Macs Cost Less to Manage Than PCs

I recently came across an article outlining findings from the Enterprise Desktop Alliance, which recently surveyed 260 IT administrators in the US to determine whether it or not is is cheaper to run Mac or PC as their primary computing environment. Their findings showed that 65% of IT admins surveyed  concluded that Macs cost less to manage than PCs. 19% of the survey respondents said the two platform ended up costing about the same, while 16% said PCs cost less to manage than Macs.

According to the survey, Macs were cheaper to troubleshoot and required fewer help desk calls; system configuration, user training, and servers/networks/printing were all cheaper for a Mac environment than a PC environment. Software licensing fees turned out to be nearly identical for both platforms.

The survey doesn’t factor in the costs of the Macs themselves; Macs do present a large up-front investment, especially compared to the budget-priced Dells you usually see populating most office cubicles. However, half of the survey respondents noted they switched to a Mac platform because of a lower total cost of ownership.

Although a Mac may be a costly initial purchase. In the long-run, they will save you a great deal of time, money and headaches. I switched from PC to Mac after almost 15 years of being in a PC environment. During that time I can attribute a whopping 30% of all time spent on PC’s to troubleshooting or some kind of down-time due to driver issues, viruses, incompatibilities, etc. In the 3 years I’ve been using a Mac, I have spent a total of 4 hours or less troubleshooting an issue or dealing with down-time due to some driver or virus related issue.

I’m not saying that Macs don’t have their share of issues. However, the time involved to troubleshoot and resolve those issues can usually be done in less than 30 minutes. No more drivers, viruses, blue-screens, registry edits or lengthy installs. I heart Mac.