“There was a time when spotting an Apple product in the average corporate workplace was only slightly easier than catching a glimpse of a unicorn,” Nick Wingfield reports for The New York Times. “Now comes a report saying that Apple will most likely be the main reason the corporate computer hardware market will show any growth at all this year.”
“In a broad report on global information technology spending that it plans to publish on Monday, Forrester Research estimates that government and business purchases of computers will grow a meager 1.7 percent, to $146.6 billion, in 2012 from the year before,” Wingfield reports. “Forrester includes tablet computers like the iPad in its forecast; sales of iPads to businesses are booming. Forrester estimates that business spending on iPads will rise 76 percent to nearly $10 billion this year.”
Wingfield reports, “That growth, along with a 9 percent increase in business spending on Macs to $6.7 billion, will help offset what Forrester expects to be a dismal year for PCs and tablets that run Windows.”
Read more in the full article here.
Microsofts law firm:
Dismal, Bleak and Retched.
Dewey, Skrewum and Howe.
Ironic that Apple is the only bright spot in the business sector when that’s the one sector Apple couldn’t care less about.
Apple couldn’t care less about what the IT overlords wanted.
But if you look at it this way, corporate drones are people too. Just because you work in a cubicle, doesn’t mean you don’t value easy to use computing in a beautiful package.
BYOD has really pushed workspace adoption of the Mac platform. Not just that but iPads and iPhones too. I knew what I wanted when they allowed us to choose our computer of choice. The bottom line is if getting a Mac makes you 200% more productive than a PC toting drone, the increased cost of getting a Mac is justified from a total cost of ownership standpoint. I also need less IT support for my Mac which translates to the bottom line since IT is a cost center.
Apple has been steadily eating into the workspace while Microsoft still has its 1990’s gimlet Eye of Mordor on the IT doofuses.
Ooh..”gimlet eye of Mordor” and don’t forget “sometimes words have two meanings.” Profound.
Apple has never been adverse to enterprise computing. But every time Apple has made the effort to enter the market, at extreme customer prodding I must add, the enterprise IT dolts have either ignored them or outright FUDed them. There is nothing funnier than excuse that the IT staff aren’t trained for and don’t understand Apple technology. Right. So that’s why employees bring in their own Apple gear and maintain it themselves. LAME MUCH IT dolts?
The hard fact: Historically it has taken 1/100th of IT staff to maintain Macs relative to maintaining Windows boxes. IOW: Enterprise IT dolts fear for their jobs. The most difficult to maintain technology wins.
Not any more! (^_^)
Where I was teaching for a while, the IT creeps were still saying to new hires, kind of menacingly, “If you know what’s good for you, get the Dell”. They don’t talk that way to senior staff, of course.
IT creep – really? Well at least you got to teach for a “while”. Someday maybe you will make senior staff, maybe in Sim
City?
Didn’t mean to imply all IT guys were that way, only the bureaucratic ones I encountered (it was at a gov’t agency). Sorry!
Thx most of us are actually very helpful and understanding. 😉
Thx most of us are helpful and understanding.
Apples high costs and OS updating is too expensive for a lot of companies to keep up with. But of course not your company of 1%er elitists. bwahahah
Up retro blue rack vacuum lice dude. Your comment, anonymous coward ‘Tl’, makes total sense not. bwahahah 😯
For fun, Let’s Do A Cost Comparison!
Windows Server 2012, Standard Edition, unlimited user accounts:
Total Cost:
$882
~~~~~~~~
Apple OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Server, unlimited user accounts:
$19.99 OS X + $19.99 Server =
Total Cost:
$39.98
Now let’s add virtualization to 10.8 Server:
Parallels 8:
$79.99
Total Cost:
119.97
~~~~~~~~
Cost Savings:
$762.03
Nice.
lol you sound like a partisan politician….. Apple has great products…….but hmmmm where are the end user hardware costs and costs for continually upgrading hardware (for a company with thousands of pc’s) to meet Apple’s constantly changing minimum new OS requirements in your comparison “dude”? I have a mac mini that is not even compatible for Lion, forget about Mountain Lion. Vacuum lice really….? bwahahah Nice.
I have a Mac Mini. It’s running Mountain Lion at this minute. In fact, I’m beta testing 10.8.2 on it for Apple, at this minute.
Re: Hardware. Apple’s hardware has consistently been proven to cost LESS than comparable PC because the ROI is high and the TCO is low. Look them up for yourself. Cheaper to run, last longer. Meanwhile, you’re still a trolling anonymous coward. I’m not.
Actually, while this is historically accurate to a degree, I think Apple’s heart for corporate IT may be softening. Recently, I was in the local Apple store and was approached by their Business Account Manager, who indicated that they are offering discounts to companies as their spending on Apple hardware increases. The discounts appear to be similar to the Education discounts currently offered and the spending requirement for the discounts to kick in are not that high.
Another dismal year for PCs and tablets that run Windows.
Fitting. Every year I’ve been forced to use Windows (since 1996) has been dismal.
I’ve been using MSDOS since 1988. Pity me. 😥
I kind of like DOS.
It’s Windows I dislike, not least because it’s a twisted clown version of Mac OS.
I should admit that I’m a reluctant CLI users at the best of times. I’ve done CLI coding and commanding for ages, but I hate it. Give me a user-friendly CLI any day. It’s only a matter of how my brain works. Where would we be today without obsessive CLI master coders? 😉
…And of course I meant to say: ‘Give me a user-friendly GUI any day.’
thats great. i love DOS too 🙂
a dismal year for PCs and tablets that run Windows
Apparently it’s time for a Microsoft version of the ‘Apple Death Knell Counter’. BWAHAHA! Love it.
Apple Death Knell Counter
My large corporation has never shown any love for Apple products, just as most of you have seen elsewhere. This past year I have been shocked to hear the salespeople reporting that one of the top requests from customers is to move away from windows and support both OS X and iPads. Blew me away when I saw one strongly anti-Apple guy using an iPad recently. If customers push this we could see a lot of companies offering support for Macs in the next year or two. That could be revolutionary.
I have a freelance writing job at the moment with a major Canadian grocery store writing IT infrastructure documents (run books, build books, PCI compliance). I am surrounded by the usual suspects you find in any mature IT group. I am using my MBP retina along with my iPad and no one really blinks. I get the occasional question about Macs in general. Among the business analysts and the younger mid-level managers (30 to 40), there are quite a few iPads at work. I would estimate that about 50 percent of the IT people have a personal iPad that they use at home but not at work if questions about apps are any indication. Amongst the consultants like myself, we are almost entirely using iPhones. The corporate IT folks are chained to their Blackberries but there do seem to be a few iPhones. There are also some android phones but not as many as I would have thought.
This is strictly anecdotal but at least when I asked if I could use my Mac onsite, no one took out a shotgun and told me to start squealing like a pig. I hate when that happens…