Is your workplace shifting towards Apple Silicon laptops as well?

[roach1245]

Curious about office-wide adoptions of M1/M2 laptops. At a U.S. university I serve as voluntary hardware-requirements liaison between my lab (computational social science, about 150 people) and the IT department. Between 2016 - 2020 the distribution of laptops used to be:

- 30% Dell laptops. Mostly used by people on Linux. These were returned for all sort of reasons, most often trackpad failures, but also fried motherboards and so on

- 30% Lenovo laptops: same as Dell.

- 40% Apple laptops: These were returned almost solely because of the 2016 - 2019 butterfly keyboards with keys becoming permanently unresponsive. At least 40 of them were returned at some point.

At the moment (July 2022) it is 80% Apple with everything being M1 Pro / Max (hardly Air since almost everyone uses at least two monitors) and it's been a flawless experience so far. Everyone loves their laptops nowadays.

The remaining 20% are hardcore Linux users that are still on Dell / Lenovo laptops but even they are slowly transitioning to Apple and reprogramming their Linux automation efforts (particularly window management) in Hammerspoon in OS X.

What has your experience been at work with the adoption of Apple Silicon M1 / M2?

 

[hovscorpion12]

Nah. My office is still old school with Windows PCs.

 

[unrigestered]

Windows (10) HP i5 mini desktops at work, the next change will be 11, or maybe even the version after that, but we're considering getting iPads so we can always carry documentations and work packages with us.

 

[bobcomer]

Not a Mac in sight here. I only have a couple of them at home.

1 desktop linux machine, the rest Windows. (mostly Lenovo's)

 

[jav6454]

At work, several iMacs have been updated to the M1 variants and some work laptops are now a mixture of M1/M2 13" MBPs.

 

[Zest28]

Nope, it’s Windows and Linux only.

The only Apple Silicon you will find is personal devices people bring to the office such as iPhone’s or iPads.

 

[altaic]

Nope, it’s Windows and Linux only.

The only Apple Silicon you will find is personal devices people bring to the office such as iPhone’s or iPads.

Where (i.e. country) do you work?

 

[Zest28]

Where (i.e. country) do you work?

It’s an international company, so it applies to all countries.

 

[altaic]

It’s an international company, so it applies to all countries.

Uh, okay. That didn’t answer my question.

 

[MajorFubar]

No, there is literally no chance my employer, whose IT is managed via contract with a high-profile national provider of business-critical support services, will ever move away from PCs.

 

[Boomhowler]

Yeah, we can choose between HP Intel machines (laptop and desktop) with both Linux and Windows, and Macs. Sort of equally supported (they are getting there). All the Macs are being replaced with M1/2 variants, no Intel variants are offered for new clients.

 

[kasakka]

Most use Macs where I work so eventually this shift will happen. At the moment most are still on Intel Macbook Pros. I'm hoping to upgrade to a M2 Macbook Pro when they come out.

 

[MrGunny94]

In the cloud team? Yes! I'm convincing more and more people to switch, the battery life is a huge game changer for us working remote and always on the go.

A few people are waiting for the M2 Pro and what not, but most folks got either an M1 Air or a M1 Mini for now to try it out, a couple of them have them running as their production machines and using a Linux VM (running arm obviously)

 

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

God I wish. Unfortunately working for the US government you get a lot of Apple haters or have a preassigned budget so you can't get new hardware. Plus the Macs are reserved for executives and employees in DC.

 

[Tagbert]

Our office normally has about 30% Macs. Employees are generally allowed to choose Windows or Mac. I do know that people who recently upgraded their Macs can choose a 14" MBP option. It's hard to know how many have that as we are still in a hybrid mode with a lot of people still working from home.

Unfortunately for me, my older MBP died in 2020 and I was given a replacement then. I probably won't qualify for a newer one for a couple of years, yet.

 

[Ultron]

No, we're still stuck using Windows laptops that spin up like a jet engine about to take off. It doesn't help that it has a ton of unnecessary applications running in the background and the IT team forcing down system updates during the midday for maximum interruption.

 

[senttoschool]

Work in Silicon Valley. Macs are used 99% of the time in product teams. You get a Linux holdout once in a while.

 

[BENCHPRESS]

I'm a SWE.

Okay, well i'm an intern but over at the company i'm in (over 5000 employees) as of June, the technology group have started to transition every developer into the M1 chip MBP's. The Intel ones just ran way too hot for the tasks that were being performed.

 

[JouniS]

Before the pandemic, when I went to an academic conference (theoretical computer science, bioinformatics), I usually saw something like 50% Macs and 50% something else. The two conferences I've been to recently were more like 1/3 Mac, 1/3 Linux, and 1/3 Windows, which was surprising.

I don't know what my coworkers are using, because people are still working remotely most of the time and many have moved to cheaper places than California.

