want to carry around a box of flimsy adapters! Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick to my trustworthy Fall 2011 MBP.
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    >> Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick to my trustworthy Fall 2011 MBP. You're very lucky you don't have an early 2011 MBP. Infamously untrustworthy. If I had waited a few months to get your model or the 2012 model, I'd probably still be a Mac user.
    - sosborn 10y ago
      > You're very lucky you don't have an early 2011 MBP I have one. Still works great.
      - slantyyz 10y ago
        15" with Quad Core i7 and AMD GPU? -edit 13" models did not have this issue
    - mschuster91 10y ago
      Funny enough, we have about 50 Spring 2011 MBPs in service, no major failures yet except people drenching their MBPs in coffee and letting them fall (disks broken).
      - 10y ago
allemagne 10y ago
My own issues with my mid-2012 Unibody MacBook Pro: I've had to replace the main SATA cable twice for about $60 each time. Also, a couple years ago updating to a specific version of OS X while LaTeX was installed caused the update process to freeze indefinitely, forcing you to reinstall everything. I had everything backed up, but it was a pain and could have easily caused me to lose important stuff if I was just a little bit lazier. Still, everything runs smooth and great. Actually noticeably better than the 2015 hp ZBook I use for work.
to3m 10y ago
My old Macbook Pro was very good. I had it for 5 years, and it was hard-wearing and reliable. I'd probably still be using it, only it turns out that, while durable, it wasn't splashproof. Most of the "savings" for me over that period came in terms of reduced hassle and bother. OS X proved reliable and low-maintenance, minimizing the amount of time I had to spend playing IT man. And, unlike Windows, it didn't fuck up over time, even proving resilient to upgrades (I did every step from Leopard to Mavericks), so the regular reinstalls that I was used to doing weren't necessary. (And, unlike Windows, it had a decent backup tool supplied, so when I bought an SSD, which was the closest I got to needing to do a reinstall, I had to do little more than leaving it running overnight, unattended, once.) Of course, things progress, and Windows vs OS X is moving closer to parity... thanks to efforts from both companies. But I replaced my soaked Macbook Pro with a new one anyway, on the basis of my experience - it certainly wasn't the sticker price, that's for sure - and it's working out OK for now.
vbezhenar 10y ago
On the other side, my macbook is the worst notebook I ever own. Faulty SSD (replaced by warranty, but still 1 month downtime because of terrible service), faulty battery after 3 years (which can't realistically be replaced), non-working audio port and speakers (I'm using USB headset), faulty keyboard (half of keys don't work as I'm typing it using Keyboard Viewer), 1 failed charger (worked 2 years), 1 charger will fail soon (cords are peeling off). There were various issues with Asuses, Lenovos I owned, but never so much. I used to own 25-year old BMW which was failing every month or two, so I had to constantly repair it and always guessing which part will fail next. I have the same feeling about Macbook, I never had so unreliable device.
jordache 10y ago
what was wrong with it? mechanical failure or failure of the logic board? I've opened up my MBA 2013. It's basically a large battery, smallish logic board, speakers and CPU fan.
forgetsusername 10y ago
>My late 2010 MBA worked for 5 years then broke one day. I had the same experience with the 2011 model. About 6 months ago the motherboard went, computer is non functional. And yet...I have 13 year old Gateway laptop (first laptop I ever owned), and a 10 year old Dell that both still boot without a hitch. And that Gateway has some miles on it (bought it to play World of Warcraft). But, as someone else here said, the "quality" difference between the Apple and PC products is immense.
walterstucco 10y ago
I still run desktops with Windows 2000... does that make Windows desktops Immortal?

gramstrong 10y ago

*for a corporation. For a single user who knows their way around a Windows machine, they are not.

protomyth 10y ago
yep, but add some relatives and it all goes bad How are Chromebooks for people who have to deal with "family / friends" support issues?
- spullara 10y ago
  How do I run Minecraft on this thing? Goes badly.
  - Shengbo 10y ago
    That's a very specific problem.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    Ah yes, the one true app doesn't work syndrome. I know it well.
TYPE_FASTER 10y ago
I do not agree. My 2009 MBP lasted much longer, and required way less maintenance time, than any PC I've owned or used.
- slantyyz 10y ago
  Of all the laptops I've had, and PC laptops vastly the outnumber Macs, I've only had one fail catastrophically. And that is my 2011 Macbook Pro, which failed right after its AppleCare expired. It had already had its logic board replaced once under AppleCare. Thousands of 2011 Macbook Pro owners had the same, now infamaous, problem, and Apple pretty much pretended the problem did not exist (until after my AppleCare expired and forced me to buy another laptop, which was not a Mac).

