Apple Mac Adoption Is Accelerating Across US Enterprises

MacStadium's inaugural CIO survey shows Apple devices gaining major ground in U.S. enterprises, with 96% of CIOs expecting Mac fleets to expand in the next two years and Macs already representing an average of 65% of enterprise endpoints. "The results show rapid Mac deployment across US business in the last two years, with 93% of CIOs claiming increased use, and 59% claiming a significant increase in use of all Apple devices," adds Computerworld. From the report: "As the adoption of Apple hardware continues to rise with both consumers and business users, and Apple Silicon is emerging as a secure and energy-efficient option for AI workloads, Apple is turning its sights to the enterprise," [MacStadium CEO Ken Tacelli] said in an interview. Among the specifics:

- 93% of CIOs report increased Apple device usage over the past two years.
- 45% of CIOs describe their leadership's view of Macs as a strategic investment, reflecting growing executive-level buy-in.
- The top drivers for Apple adoption are security and privacy (59%), employee preference (59%), and hardware performance (54%).
- Perhaps most importantly, 65% of CIOs say Macs are easier to manage than Windows or Linux devices.

In addition to those factors, the unique technical capabilities of Apple's kit (53%) play a role. Businesses are buying Macs because they're cheaper to run, last longer, allow employees to be more productive, and are both more private and more secure. The survey also shows that AI has become a leading reason to choose Macs. Apple Silicon is highly performant and energy efficient, enabling Macs to run on-device, secure AI, and to access cloud-based AI services.

Link busted, statistic questionable

[davidwr]

https://www.computerworld.com/... [computerworld.com] is 404 and not in archive.org.

"Macs already representing an average of 65% of enterprise endpoints" seems way off. Based on other widely-quoted statistics, I would expect Windows 10/11 to have way more than 50% of enterprise endpoints.

Re:

[arc.light]

This link works for me: https://www.computerworld.com/... [computerworld.com]

Re:Link busted, statistic questionable

[arc.light]

In the link that works, the text reads: "Apple already accounts for an average of 65% of enterprise endpoints" rather than "Macs already representing an average of 65% of enterprise endpoints." They could be counting phones as endpoints.

Re:

[jargonburn]

Good point. If they are including phones, I find that figure quite believable. My personal experience with enterprise deployments is certainly nothing from which to extrapolate worldwide trends, but I'd find it hard to believe that experience to be so completely out of step with general trends.

Re:

[larryjoe]

Right. Another way to reason about this is that Macs represent about 8-9% of total laptop sales. Slightly more laptops are sold for enterprise rather than consumer markets. That strongly suggests that enterprise laptop market share for Macs is close to 8-9%.

Re:

[macmurph]

Try loading it in Safari instead of Edge. :-)

Re:

[PPH]

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3502392/macstadium-sees-apple-adoption-accelerating-across-us-enterprises.html [computerworld.com] is 404

A first, I suspected that someone in Microsoft's advertising department fired off a sharply worded e-mail to Computerworld. Reminding them of ad budgets.

But then I realized that they'd probably be using Outlook. So the e-mail is still probably stuck in the Azure system somewhere. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by Microsoft.

Re:

[Richard_at_work]

I highly doubt MS cares.

All the companies I have worked for since 2016 have been using Macs for development, and .Net for the language - deployed in containers on Linux in either AWS or Azure.

The company I currently work for uses Azure completely, and we get assistance from MS for the Mac-.Net-containers-Azure workflow.

Re:

[PPH]

But your employers are a special case: software developers. Microsoft knows you can't be bullshitted because you may know as much about the business as they do. But a lot of non software businesses can probably be frightened into not switching away from them due to ... reasons.

Re:

[Coopjust]

Microsoft doesn't give a shit about Enterprises switching some employee computers to Macs anymore because they still have O365 and Azure AD (Entra ID whatever the hell they're calling it now). Hell, when Satya Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer, he cut the QA:developer ratio from 2:1 employees to 1:1. Firing half the QA people, and leaving consumers/businesses not rich enough to afford using the Win10+ LTSB/LTSC as the equivalent of QA testers on the updates.