 

[jav6454]

Before the pandemic, when I went to an academic conference (theoretical computer science, bioinformatics), I usually saw something like 50% Macs and 50% something else. The two conferences I've been to recently were more like 1/3 Mac, 1/3 Linux, and 1/3 Windows, which was surprising.

I don't know what my coworkers are using, because people are still working remotely most of the time and many have moved to cheaper places than California.

That 1/3 of something is interesting.

 

[DJLC]

They haven't upgraded my work MacBook to Apple Silicon yet, but all the higher ups are sporting 16" MBPs now. Hopefully soon... .

 

[aVex]

I work for a global technology consulting firm and we specialize in Microsoft workplace technology (M365).

Apple machines will never take over or replace enterprise fleet of machines by default. The reason for that is that Apple the company themselves have no interest to play in the Enterprise space.

As much as Microsoft these days are platform agnostic, Enterprise take up will still be low. Microsoft they don’t care what you use and will support everything including Linux, Apple as a company is focused more on creators and home users. in macOS there is zero capability out of the box to help a business protect corporate data and zero capability for governance and zero capability for management. We need to seek third party solutions.

I’m using an M1 Pro, the experience is great but I am skirting compliance rules. I have to operate everything out of a web client.

These days I don’t think there are Apple haters or Microsoft haters. We now have choices, we can choose what we love to use but until Apple decides to enable macOS to become Enterprise grade ready, Windows will still be the force.

Silicon Valley is not 99% macOS as to some comments here. I work for a Silicon Valley company. Companies that can afford to go all Macs are usually startups where they don’t need the classic governance, data protection, controls. Not forgetting Macs are not cheap, consider the economics of supplying 50,000 of these to all your workers and that is not a small sum.

Technology keeps evolving and changing. We never know, maybe one day Apple will make a macOS for business? The real issue here now is Intel, they have been feeding the industry their sauce for so long we’ve become accustomed to using hot toasters. Thanks to ARM and Apple, it’s forcing them to change their ways. Windows 11 is great but the experience is wrecked by Intel.

I talk to Fortune 500 businesses mostly and for sure there are a lot of demand for Macs these days but the challenge remains how to introduce them at scale, at the right cost and protecting the business all at the same time.

 

[Tagbert]

I work for a global technology consulting firm and we specialize in Microsoft workplace technology (M365).

Apple machines will never take over or replace enterprise fleet of machines by default. The reason for that is that Apple the company themselves have no interest to play in the Enterprise space.

As much as Microsoft these days are platform agnostic, Enterprise take up will still be low. Microsoft they don’t care what you use and will support everything including Linux, Apple as a company is focused more on creators and home users. in macOS there is zero capability out of the box to help a business protect corporate data and zero capability for governance and zero capability for management. We need to seek third party solutions.

I’m using an M1 Pro, the experience is great but I am skirting compliance rules. I have to operate everything out of a web client.

These days I don’t think there are Apple haters or Microsoft haters. We now have choices, we can choose what we love to use but until Apple decides to enable macOS to become Enterprise grade ready, Windows will still be the force.

Silicon Valley is not 99% macOS as to some comments here. I work for a Silicon Valley company. Companies that can afford to go all Macs are usually startups where they don’t need the classic governance, data protection, controls. Not forgetting Macs are not cheap, consider the economics of supplying 50,000 of these to all your workers and that is not a small sum.

Technology keeps evolving and changing. We never know, maybe one day Apple will make a macOS for business? The real issue here now is Intel, they have been feeding the industry their sauce for so long we’ve become accustomed to using hot toasters. Thanks to ARM and Apple, it’s forcing them to change their ways. Windows 11 is great but the experience is wrecked by Intel.

I talk to Fortune 500 businesses mostly and for sure there are a lot of demand for Macs these days but the challenge remains how to introduce them at scale, at the right cost and protecting the business all at the same time.

I work at our company HQ where about 3000 people work and about 1/3 of people are using Macs and the rest are mostly windows laptops. We have at couple of other large US offices where the mix seems similar. I cannot speak to our non-US offices. The IT team seems to have no significant problem deploying and managing those Macs just as well as the windows boxes. Yes, they use third party software for some of that. It seems to work OK. They don’t complain about those of us who choose to use Macs. I’m sure that a lot of other companies don’t want to bother but we like having the options and it is working well enough for us.

 

[aVex]

The IT team seems to have no significant problem deploying and managing those Macs just as well as the windows boxes. Yes, they use third party software for some of that. It seems to work OK.

Yes - you will need third-party for a number of things and there are still limitations. In this day and age the business should have no trouble issuing a mac device unless they are cost prohibitive or there is risk to business data exposure that is classified as sensitive.

When we run our workshops, we create personas, different workers in a business and based on the profile the type of device that is approprite including the exception cases.

 

[jav6454]

They haven't upgraded my work MacBook to Apple Silicon yet, but all the higher ups are sporting 16" MBPs now. Hopefully soon... .

Usually higher management gets the nicer toys.