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What a strange article!

"Every computer on an enterprise network needs a set of basic services. In particular, power and internet must be available."

Power? In the sense of [Nm/s]?

And the graphics! Why is the Mac-Square larger than the PC square in the second graph? Why does the "Hardware and essential software" square not contain references to hardware or software, but concepts like "encryption" or "deployment"?

I have a really hard time understanding the point of that article.

The squares are stacked bar charts with a weird styling. On the x axis, you have the two systems macOS and Windows, and the y axis is cost or price.

The "hardware & essential software" part for macOS is more expensive than for Windows because Mac hardware is more expensive than Windows hardware.

"Jamf helps organizations succeed with Apple. By enabling IT to empower end users, we bring the legendary Apple experience to businesses, education and government organizations."

So, totally unbiased and not a sales pitch disguised as a comparative article then.

Employee at Fortune 200 company here. This article reflects our experience as well. We have our own video production unit and those guys have been using Macs for years. More recently we've gotten into iOS app development which has necessitated Macs in IT. That's when things started taking off - lots of our IT teams not doing iOS app development started getting Macs.

We've had the same experience as mentioned in the article - those teams using Macs are more productive and require less support. The only guys not running Macs are those doing legacy .NET support or those who simply don't want to - we're not forcing anyone to use a Mac.

This new generation of Macs could really be a game-changer because the Apple Tax has largely evaporated - especially for large enterprises. That drives the TCO even lower and if these machines perform that much better than your standard-issue enterprise HP or Dell laptop then that may help the Mac break out of our IT organization.

Does that mean my organization will become a Mac shop? No. But neither is IBM. We'll still have engineers needing a beefy CAD workstation. We'll still have people needing to run Windows-based proprietary software. Still, I could see 60%-70% switching to a Mac and our company saving a lot of money by their doing so. That's nothing to sneeze at.

As an engineer, I'm hard pressed to think of better than Ubuntu on Thinkpads for the engineering staff. Are there any startups doing this?

Shuttleworth needs to invest in MDM. He'd make a killing.

In the distant future, I think we'll all be using thin clients, editing code in the cloud. Microsoft clearly wants that pie if you look at what they're doing with VS Code and Github. If that's where we wind up, then the base OS and machine specs don't really matter much.

I would not consider working for a company where my only OS for work would be Ubuntu. For me that would raise massive red flags that the company is a cheapskate (speaking from experience...)
We already had thin clients approaches 15 years ago and most setups I have seen were quite a failure.

Never going to use a Mac, since I think it degrades developers freedom (and that of users too, but that is subjective).

I am surprised that Microsoft actually tries to emulate Apple instead of serving an alternative. Windows is still a mess in my opinion.

I do deploy stuff to the cloud because I don't like administrative tasks and don't need to pay the invoices.

But yes, an uniform environment has advantages for administration, no doubt about it. But the price is too high to switch to Apple land.

If they had a critical mass, you can be sure you loose a lot of freedom to execute stuff to your liking. You cannot even reset do a factory reset of a damn iPad without cloud access. I think it is insane that some developers disregard these "features". That is missed in this cost analysis of course.

I'd pay for good Linux MDM right now.. please!
I really hope not.

Most startups use Macs for a reason. Super powerful, durable, resale value, unix derived, just works.

Thinkpads with Ubuntu work too but the only place I know of that does Thinkpads with ANY linux is Red Hat.

> Most startups use Macs...

I doubt it. Citation?

Microsoft Office365 is not the same across MAC and Windows 10 machines. The Excel, Powerpoint, Word, Outlook features and capabilities are not the same.

Teams is barely useable on OSX

As a corporate user of both, side by side (thank you Barrier) I can tell you that it will be difficult for corporate IT departments to wrap their heads around a broad-based OSX-based deployment

Windows gives them the illusion of control through their master configuration abilities of Windows 10

The company i am at uses ubuntu for most dev machines for >10 years and this has worked well. I made the switch to a mac a few months ago and am mostly happier tho.