Here go my opinions, and these opinions are mine and mine only. This year marks my 20th year working in tech. I have held a few jobs across a few industries, I have been a consultant, and I have worked with a wide range of customers. There are so many factors to this, that you have to break it down to the essentials.
Here go some topics I think are noteworthy in regards to platforms outside of Windows:
Platform Choice
Platform choice has many merits, and a few minor drawbacks. To the point where I think that the drawbacks to a platform choice system are pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things. From a business perspective (or an Org if you don't work for a business), you want to retain good talent. You want to avoid having turn over. Allowing your employees to choose their preferred platform, means they will like their job more, in return that means they are more likely to stay. This isn't a Mac vs Windows vs Linux discussion, this is a human discussion. Typically users who are more comfortable with a specific platform are less of a support cost. They file less tickets, they are more self sufficient, and they are happier with their work computer. This actually can be seen as a cost savings for several reasons. Training a new employee from scratch costs more time and money than promoting and growing your existing employees.
Overall Cost of Ownership
You need to look at this topic, at the highest of levels and break things down. Software cost, hardware cost, licensing, the cost of your tools and infrastructure, total number of employees required to run a tight shop to get results done, down time (yes a broken computer is costing you time and money, the less a computer breaks the more money you save), life cycle, and things like resell value. The Mac scores pretty high in a lot of these categories, unless your users just don't like the Mac platform. Then it is counter productive. Take the licensing cost of CALs, OS licenses, server OS licenses, and so forth. Add them all up. Then look at macOS, it is free. You pay for the hardware, but you aren't paying $300 per an OS license (or whatever it is Windows costs). This, at large scale, can save a ton of money.
How many help desk people do you need for a 24/7 help desk? 10, 25, 50, 200? A lot of data shows, that Macs have a smaller support foot print, but there is a catch to this. You obviously need to hire engineers that are both passionate and talented at managing and supporting Apple devices. You can do less with more, if you do it right, and macOS has a ton of automation options. Two very easy options (which are my favorite two) are of course the shell and Python, that come stock. Sure, Linux can do that, and sure Windows has PowerShell, but Apple has a lot of that built in with no shipping dependencies. Apple also has plenty of tools that plug right into those automation paradigms, making it easy.
In House Apps
This is the trickiest one. If your Org went all in on say .NET and VB client apps, well now you must port all of those to the Mac. This is actually pretty costly, and might be one of the points where Apple is not a cheaper or cost savings up front. If you have gone a more modern route and migrated a lot of your in house apps to SaaS and web applications, then well it should just work, and it is not a cost center for you. If your apps are cross platform, say written in Java, then that also makes it super easy for a Mac to fit into your current Org. This one is very subjective, and it either is costly, or has really no cost to it depending on the state of your in house app catalog.
Ticket Drivers
Are you tracking your help tickets? What are the biggest drives outside of password resets and email/calendar issues? Since macOS is pretty simple and intuitive a lot of times users can just figure it out. I have seen plenty of users just need to learn how to use Spotlight, and bam, now they can just search for anything they need. Since Apple controls the hardware, the OS, the ecosystem, and their base apps on their platform, the general quality is a bit higher. This is not a dis on Linux nor on Windows. Linux is just a kernel, that some distributions use to roll out an OS, with their own package managers and concepts. Windows is just an OS, and they do not design hardware (sans the Microsoft surfaces and such) and so they are relying on third parties to design systems and QA their product/platform from a third party perspective. This means that Microsoft loses some quality control when a vendor decides to ship OEM Windows on their hardware design. This doesn't mean that macOS won't have all the same help desk tickets a Windows or Linux system would, it just means that percentage wise it should be lower.
Leadership
The biggest advantage you can have to make it happen, is having your leadership fully buy into this. If your leadership is not about it, then you are probably going to fail at some level and that will cost you more. All of your leadership need to buy into this to make it happen, it is really a must. Then your leadership will have to enable you do be successful with the Mac platform. Right now, in my current stack, I am using open source software to integrate with jamf to automate a lot of things. I am able to do the work of several people, just from an automation standpoint. With Windows there is so much manual labor of GUI button clicking, wizards, going through dozens of steps to get one task done. Back in the day this was the meta, the new meta is agile, automation, use code, etc. Microsoft is catching up in that realm, but they are playing catch up. So, if your leadership encourages this and enables you to do this, you can definitely massively manage a lot of Macs with a small team and a small group of tools.
