IBM says Macs three times cheaper than PCs

IBM has reiterated its position that Macs are cheaper than Windows-operated PCs, following comments it made in 2015 when it announced it was installing more than 2000 Macs per week after giving its employees the choice to decide.

During an Apple IT management-centric conference called the Jamf Nation User Conference in the US last week, Fletcher Previn, vice president of Workplace as a Service at IBM, said the 30,000 Macs installed at his company last year had grown to 90,000, and claimed it was the biggest Mac deployment on earth.

CRN last year reported Apple chief financial officer Luca Maestri’s claim that IBM was saving US$270 (A$354) per Mac compared to a traditional PC deployment, based on the reduced support cost associated with running a Mac.

Last week, Previn backed Apple’s claim again, saying IBM was saving between US$273 - US$540 per Mac over a four-year lifespan. Despite the uptake of Macs now sitting at about 1300 new systems per week, the company expects to house more than 100,000 by the end of the year.

“Today, as I mentioned we have about 90,000 Mac users, it grows at about 1300 new Macs per week. Just five percent of our help desk is dedicated to Apple devices and yet we see 91 percent customer satisfaction for those Apple devices when they call the help desk,” he told the conference.

“We had always had people within IBM who had been asking for Macs, and outside of the very small number of designers or people who built software for Mac, we did not allow people and IBM to have choice in their platform until last year.”

Since allowing the adoption of Macs and iOS devices, Previn said 217,000 Mac OS and iOS devices had entered IBM, which were supported worldwide by a staff of five people.

“We continue to see very high [customer satisfaction] on the Mac helpdesk, and, incidentally, PC users drive exactly twice the number of support calls compared to Mac users,” he said.

Adding up the costs of software stacks, staff and helpdesk expenditure required for each platform, Previn said Windows PC’s were three times more expensive to run over a four-year period than Macs.

“It ends up being US$57.3 million more expensive per 100,000 machines, or exactly three times the cost. And, by the way, it’s three times the cost all the way through these scenarios, if you remove staff and the helpdesk it’s still three times the cost,” he said.

Previn used that model to compare the purchase of a Macbook Pro 13 with a Lenovo T460 and revealed a saving of US$273 on the Apple device, while comparing the same Mac to the Lenovo X1 Yoga, another popular Windows-based machine at IBM, apparently yielded a saving of US$543 for the company.

He concluded by saying employee satisfaction was up, while the company’s IT costs were down.