UnoriginalGuy 10y ago

Worth saying that IBM has a large financial interest here as they're selling enterprise Mac integration.

nmstoker 10y ago
You're absolutely right to highlight this. I didn't wish to sound cynical but their motive is pretty clear.

patwolf 10y ago

I'd like to know what percentage of help desk calls are related to hardware vs OS vs software. I can believe that the Mac hardware is more reliable. However, a lot of help desk calls I remember making were because some legacy software wasn't working which wasn't directly related to Windows, e.g. I can't read my lotus notes mail because there's a problem with my remote mailbox configuration. I'd like to know if those calls get marked as a PC problem. I'm sure much less of the legacy software runs on Mac and therefore they get fewer help desk calls related to it.

jgforbes 10y ago
There could be other biases too. For instance, if the Mac users at IBM were in largely technical roles (e.g. working on their MacOS integration service) vs large non-technical departments working on Windows machines (e.g. HR and accounting). It wouldn't be very surprising that technical departments had less help-desk complaints than non technical departments.
- busterarm 10y ago
  Not always. One of the software/hardware architects at D.E. Shaw Research (with a Ph.D. from MIT) was _legendary_ among our support team for filing and expecting followup on scores of internal support tickets for minor and often non-reproducible issues like the behavior of his laptop touchpad buttons or weird one-off website behavior. He filed tickets for everything and almost always for things we couldn't do anything about. I'll never forget his name for that reason alone. He was, and I imagine still is, a serious drain on the support staff. Totally brilliant though.
  - dwidget 10y ago
    He probably just figures it's delegating minor roadblocks so he can get to the 'important stuff'. If I could get a whole team dedicated to smoothing the highway in front of me of every little thing I probably would stop differentiating what was a pebble vs a tack. If he's the source of enough funding to pay for more than all of the man hours then it's more or less justified even if frustrating/frivolous. He's a cog and tripping up the workflow costs money. Idk, I've seen a lot of dev guys try a lot of fruitless troubleshooting on systems when it would have been better to blow away the entire install and load up only necessary components...the troubleshooting cost a lot more because of the disparity in their paycheck and the revenue they brought in vs. the IT departments. The IT department should want calls since it reduces the disparity in earned department revenue, better showing the value of IT staff. Unless there isn't interdepartment accounting, in which case 'screw those time wasters, lol'.

ben_jones 10y ago

/r/sysadmin had a good discussion on it [1]. TLDR; the study is hardly conclusive and knowing IBM is aligned with business goals. [1]:https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/58j88j/ibm_claims_macs_less_expensive_than_pcs_for_their/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/58j88j/ibm_claims...

Mithaldu 10y ago
Wow, this is a nice quote: "Yeah I was wondering about the Linux base. I was denied a Mac when they introduced this policy as I was what they call a privileged user (most sysadmins will be)."

jmknoll 10y ago

"Previn says that while a Mac initially costs anywhere from $117 to $454 more than a similarly configured Windows PC, over four years IBM saves between $273 to $543 per Mac compared to a similarly configured Windows PC." Its late over here, and I could be misinterpreting this, but this feels like meaningless clickbait. 3 times cheaper to own is based on 117 * 3 ~= 543? Taking the extreme low end of one value and the extreme high end of the other feels dishonest. Perhaps a more appropriate title would have been "In the long run, you'll probably save about $25/year by buying a Mac."