Actual Dollar Dollar Bills Y'all
Money matters. With the Mac platform you have so many hybrid approaches of using the "Jamf And _" model that jamf has talked about for years. The integration is there and the ability to streamline open source or community tools into your Mac designs/workflows is a HUGE cost saver. I have probably 5-6 open source tools I am using right now with my jamf stack, which not only saves money, but some of them don't even have a commercial alternative. You get free OS upgrades every OS. The hardware easily maintains a much higher resell value. If you can get a 60% return on investment at the 4 year mark that is HUGE compared to a PC. Now that $2000 Mac cost you just under $1000. You 100% cannot beat that type of ROI on a used laptop with anything but a Mac. I don't know how Linux and Windows teams do it all around the world, but in my limited, anecdotal experience, the Mac and Linux teams were always half the size or smaller than the Windows teams. This means half the payroll. An employee is exponentially more expensive than a laptop or a piece of software. At my current job during our orientation, there was a session where someone explained that the most expensive asset in the room was each employee, and the second most was the Mac laptop, which was a fraction of the cost of the employee. If you can get 50% return on a 3 year old used Mac laptop, change your hardware refresh rates to 3 years. Find that sweet spot. It makes them absolutely the cheapest laptops to buy because you can get some return on selling them.
My Personal Take
I don't even really think about it as Mac vs PC vs Linux anymore. I just think of it as platform choice and enabling your employees to have the platform they are most efficient and happy with. This alone should drive down tickets, which saves money on payroll, and we already know employees are more expensive than any tech we purchase, because Orgs need the employee's time. Technology can not give us that yet. You can make a lot of adjustments to make one platform cheaper or more expensive. If you are going to deploy Macs, then do it. Have your leadership buy in and support you. If you aren't going to go all in, then really rethink your decisions. For me, I am 100% most efficient on my Mac. I get tons of more work done, and I can a lot more, and it is my platform of choice, so I can so much more with it than any other platform. Not everyone is like me, but anyone who has a Mac at my Org, is going to have a streamlined experience, with very little they have to actually do, due to my automation. So, in the end it is all subjective. Theoretically Macs should definitely cost you less just because of the resell value alone. However, if you do it poorly, hire the wrong people, or have the wrong leadership who don't believe in it, then Macs might be the most expensive thing you decided to deploy.
Also, if you want to compare the actual dollar cost to a MacBook Pro to say a Lenovo, they have to be the same spec. Same high quality screen, SSD, weight/size, processor, and so forth. High end Lenovos that are the same spec of a MacBook Pro are not really that far off the cost. Unfortunately, Apple does not make cheap or barebones model laptops.
Well as the only person on this thread who has more PC's then Macs I guess I will chime in. I have 13 staff members supporting 4000 PC's and I have 1 person dedicated to my just under 1000 Mac devices and 500 iPads. Our support costs are lower, our engineering time is less and our amount of trouble tickets is 40 % less and I have the data to back that up. The sad part is I have a true appreciation for Windows and SCCM. Powershell is an extremely powerfull tool. In the hands of my best people they have been able to do some really awesome stuff in our Windows Environment. The part that makes it even more lopsided is the 1 person who does our Mac OS Support is our Customer Care Director and he only spends about 20 hours a week doing it.
Software Load Windows 300 Pieces of Software , Mac OS 189
Faculty & Staff Windows Machines 1000, Mac OS Faculty & Staff Machines 486
Trouble Tickets Windows Faculty & Staff 11 Average tickets per day, Trouble Tickets Mac OS Faculty & Staff 2 Average tickets per day ( not including password resets only trouble tickets specific to machines)
The KEY PIECE to all of this and the part that makes the real difference is how many hours do my Windows techs spend researching a problem.... My mac tech calls Jamf Support after looking on Jamf Nation. Even if he is stumped he is getting help when my Windows techs are stuck trying to figure it out. BTW Antivirus is a waste of Money if you dont have a real IDS. For home and road users it pays for enterprise users it does not pay. Your IDS / IPS is where your protection is.
Bottom Line... My Windows techs work harder, longer and spend significantly more time playing catch up. My mac tech is almost always prepared for whats coming because time is available for that to happen.One last thing... When you don't by cheap hardware... the upfront cost of PCs is not as glaring as your think.
Our Entry Level Desktop computer Costs
PC 900 Mac 1300
Mid Level
PC 1100 Mac 1700
High Level
PC 1800 Mac 2200
IBM's 2016 & 2018 JNUC data is pretty Damning . You can't argue with analytics especially coming from a company that dumped PC's ( after being a pc manufacturer for 20 + years) for Macs and reduced their IT Staffing afterwards...
