When I was in college, I interned as IT support at a large corporation. We were buying $1200 Lenovos for normal office workers and $2000 laptop workstations for the design engineers. You'd be surprised at how much money enterprises spend on each laptop.

I happen to think that the enterprise is an untapped market for Macs. Not tech offices. Other industries that run on Lenovos and Dells.

If I'm a small business, I still wouldn't buy $500 Windows laptops for my employees. I'd buy $750 M1 Airs. They last longer, "just work", and have fewer support issues.

IBM went to macs 8 years ago.

> I'd buy $750 M1 Airs. They last longer, "just work", and have fewer support issues.

As an employee of a company that runs macbook fleets, hell no they don't. Every other year we have had to replace half our inventory because of the 2015 macbooks having faulty batteries that want to explode, and then the next generations being that terrible keyboard, where every single employee needed their entire top cover replaced at least once because the keyboard didn't even last a year.

Meanwhile at my previous company which ran those boring ugly dell "workstation" laptops with the fat ass batteries, Entire generations of older workstations were still in inventory because they just didn't die, and were stupidly easy to repair, and you didn't have to send them away for a month for something like "my N key doesn't work anymore" or "the battery we gave you will burn your house down"

I just don't get how people say "Macs are reliable", because the only laptops less reliable than my work macbooks have been a series of cost reduced dell laptops that screws would literally fall out of, except even when that happened, dell would send someone to come fix it the next day, in your home!

Nobody considers the final-gen intel MBPs with touchbar and stupid-ass keyboard to be reliable. M-series machines however, I have not heard of any issues with those aside from flaky MagSafe connectors.

Haven't heard the reports of spontaneous screen cracking? [0]

[0] https://www.makeuseof.com/m1-macbook-screens-cracking/

It's widely known that accessories like stick on camera covers can damage the screens of the new macbooks because they're designed with almost zero gap when shut. I work among a sea of macbooks and follow the macbook world rather closely and have never once heard of any common screen issue on the apple silicon models that didn't amount to someone having stuck something between the screen and the case when closing it.

There's loads of threads on Apple's own site, reddit, etc. of it happening. Some users have claimed it happened while the laptop was OPEN.

But hey, it's not like Apple has a history of denying problems, right?

Apple has definitely had screen cracking issues in the past, and I believe it has been a covered repair/replacement.

Nope, first I’ve heard of it. Nor do I believe the person “it was just sitting there, it cracked just by looking at it funny!” Uh huh. Sure buddy.

> 2015 macbooks having faulty batteries that want to explode, and then the next generations being that terrible keyboard, where every single employee needed their entire top cover replaced at least once because the keyboard didn't even last a year.

IIRC there was a recall/replacement program for those batteries as well as earlier generations of the butterfly keyboard. I'm not a fan of the butterfly keyboard, but Apple did replace it twice for free. The final revision fixed the reliability problems for me at least.

> They're more likely to buy a budget laptop in the 400-500 range

I'd imagine the TCO on those bargain basement laptops is terrible, so I doubt they're really a big sell for corporate buyers.

Not necessarily - it depends how easily you can upgrade off-the shelf NVMs and RAM, and how much RAM its motherboard supports.

(A) the actual purchase cost for memory, whether its $200 or $20 is essentially irrelevant when it comes to TCO.

(B) In my experience corporate machines simply aren't upgraded. You get enough for the job when you order it. If you need more, you get a new machine and the old one is repurposed or retired if it's remaining usable life is short.

>In my experience corporate machines simply aren't upgraded.

Yeah. It would basically be insane for a company for nickel and dime laptop purchases and then pay an IT person to do bespoke upgrades. Like a lot of things that may seem sensible on a personal level where labor is cheap/free, they don't make sense when you're paying someone $50+ an hour to do them.

Yes, you are completely right. In my experience though, the machines do get upgrades if someone insists, and the tech department prefers the easiest possible way.

I remember in a n org I worked a few years ago we got new laptops with SSDs instead of HDDs. Everybody was happy except the people who worked with a lot of data as the first SSDs were very small like 128 GB (still the amount of disk space you would get in an entry-level MBP 2019 I think). So we asked for an upgrade and they replaced our SSDs rather than replacing whole laptops. But I'm sure it's place-dependent.

$299 Inspirons these days come with NVMe storage and 6 core Intel CPUs

Still the 1366x768 displays that they were using 10 years ago?

Just a quick glance at the dell website shows me an Inspiron 15 w/ 8GB RAM, and a 256GB nvme for $279. I'm sure the panel isn't great, but it is 1080p.

It is an i3, but still... this is $279! Do some bargain hunting and you can find some pretty decent machines for <$500 now.

That 'i3' runs circles around i7 laptop CPUs from just a couple of years ago

You do know what the "T" in "TCO" stands for right? Hint: it's not the price you paid for the hardware upfront.

At work, the m1/m2 airs are exactly what we buy for most employees. The base spec is absolutely fine for most of our staff, and they’ll get 3+ years out of them.

Edit: devs get 32G pros though, and we loathe the extra RAM pricing on those. Cheap compared to the cost of a developer, though!

Sounds like you're just guessing what "a regular company" would do. The company I work for, as boring as any "regular" company, was buying M1 MBPs with 16GB and 512GB two years ago. For anyone who preferred a Mac to a PC laptop. I personally know of three companies that just buy a MBP for anyone asking. They're not cheaping out on some Latitude or Inspiron pos.