Mac enterprise users can still use MS cloud

Re:

[keltor]

If we include all our endpoints (which we would count phones) ... Apple is definitely #1 endpoint and its around 70% now. We're already discussing kicking Android off the MDM except in China (they have their own MDM and are around 90% of Android.)

Marketing/Creative uses Macs 100%. IT, at least the BA/Developer/etc types use Macs now almost exclusively. We don't really have much COTS using Windows now, it's mostly gone web-based these days. Office works fine on Macs and really I think we could kick Windo

Mac does the job

[Mean Variance]

I converted in the workplace from Windows to Mac in 2014 after some early beta testers. 2 jobs since then Macs are standard issue. I did short side gig with a PC and it felt so clunky. PowerShell - ugh, probably because of lack of familiarity. It's probably fine.

Use what works for you, but Mac for work and a personal one (my current job silos and doesn't allow personal use) do the job.

I am a software dev in Silicon Valley land for context. Macs are just fine. I you like Windows or Linux, good for you, not something to argue.

Re:

[drhamad]

We converted my offices (legal industry) about a decade ago... no chance of going back. We're happy.

Re:

[Tatsh]

They are horrible for developers. I used one for years before switching back to Windows with WSL for work (at home I just use Linux).

The dock is stupid and antiquated no matter where you put it or if you hide it automatically. The mouse acceleration is completely wrong and this is basically impossible to fix. Moving windows around is always a heavy operation compared to any other OS. For years Apple had absolute crap for dedicated GPUs when they gave up on using Nvidia (do not tell me about the supposed cra

Re:

[macmurph]

I take issue with "Moving windows around is always a heavy operation" Stage Manager is a must have and you have tons of options for window managers such as Spectacle but turns out that the one Apple added to MacOS is pretty awesome. Window management in Apple Vision Pro is non-existant though.

I agree that Xcode is very unwieldy and always has been. But these days I mostly use AI, python, and a variety of other editors such as VScode, Cursor, BBEDIT, nano, etc.

Lack of cuda support for AI can be solved by sel

Re:

[keltor]

In most companies, Developers and BAs are the ones using and demanding Macs now.

I mean creatives/marketing/etc already demanded Macs, but that's been the case for decades, my wife refuses to use PCs in any shape or form.

Re: Mac does the job

[unami]

That might as well be, but in my experience, apart from multimedia, the only department in a big company where you will likely find macs is software developement. Usually not for developing software for macs - but a lot of developers seem to value a nice latop with a good cpu (as long as they are not doing some machine learning on nvidia gpus, obviously)

Re:

[keltor]

> PowerShell - ugh, probably because of lack of familiarity. It's probably fine.

This echos my assessment even if I'm much more intimately family with it. It's fine, it works for automating stupid shit on Windows servers and can configure the servers 99% of the time, but fuck if it's not a constant moving target and it seems like it was designed by someone with hardcore NIH syndrome.

Re: Mac does the job

[Tatsh]

It's way better than cmd. And more recently it gained the ability to have a set -e type functionality. Arguably it's better than Bash because of the structured data piping which is like having jq built-in.

So uhhh

[paul_engr]

A mac publication's surveys of their apparent demographic says that said demographic likes macs? Shocking revelation!

Re:

[macmurph]

Computerworld has never been a mac publication. In fact, it was strictly a Windows propaganda for the years it was in print. I say propaganda because journals discussing Windows as a serious OS is not reflective of reality... its shoddy, insecure, high maintenance, and difficult to use... so any publication that spoke of it as a productivity platform was spreading disinformation.

Re:

[PPH]

I think the PP was referring to this https://www.macstadium.com/blog/cio-survey [macstadium.com]

Re:

[sabbede]

Now that's just silly. That you don't like it doesn't mean it shouldn't be treated as what it is.

"The only serious OS is the one I use!" No. That's the one you prefer. You don't have to make up things to dislike about Windows, you can just prefer something else. You don't need to pretend your tastes are objective facts, just like what you like.

Graybeard approved

[BytePusher]

25 years as a professional software developer, vim user since 1994; I use an M1 MacBook from 2020 and I have zero temptation to upgrade it. I'm sure at some point Apple will enshittify the MacBook, but whatever you buy today will last at least 6 years.