greedo 10y ago
No. The minimum savings was $273/4 years = 68.25/year The maximum savings was $543/4 years = 135.75/year
- jmknoll 10y ago
  Are those savings already including the fact that "a Mac initially costs anywhere from $117 to $454 more than a similarly configured Windows PC"? Looking at it again, its not entirely clear from the way that its worded.
  - greedo 10y ago
    Lifecycle TCO would naturally take into consideration the initial purchase price. Just preface think of it like this: "Despite a Mac costing anywhere from $117 to $454 more, it's cheaper than Windows."

rdtsc 10y ago

OS licensing is probably cheaper as well come upgrade time. I understand macOS license is tied to the hardware so for a new version don't have to pay? With hundreds of thousands of machine that can add up.

eosrei 10y ago
Windows 10 is effectively now the same as MacOS, but with rolling updates: http://www.winbeta.org/news/windows-10-last-version-windows-not-end http://www.winbeta.org/news/windows-10-last-version-windows-...
- rdtsc 10y ago
  Ah interesting, that does level the playing field there I suppose.
- slantyyz 10y ago
  >> Windows 10 is effectively now the same as MacOS MacOS has one big thing going for it that Windows doesn't - there is only one desktop edition. None of that "Home" and "Pro" crap.

FollowSteph3 10y ago

It's because most PCs people use are bottom of the barrel cheap. If you compare similarly priced PCs to Macs with similar business class builds (keyboards for laptops, etc) I highly suspect everything will balance out, at the very least be minimal.

greedo 10y ago
If you look at the full reports, it's readily apparent that IBM isn't comparing an expensive Mac to an el-cheapo PC.
- raesene6 10y ago
  But they could well be comparing a new BYOD MacOS environment to a old corporate legacy windows setup, which isn't really comparing the performance of the OS so much as comparing BYOD with old-school centrally managed windows domains.
DINKDINK 10y ago
Increasing the costs of a PC would make the comparative cost worst. The article claims equivalently spec'd systems >Previn says that while a Mac initially costs anywhere from $117 to $454 more than a similarly configured Windows PC,
bdcravens 10y ago
I believe this comparison isn't public at large, but large IT use case.

rvanmil 10y ago

It's only anecdotal, ofcourse, but I used to own Windows machines and as a result so did all my relatives with me being the "tech guy" in the family. Not a week would pass without me fixing a relative's PC. Now, about 7 years later, everyone in my family including myself has switched to Macs and I can't even remember the last time I was called to fix a machine.

rayiner 10y ago
This. The only person I still do tech support for is my dad, who is on Surface/Windows 10. My mom got an iMac about 10 years ago and now uses an iPad and iPhone. She set up Facebook, gmail, etc. by herself and never calls me for help.
agumonkey 10y ago
And you know, fixing, helping, is fine to me, even regularly, but Windows problems are such fake ones. I stopped using Windows for a while, was cringing on linux papercuts and lack of skilled GUI, but the minute I had to use windows, bloatware jumps at your throat and you regret it right away.
knz 10y ago
Chromebooks have a similar experience is you want an even cheaper alternative. Applications beyond the browser are more limited (photo management is awful on Chromebooks) but it's hard to beat the price and functionality for most users.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Was trying to sell my dad on getting a Chromebook, but he insisted on getting something with a numpad...
  - sqeaky 10y ago
    Tape on of these to it: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=usb+numpad https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Da...

sickbeard 10y ago

IBM reduces IT staff by 30% next quarter

cloudjacker 10y ago

> "The challenge is, all the people that still have Blackberries can fire me, so it's hard to force it from them," he joked. in tears

wineisfine 10y ago

And some day, it might take a few years, some smart guy will quote me that Android is like Windows, back in the day, and that Apple is still Apple.

pythonistic 10y ago

Ex-IBMer here: until 2015, Macs weren't an option for people upgrading their PCs. They're deploying new Apples as laptops age out, and employees will then have a choice of a MacBook/MacBook Pro (depending on job role), a Lenovo laptop (configured for job role), or for the special snowflakes with sufficient budget, some custom configuration. BYOD is alive, well, and encouraged at IBM. Most IBMers with Macs were using their personally owned hardware (as was the rare IBMer using a Microsoft Surface). Early adopters (before the end of 2014) were supported internally through the community, and starting in 2015 we were required to install a configuration program that would add an IBM app store and configure the machine so it complied with the internal security rules. Many of the day-to-day headaches on the Windows machines (e.g., printing) were eliminated with the IBM development Mac tools, but other things were impossible or required a VM to do, like using an IBM internal SOCKS proxy application to connect to customer sites. IBM has a very active and dedicated Linux community as well. I can't speak to support numbers, but the tooling was more mature and more tools were available on the RHEL distribution.

