Comment by saiya-jin
7 years ago
There are choices, better than ever before, but to vast types of users this doesn't matter.
Some examples - corporate users (nobody big seriously considers Linux for desktops for various reasons, Apple would be easily 3-5x that expensive for no good enough added value), gaming (again some good options, but subpar to windows on probably every aspect).
Everybody knows Windows, everybody can somehow get by with just clicking around. If I've put Linux on my fiancee's notebook (she is a doctor), I would have to do 24x7 support for it, forever. No, thank you.
>Apple would be easily 3-5x that expensive for no good enough added value
Well that's straight up not true, in fact IBM has over 100,000 Macs in the field and they estimate it's saving them $535 per machine over four years.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3131906/apple-mac/ibm-...
In our branch we have tiny windows desktop boxes (20x20x3cm), they cost below 300 USD to buy. Our corporation has around 100,000 of those around the world. Good enough for any office work you will ever need. We devs are forced to use them too, and they are OKish with 16gb RAM. I've seen these kind of computers in every single employer I ever worked for in last 15 years, corporate or tiny. There are 100s of millions of similar computers in offices around the world.
What does Apple have that's cheaper? To save 535$ they would have to pay us to take them.
Topic might be different for high-end notebooks, especially with some sweet corporate deals. That's NOT the bulk of computers used for office work around the world. Cherry-picking some specific relatively marginal scenario doesn't affect the big numbers.
If the machine is more expensive to buy but significantly less expensive to manage (if, say, OS updates don’t delete all your data necessitating hours of recovery), the total cost goes down.
The initial purchase price of a machine is near-insignificant to the TCO of a corporate machine.
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