Re:Graybeard approved

[twdorris]

Came here to say the same; graybeard and all...except 35 years as a professional developer (software, hardware, firmware, whatever); e3 user initially with IBM in early 90s, then vi from about 92 to present.

Used to use Apple exclusively in the 80s until they absolutely lost their #$!@% minds. That period without Jobs (pretty much all of the 90s) was insufferable trash.

Eventually they sorted it all out but it took me a solid 15 years after their release of OS X to finally be willing to give them another try; and honestly it was all the Windows 10 horseshit that drove me to it.

Bought my first MacBook Pro (Intel) in, I think, 2016...never...looked..back. Ever. Not once.

Fancy with all kinds of pretty little bells and whistles? No. Intuitive, powerful Window management? No, for sure.

But it f'king worked. I have NEVER had a single crash of any sort on any MacBooks I've owned or running any version of macOS I've tried. I'm sure it happens, but holy hell what a difference the entire experience was from Window's upgrade/BSOD/reboot hell and Linux's atrocious desktop/support/management consistency hell.

And then Apple goes all in on ARM!? I'm here to stay I guess. At least for a while; almost certainly until I retire and beyond a bit...I could get by on what they currently have for that time period. So even if torched every good idea they ever had tomorrow, I guess I'm finishing up this career with Apple...where it all started for me.

Re:

[Bongo]

I think it's very similar for me in the sense that it just works.

And there are of course many pros and cons. There are some very nicely thought out apps for Macs, however, mobileme was a disaster, etc.

The hardware just lasts a long time.

The inconsistent UI on Windows drives me nuts, and to the extent that macOS is inconsistent that also annoys me, but it's much better overall.

The pros and cons are going to be a very long list.

But I've using Macs for quite a long time, and once Mac OS X came along in 2001, w

Re:

[hawk]

[*checks beard in mirror*]

oh, crap!

anyway, I both leaned unix on a pdp-11 at work and bought my first Mac in 1984.

Various Macs until I switched to a combination of unix and *nix as a graduate student, largel over LyX (largely a graphical front end to LaTeX at the time, as I was editing plenty of matrices full of integrals and such, so keyboard navigation was critical.

Then in 2008, back to a Mac laptop when it mugged me on clearance in Frys. I figured I could put FreeBSD (or maybe linux) on it, but it was a

NextStep

[macmurph]

All of the selling points listed were absolutely true in 1990 with NextStep running on the cube and slab. But costs have come down and performance has gone up. User base grew a lot in absolute terms and percentage of the market.

- 45% of CIOs describe their leadership's view of Macs as a strategic investment, reflecting growing executive-level buy-in.
- The top drivers for Apple adoption are security and privacy (59%), employee preference (59%), and hardware performance (54%).
- Perhaps most importantly, 65% o

Re:

[PPH]

Back in the early 1990s, the outfit I worked for was a Mac shop. If you didn't need a big engineering workstation (Sun, Apollo, HP-UX, AIX) you got a Mac SE for productivity apps. They worked great.

But then Bill Gates began holding annual CIO dinners, to share his vision of the computing world with the movers and shakers in various industries. The more Microsoft you had in your company, the closer you got to sit to Gates. I'm sure our CIO got the little kiddie table in the back, next to the kitchen door. S

Re: AI workloads?

[sglewis100]

Exactly. The Mac mini with 32gb RAM is $1000. Thatâ(TM)s a lot of memory for AI at that price point compared to a Windows box with an NVIDIA GPU.

Re: AI workloads?

[shadowjk]

The AI ecosystem is a mess, but Nvidia and Apple are probably the two best supported hardware platforms.

Sure, Mediatek, Qualcomm, Rockchip, Intel, AMD, Bob and Robs chips chips and fish, and every little CPU and SoC vendor do shoehorn NPUs into their products, but nothing supports them, the vendors might port a version of torch or something else if you're lucky, but by the time they're done the hardware is outdated and the software they ported is outdated.

Apple hardware seems to be very close to Nvidia in t

Windows 11 really is that bad

[ebunga]

They're using Macs in the enterprise now.

