Macs cheaper to run than Windows in enterprise
New research confirms Macs have 33 per cent fewer problems than Windows PCs in a business environment - and that it's easier to resolve Mac problems than those with Windows.
Nucleus Research has been conducting an in-depth study on Mac versus PC in the enterprise. Ian Campbell, CEO of the company, writes: "We've been investigating the ROI from Macs versus PCs in the business environment. I was reviewing the data from a case study one of our analysts is completing and the results are interesting."
He continues: "This particular company has approximately 1700 employees with a mixed environment of PC users and Mac users. Here's the interesting data point: On a per user basis, for every 3 trouble tickets the help desk opens for PC users they only open 2 for Mac users. In addition, the Mac trouble tickets are closed 30% quicker. To net it out, in this company the Macs have 1/3 fewer problems and the problems are solved a lot quicker."
While the CEO freely admits the data only comes from one company, he calls it a "fair comparison of sophisticated users in a roughly balanced Mac versus PC environment."
The researchers are investigating numerous similar deployments, and will publish additional findings as and when case study work is complete, Campbell said.
The cost of investment is higher for Windows, too, as Computerworld suggested last year when it found that the true cost to put together a BTO Dell laptop to be as well featured as a MacBook Pro cost $650 more from Dell than the equivalent Apple laptop.
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Comments (21)
Wow! They've done it again. I could pull articles from 10 and 15 years ago that proved exactly the same thing. Mac has been a far more cost effective and efficient business investment for 15 plus years. When looking at a range of business IT model investments, Mac configurations have consistently provided more up time, better staff morale, required less repairs and less IT staff support to maintain operations. Over the life of the investment Macs have been far cheaper to buy and own, even when they were considerably more expensive to purchase up front. And with MS tied costs for networking windows, Apple makes it cheaper, faster, easier yet again. 30% better, cheaper and happier - at least!
Excuse me as I have to go and rescue another Windozzzzzzz user, box and server.... At least its a job; about as much fun as working the coal mines in the 19th century!
Yeah, I remember a press release out of Apple Australia way back c. '99, when the company released information citing research by Gartner which made the same argument. I also recall the strange way that release was then retracted, and the Apple PR (I think) lost their job. Never understood what that was all about.
I would like to see some more details on their setup. I worked help desk for years and have not seen this trend. The majority of the help tickets are non-os problems. I would guess that the Mac users are designers and only using a few programs, where the PC users are using hundreds of different applications throughout the company.
I wear two hats, designer and video editor. And in either of those roles I use just as many, if not more apps than the average non-designer, non-editor windows user in my office.
Not trying to prove you wrong, just saying that your blanket statement is... well... wrong. :)
Most of the Windows users in my office mainly use only MS or Open Office, Firefox, and Outlook, although we have one workstation dedicated to video compositing. The Mac users (designers, editors, and otherwise) have a looong list of apps we use every day, as well as our office, web and email apps.
My previous comment was supposed to be in reply to "Programs, not OS" by Noob, above.
This is really a load of crap. Anyone who has tried to integrate macs into a true enterprise (meaning Windows Active Domain) knows that macs are real crap in this area. They do not play well with others.
I think you'll probably find the actual problem is that Windows doesn't play well with others, as European anti-trust regulators continue to explain in the courts.
Exactly, I work in IT at a place with 7k+ machines. If it weren't for active directory, group policy, etc it would be impossible to manage it all. Macs are great but in a managed environment they are just not there yet.
So why not use AD managed by a Mac?
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/technology/opendirectory.html
That still only provides a fraction of the capability given to me by a windows AD environment.
I'm sure apple will get there but it obviously isn't their focus yet.
I integrated 100 Macs onto AD with 300 PCs in less than one day.
It's easy if you know what you're doing...but isn't that always the case.
I have just completed involvement in looking at standardizing a medium sized school district 6000-7000 computers on either MacTel or WinTel. If you do your own research on this topic you can find a lot of evidence both ways for which is cheaper and less troublesome.
The information very quickly becomes a morass of conflicting statements and opinions with "facts" that are generally not explained or verified (as in this example.) Even though they sort of explain it, they don't provide all of the info that one would need to make an honest comparison to your own situation, though I would love more info on this since we have approximately same number of full time users and similar distribution!
I have to imagine MacTel is a smarter investment. You *can* run Windows on it if you choose via BootCamp. You can run terminal sessions to a Citrix server if you want. Plus you can run OS X.
This gives you flexibility and doesn't require you to settle or compromise. You avoid vendor lock-in to a significant degree because even if you, down the road, god forbid, decide Windows is a better option you can do that.
