I read this same IBM article two years ago before circumstances caused me to turn completely away from Apple. Until more businesses start to do their own assessments and you start to see more deployments of Macs vs PCs based on those assessments, you have to take the article with a grain of salt. If you noticed, the article speaks about the total cost of ownership of Macs vs PCs as they are deployed at IBM. The article states that PCs are cheaper to purchase than Macs, but the cost of the software that Microsoft requires IBM (and other large firms with IT departments) to manage PCs is more than what Apple (currently) charges to manage Macs. That's true, at least as of the time of the article. No debating that. Also at the time Apple was making some gains at schools and in the cockpit for aircraft, especially with iPads.
Sigh.. so here we go. Like I mentioned, you have to take these articles with a grain of salt. It is not the same for every business. It can actually cost A LOT MORE to move from PC to Mac if your business has PCs that rely on specific software that is unavailable for the Mac. I shared these articles and others with my old roommate, as well as my experience with most of my executives who were excited about and wanted to use iPads. My roommate worked in the "IT department" for one of our sister organizations. He was also a big fan of Apple. His organization and my old organization, both larger than IBM for personnel and computer deployments, had conducted an internal study on the use of Macs and iPads and found that it would cost us more to deploy and utilize Macs. Large deployments of iPads were out of the question. There was no way to properly secure them and they were not as robust as our organizations needed. Before I left, we had an incident where we deployed a small amount of iPads to some of our pilots. A large amount of them were broken and a few came up missing. Apple had made some gains in our organization. We replaced some of our Blackberries with iPhones but we faced more resistance to the idea than what was originally imagined. I loved the Blackberry, but I gave the iPhone back and used my personal phone. I wasn't the only one.
School deployments haven't been going well for Apple either, especially after the LAUSD iPad fiasco. It turns out that Chromebooks are better for most schools.
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/201...l-a-school-ipad-scandal-what-you-need-to-know
Sorry this is long on anecdote, but I will leave you with this: We have seen a lot of people who have Apple products for personal use try to advocate for the replacement of their business devices with Apple products. For small scale deployments in some "non-essential" areas, this makes sense. However, on a larger scale it does not for various reasons. Those reason include lack of security (Apple doesn't have the security software that both Microsoft and Blackberry have), lack of some business and specialized software (we still need Microsoft Office and Exchange servers, Windows has a ton of enterprise software Apple has no replacement for), lack of durability (Apple focuses on making products look good, not last long.. we use a lot of hardened laptops and tablets which Apple doesn't offer), and privacy concerns (Apple is all about protecting your privacy, businesses are not when you use their devices).