Re:

[mosb1000]

It’s been very problematic for my customers. I have an original threadripper in my CAD machine, and with Microsoft dropping windows 10 support, I’m going to have to replace it to upgrade to windows 11 in the near future. I’ve been seriously considering switching entirely to Mac instead.

Re:

[mosb1000]

Of course, with Apple dropping support for the Intel macs, I have to replace my mac too, but there’s no chance I can skip that, since I need it to develop iOS apps.

Re:

[waspleg]

We have some Apple fanatics. My boss is pushing for the whole org to be mac shit ostensibly because resale value being so much higher and they want the budget padding... That most people don't know how to use them, our techs don't know how to support them, etc be damned.

Re:

[sabbede]

And that they are not equipped for enterprise management. At least not without significant extra trouble and expense. On top of the extra expense from being an Apple product.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

i guess I better hand in my geek card because 30+ comments about Mac and Enterprise and none mentioning Scotty talking into a 68k-era mouse.

Transparent aluminum...

Choose privacy

[NotEmmanuelGoldstein]

... rapid Mac deployment ...

With both Microsoft and Google building a walled garden around their consumers, choosing a vendor with a history of protecting privacy, is a logical choice.

Another option is Linux but the upgrade costs are much higher.

Re:

[sabbede]

Wait. Didn't Apple create the first "walled garden" around their products?

Windows 11 has built-in ads, security compromises

[jsepeta]

Maybe if Microsoft gave up on their hostile plans to force Bing Advertising into their operating system, people wouldn't say "fuck it, just get a Mac."

Re:

[sabbede]

What does a crap feature of Home have to do with Enterprise use?

No enterprise features in macOS please

[HnT]

The insane amount of crazy pseudo enterprise-features in windos makes it an abomination and I really hope macOS will never get all this unbelievable trash.

Re:

[sabbede]

And that's why they are not, despite what this article claims, commonly used in enterprise environments.

If that's your preference, have at it. It makes me sad to see them in enterprises, as I know they will be a pain to manage.

Frying pan meet fire

[Big Hairy Gorilla]

Yeah, Apple would never do anything high handed like change the terms of service while you are looking out the window or sneak new surveillance sw into the next release or raise prices once you are balls deep in Apple koolaid.

Your naivety is only exceed by your willful blindness to dependency. You're going need some AI on that, and you are going to love it. Shhhh... never say a bad word about <in hushed tones> Apppplllle. Amen, think no more, problems solved.

endpoints

[argStyopa]

"Endpoints" is the code word for "we're counting phones" and since iPhones are popular & stupid expensive (so they're seen as a status symbol by material-worshipping Veblenites) c-suites cheerfully authorize them as company-expensed devices.

Can confirm in my own 10,000 person multinational, all the "cool kids" have iPhones. None outside the art department - not one - uses Macs for desktop or laptops.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Counting iPhones or iPads is not unreasonable. At my last job, I could use an iPad with SSH to do my job as easily as a Mac or Win laptop, and did. I had moments where I literally had to pull over while driving, grab my iPad, login to fix a server problem, and then continue driving. It was easier to do that with an iPad than a laptop. I could've also used my iPhone, and did once or twice, but the screen was kind of cramped, so the minimum walking around device while on-call was an iPad.

And in my depar

Slashvertisement

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

How much did Apple pay for this Slashvertisement?

Yeah sure

[DrXym]

And Disco Stu says disco is coming back.

Kinda funny

[wwphx]

Just yesterday I saw an article - didn't read it - purporting that Macs basically had no reason to exist anymore. I wish I'd read it to see what idiocy they were pruporting.

I remember back about '08 I was working as a SQL Server administrator for a city and the IT director came during the lunch hour to give me all sorts of shit about my MacBook Pro sitting on my desk. I used it as a music player and for surfing when I wanted multiple screens to do my job. I was really getting mad at him interrupting m

Are both more private and more secure?

[Murdoch5]

How are you going to confirm that? You can lock Unix / Linux down tighter than a nuns nasty, and at the same time have those setting open and verifiable. I'm not sure about Windows, maybe you can run it or configure it in some high security mode, I don't know, but to claim Apple devices are "more private and more secure", is just stupid.