lostlogin 10y ago

Institutional computer usage seemes designed to cost the institution money. I have to log jobs for basic installs, have 2-3 follow up calls and emails to clarify what I want. Then I wait for the team who install that category of software to be free (usually the person I need is on leave). It's easier to find a workaround, even if it makes the job take hours rather than minutes. Random machines can't access the internet for updates even if the admin password was available - internet access is an attack vector to be minimised. Maybe other large institutions are better. I see the odd Mac user and I'm sure it's cheaper for the department as Mac users get an admin password and a "dunno how to help you, youre on your own". I want this too.

Shivetya 10y ago

Sorry, but Apple still needs a dedicated docking station solution provided by them. It can simply connect through a single port (USB3/Etc/Etc). I use my current work laptop for home and work and have full setups at each and its a simple one step to activate it all. Now what I am curious about is being able to do pushes that are corporate team just loves to do and ease of connection to to z, i, and p, systems. IBM recently moved 5250 emulation to a pure JAVA solution that works on Mac/Linux and I am sure z 3270 has its solution too. A lot of IBM system admin tools have been moved to JAVA just so it would be platform independent

wmf 10y ago
The Thunderbolt Display acts as a dock; it currently requires two cables but there may be a new USB-C version next week that uses one cable. Third-party docks also exist: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TCDOCK11PSG/ https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TCDOCK11PSG/ Just don't expect IBM to buy one for you.

roryisok 10y ago

my first reaction is to not accept this and share anecdotes of my experiences, but maybe he's right. I don't run an IT dept. I've not done any cost benefit analysis. I just know my second hand thinkpad was cheap, works well and I won't trade it for a mac any time soon. Maybe if I was loaded I'd buy my folks and siblings macbooks, but I'm not, and I'm happy enough to fix the odd issue on their cheap windows laptops. one or two reinstalls a year while I watch some TV in the background beats convincing them to spend money they don't really have on top of the line hardware but like I said, different story if you're making financial decisions for a big Corp

stOneskull 10y ago
for sure. there's a huge spectrum between a person and a small business and then massive IBM. for IBM it's three times cheaper. for me, it's probably cheaper to use debian on a raspberry pi than debian on a free second hand desktop that originally came with windows xp or vista, just based on electricity cost.
j2bax 10y ago
My own little anecdotal experience... I'm a producer at a small agency of ~30 employees. In addition to my more than busy schedule producing interactive content I also manage the Mac hardware/software for our team. I wouldn't consider myself much more than a Mac hobbiest at best, but I rarely have an issue I can't figure out. I was a PC/Windows guy that switched to Mac in college when I was doing a multimedia degree. So by no means a Mac expert and probably about as much experience with Windows at this point. That said, one thing I'm certain about is that there is no way I would take on managing a Windows network for ~30 people in addition to my fairly non-related position at the company. It's honestly very rare that I have to mess with anything with our network, computers, server etc. after having set everything up initially. This has been over the past 6-8 years.
narutouzumaki 10y ago
... that's because of the cheap second hand thinkpad, which is a marvelous piece of engineering, and probably the best the Windows/Non-Mac world has to offer in competition to Macbooks. Even though there have been some questionable redesign approaches and a slight (perceived) slump in QC in recent years, Thinkpads IMO are still THE best machinery out there to just get stuff DONE. They are reliable, full Linux compatibility, easy to service and have the best non mechanical / Notebook keyboard out there. Tbh the only thing I envy the Macs for are their brilliant screens. But we have red nipples on our keyboards, so yeah...

fnordsensei 10y ago

The company I work at is small, at 32 employees. We standardized on macs in the mid 00s for the exact same reason: maintenance costs. Being a consultancy, the ROI calculation also included hours lost due to malfunctioning hardware or software problems, and it became very easy in the end to justify the initially higher expense of giving someone a mac instead of a PC.

