A lot of discussion has been had in our office recently, especially in light of the passing of Apple founder Steve Jobs, as to whether or not Mac products really have a place in the corporate environment. I am specifying Mac products, not Apple as whole. By now most people accept iPads and iPhones are viable office tools. Thus we can, for the sake of this blog; omit those products and focus squarely on Macs. Whether it is the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac Mini, or the Mac Pro we want to focus on devices running OSX 10.6 or higher. Just to be clear here, I am talking about Intel Macs, not Power Mac G5’s or any of that rubbish. The reason why I am focusing on Intel Macs is because they can run Windows natively with Boot Camp, which really opened up the Mac experience to those outside of its traditional niche market.
Before we begin let’s look at some quick facts:
- Most PC users are still using Windows XP, at around 35%
- Windows Vista has a larger percentage of market share than Mac OSX
- October 2010, was the first time since the 1990’s that Apple had more than 10% of the PC market share
- As of September 2011, OSX had achieved 13.3% total market share worldwide and 15.4% market share in the U.S.
In today’s corporate world Windows, no matter which flavor, is still king. Hardware prices are more affordable than ever, and even with the price of Windows operating systems, being more than triple the cost of Mac OSX, Windows PCs are still more affordable than most Macs. As an example a brand new 15” MacBook Pro with an i7 CPU @ 2.4 GHz and 4 GB’s of DDR3 Ram costs $2199 before taxes. A Sony Vaio 16.4” laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit with similar specs and a Blu-ray drive retails for $1149.99. Adding to this fact is that at the end of the day, most applications are written to run in the Windows environment. All of these factors have combined to secure Microsoft’s place at the top of corporate mountain over the past two decades.
The reason for Mac’s recent growth in the market is twofold; the first reason is more users are exposed to Apple products than before due to the domination of the iPhone and iPad in the mobile consumer market, and number two, the introduction of Intel chips have made application support, and running Windows applications on Mac Hardware truly viable for the first time. Whether it be through virtualization apps such as Parallels or just loading up Boot Camp, Mac users are now able to take full advantage of the simplicity of Mac OSX, while have the productivity of the Windows environment all under one workstation. This versatility has opened the enterprise and corporate environments up to Mac hardware for the first time in decades.