The unnamed person who wrote, "Macs are great but in a managed environment they are just not there yet" misstated the truth. What he (or she) should have written was "Macs are great but in an environment controlled by people who are only trained in the proprietary technologies from the Microsoft monopoly, Microsoft has achieved its monopolistic goals or making sure that other computers do not work within the system."
When you are convicted of breaking monopoly laws, and face virtually no punishment for your crime against democracy, capitalism, and freedom, you can get away with anything.
I think most of the problems integrating Macs into PC environments are that most IT departments have the bulk of their experience on various versions of Windows. They are sometimes reluctant to dig in and find the solutions to any Mac issues. WIth the increase in popularity of Macs I think that support for Macs will improve. It will be interesting to see how things play out with the update to the iPhone and the intense developer interest. This will bring in many developers that have never programed for OS X before.
Everybody seems to be forgetting that even to just set up a Windows box, virus protection software has to be purchased, installed, updated and managed. The costs of not doing so are enormous. The software is usually inadequate, so smart businesses would employ more than one solution throughout their system. Next, most businesses have not migrated to Vista due to implementation problems and MS is not supporting XP. So what does that leave you? The only real reason that any business doesn't switch to either Mac or Linux is because they don't want to throw away their investment in software on their old ailing Windows systems. Oops, I forgot, they will have to do that with Vista any way. It's up to you, people. No wonder Mac sales have outstripped the growth of PC sales in recent months/years. Oh yeah and Macs need rebooting less often. Duh.
It's the lazy IT professional that will not integrate Macs into a Windows network CORRECTLY. They purposely hack something together they call support and when it doesn't work correctly, they scream SEE MACS DON"T PLAY NICE! Because they are the loudest squeaky complaining wheel in the organization, they usually end up getting their way and the Macs are removed.
Times are changing, people are fed up with the Windows monopoly and the small arrogant little IT empires its built. UNIX (Mac OS X) and its variants are rising steadily. When they reach a 20% marketshare these so-called IT professionals will have to learn to grow in knowledge or be replaced by a more open-minded professional. Apple is now one of the most respected brands on the planet and the youth love them. Businesses WILL be demanding them more and more.
Okay, so we are an entire AD backend and 75-80 percent OSX clients. With 10.4 we were able to integrate AD for a number of purposes, with 10.5 even more. We have over 7200 "clients"
We will be doing AD logins with SSO using Firefox (to an ISA proxy) and file shares/printers (using ExtremeZ-IP). We have an entire scripted web based image system based entirely on built in Apple technologies. Everything is either scripted unix, or third party (free) apps that are GUI wrappers to command line options.
Even big companies like Cisco are bringing more and more client software to OSX, and moving away from Windows as their server infrastructure to a *nix appliance model. I get to use Office, Photoshop (and other CS3 apps) Final Cut Pro, and all the iLife apps, then use VMware to run any apps I may need in Windows, or boot into Windows for some more power hungry apps. You just can beat that combo, especially if you use Citrix, RDP clients, VNC or other remote clients.
The amount of management options with Apples MCX system is outstanding. Yes there are some glaring problems (Printer management is one). But the ability to use preference manaifests, and push plist options out to clients is amazing. The amount of control you have may not be 100% what you get with group policy....but for the average user there is more than enough options. Even power users will be impressed with some of the control you have with plist files.
Our laptops are just bullet proof. If there is a problem, we reimage the laptop. it just works. BUT I preface that by saying we put a LOT of work into finding solutions, testing and integrating.....where most lazy Windows IT people just want to buy third party solutions to answer their questions and fix their problems. With OSX, most of my software needs are open source/free where possible. Yet, I still have Office, CS3, and other name brand software products. The best of both *nix and Windows.
Dont blame the OS, anything is possible with enough planning and work (I mean it *IS* your job as an IT professional...right?).
i'm not taking any sides, but face it: this is anything but a controlled, scientific, double-blind study.
resume pointless bickering.
try taking a macbook where you've added it to an active directory domain on the road. See how well it works first time you try to login to your machine. It hangs for five minutes still looking for the A/D machine to login to, even though I've set it up to cache credentials.
Of course, Windows laptops that have been integrated this way have an almost instant login.
Apple could have made it easy to integrate into Active Directory. I mean, they use the same software the Linux boxes we've integrated uses. However, the Linux boxes have no problems with their Samba shares and logins. The Macs have all sorts of strange problems with their published shares, forgetting them sometimes, and duplicating them other times.
Plus, how you add a Mac to an active directory domain is kinda obscure. It should be just as easy as a Windows box to add. There is absolutely no reason why it couldn't be that way.
And why is it so difficult to get the Mac to use Active Directory for its contact lookup? I still don't have it working. There is no reason why it can't be as easy as it is in Windows.
I voted no because it simply doesn't make any damn sense!