joshmanders 10y ago
I came to the same conclusion after 15 years as a Windows user, 2 years as Linux and now going on 4 as Mac.

greedo 10y ago

I use a Mac at work, and we've started giving managers the discretion to choose a Mac for their employees. I've been using Macs since OSX, so fairly familiar with their flaws in a corporate environment. I have to laugh at anyone who thinks Windows would be comparable or cheaper in cost to a Mac. Everyday, I hear a continual litany of woe and despair from our helpdesk about drivers, and anti-virus, and AD issues etc ad infinitum. Fortunately for me, my only interaction with the "Windows" environment is via SMB to our fileservers. This works reasonably well. The rest of our applications are either Java based, have a web interface, or use a console. My immediate coworkers are all sysadmins with years of experience, and even they still have to cope with BSODs, crashing applications, and all the usual crap that Windows users continue to put up with. It's sad; they actually think it's normal. I run into the same issue when they talk about Windows server issues (I admin the *nix systems). They don't believe me when I say I don't run into issue xyz...

talmand 10y ago
>> I hear a continual litany of woe and despair from our helpdesk about drivers, and anti-virus, and AD issues etc ad infinitum Sounds like human error to me. My two young children seem to handle Windows just fine without me having to constantly monitor their machines. Edit: what? my anecdotal evidence isn't as good as everybody else?
- jakobegger 10y ago
  You should know that anecdotal evidence is frowned upon on Hacker News when it doesn't support conventional wisdom.
  - salamisultan 10y ago
    Shutup you dirty nigger
  - sqeaky 10y ago
    I thought his anecdote was the conventional wisdom? It lines up pretty perfectly with my experience swapping in Ubuntu for Mac OS. When I have a problem I can troubleshoot it down to a specific line of code or piece of hardware, on windows.... well, I would rather not troubleshoot anything on windows.

KirinDave 10y ago

I wish I could talk more about this but I'm not sure I can go into detail today. But I can say: - Part of the reasons macs are cheaper is that they're massively less instrumented than PCs. - Most orgs have not migrated to Win10 because they're totally convinced they need that instrumentation on windows. - But they don't need that instrumentation on OSX, so it calls the entire premise into question. It's also the case that people negotiate cheap block sales of SKUs from "trusted" partners to help pre-bundle all that instrumentation. But as this data shows, it turns out that buying less customized devices with better overall specs is actually a cost savings and per-unit cost. Finally, I'd argue that employee satisfaction is almost directly a result of not having a heavy-handed and almost entirely arbitrary series of mandates forced onto their computer. I won't talk about my employers efforts, but I know OTHER people (friends in IT) who are experimenting with mass deploys of Win10 and Surface books with a "let's throw EVERYTHING out and pretend these are a new platform" approach, and they tell me that they see benefits. As the conversations are casual, I cannot go further. It's sort of amazing what happens to overall cost if you accept the premise that the vast majority of IT tooling and monitoring is in fact bad, wrongheaded, and not fulfilling real security and auditing requirements.

raesene6 10y ago
This very much chimes with my experiences of enterprise IT. The change is in throwing out the new platform and putting in a new one, not in what they old and new one actually are. I'll be interested to see if the waves of BYOD and lightly managed systems give way to a return to centralisation again, when people realise what they don't have any more, or if it turns out, as you say, to be that they never really needed it in the first place.

StillBored 10y ago

Well, if IBM's PC image is anything like it was in the early 2000's probably > 50% of their PC issues are self inflicted by the IT people who built the image. From buggy unsigned drivers, to crapware for security/etc, I stabilized my machine by uninstalling a bunch of things that should never have been in the standard image. If you compare the PC vs MAC images at the last couple companies I worked at, you will find that the PC's are far more heavily modified with crapware/bloatware than the macs were. Usually because having checkpoint/norton/whatever was an absolute requirement from a security perspective on the PC's but apparently the MAC's didn't even need disk encryption enabled much less virus scanners...

treve 10y ago
> Well, if IBM's PC image is anything like it was in the early 2000's probably > 50% of their PC issues are self inflicted by the IT people who built the image. I'd argue that most issues people have with Windows PC fall in the category of 'self inflicted', but the point is, is that this is much harder to do on a Mac (apparently). I never heard someone building an image for a mac for example.
- raesene6 10y ago
  So it would sound like the answer is to improve the IT practices in use, rather than necessarily blame the underlying OS...
- washadjeffmad 10y ago
  Not in the Windows way, but we maintain (read: throw together, once) separate images for fusion drives, on/off domain, and some other minor use and test cases. But no one here is patching kernels or blacklisting modules to fix hardware issues on Macs, or working around some Intel security technology that disables xhci controllers on Skylake if you aren't on Win10 because the last LCR didn't cull enough of the incompatible hardware to upgrade from Win7. Things like that are why our Mac group can support as many systems as the PC team with 1/5 the staff. And that's not including Service, who deal almost exclusively with PC issues by volume.
- 10y ago

tjpaudio 10y ago

Am I the only one here getting a warm fuzzy nostalgic feeling from reading this, a lengthy "mac vs. pc" discussion?

infodroid 10y ago

I wonder whether this is a premature conclusion due to sampling bias. I suspect that the early Mac adopters at IBM were mostly developers and expert users, people that didn't need a lot of support anyway. This makes it look like IBM's Mac users are cheaper to support, when in reality the true support costs won't be known until the user base is more representative of the company as a whole.

usingpond 10y ago

To contribute some anecdotal findings to the larger IT discussion in the thread, a lot of it comes down to this IMHO... There are three levels of understanding of personal computers and how to manage them: A) Basic understanding, the vast majority of users/clients B) Intermediate understanding, you often find yourself walking your relatives through setting up their mail client C) Expert understanding, you have deep knowledge of networking and user permissions for each computer on this network. You don't use apps to figure this out, you have set it up, tried it, and are proud of a system you have designed to make it all work. I've found that many issues arise from folks working in IT whom are B that think they are C, and the frustration from not having Macs work identically as their Windows networking wizards causes friction. I think as people are getting better trained in BYOD, and the fact that there's no way around better IT training to accommodate it, is causing a sea change in adopting Macs.

rajanikanthr 10y ago

purchased my Thinkpad T520 in 2011.. still running strong :)

makecheck 10y ago

I’ll take “headlines you would never see in 1990 for 800, Alex”. :) Sadly, even today, using a PC laptop, the process is something like this: 1. Open lid and start work. Actually no, the battery managed to drain itself again due to the power-inefficiency of the system; better go find a cord and plug it in first. 2. Open lid again and start work. Actually no, the fancy “resuming Windows” animation has appeared. Check back after several minutes. 3. Try to start work. Actually no, Windows has required updates and needs to install and reboot. 4. Try to start work. Actually no, the previous update was apparently just the first; Windows has to reboot again and install something else. 5. Repeat step 4 about 3 more times. 6. Try to start work. Actually no, “something” in the background isn’t done screwing with the machine yet so everything I click on is unresponsive. 7. Try to click on something. Damn it, I forgot the built-in track pad is garbage and half the time I accidentally click on things I don’t want. Let me go find a mouse and plug it in. 8. Try to start work. Oh right, even the simplest applications take inexplicably 30 seconds to launch on a “modern” computer. 9. Begin work, probably an hour later. This happens literally every couple of weeks but usually more often. Fortunately I only have the machine because I occasionally have to sync my development to compile with Visual Studio and so the entire system is mostly a distraction. Meanwhile, on my main Mac machine, it’s virtually instantaneous to start working in all respects. Open the lid, the OS is READY and the apps are either already open or they restore nearly instantly. While the Mac can certainly have restart-worthy updates, it’s way smarter about this and I always retain FULL CONTROL over the process (including the “let the message sit there forever until my work is done” option). And that’s before I even start listing the Unix tools, the awesomeness of "brew", reasonable terminal emulation, etc.

gjolund 10y ago

Linux is even cheaper. I am constantly dumbfounded when I see "lean" startups shelling out for macbooks. If you really want to save money and run a lean operation go linux.