IT Folks: Which Macs are you currently buying for your users?

[Yebubbleman]

14” pros w/ 32 GB RAM for engineers and base 14” pros for everyone else. We were doing 13” pros with 16 GB RAM but got tired of finding alternative ways to support multiple displays. So we decided to just ditch the 13s and do 14s across the board

Which 13s were you getting? I'm guessing something with an M1 or M2 based on the displays comment.

Doing two configurations of the same external machine sounds smart. That way you don't have users clamoring for a bigger size.

 

[teh_hunterer]

Those who get a Mac get a base model 14" or 16". Pleasantly surprised with that. It makes a big difference when an employer doesn't nickel and dime you, and invests in you enough to get you a suitable machine you can actually work with.

 

[thelatinist]

We had been purchasing 16” MBPs for most of our staff, but we just ordered a batch of 15” MBAs and will probably continue to do that. We can double their storage and still save 30% over a MBP.

 

[wegster]

You know, if I would be offered a job where I’d be forced to work with Windows, I probably won’t take it, unless the pay were ridiculous and the job itself easy. My own sanity is much more important to me than corporate BS.

A prior job(sw eng/dev) was for a very Unix-centric company and was psyched as they were a solid longtime Unix company and were dong some pretty cutting edge stuff at the time. Sadly, on top of the dozen+ Unix and Linux variants - someone added Windows into the mix. I was NOT thrilled..realistically speaking there were handfuls of various compatibility specs like POSIX and other macros where a fair amount of code could be common, then #defined into groups of *nix flavors, and with some added wrapper code, for most cases even things like lower level serial I/O, threads, etc. you’d wind up without too much ‘one off for a specific OS’ code.
Enter Win32, and while we’d continue to write ‘single interface’ components and libraries, the internals might as well have been entirely separate…not to mention coming across numerous ‘not documented APIs yet you knew they existed’. Hated it. I also wasnt a huge fan of Java, and definitely turned down a number of dev jobs at Windows shops.

Thankfully, even if it did narrow the job pool, it was an option, from big ‘legacy Unix’ shops before Sun broke my heart being consumed by Oracle, and as Linux grew.

When I started my current job last year, I was asked if I was more comfortable on Mac or PC. I said Mac, and she said, "Macs are in short supply right now, so we might have to send you a PC for now and then swap it out." I was surprised to find a 16" M1 Pro MBP on my doorstep the following week, and fell in love with it so hard that I bought a 14" for personal use.

I think it's telling that probably 10 years ago, this was not even a question in the tech industry. Every new job I ever started, you got some clunky old beat up Dell laptop and weren't asked what you preferred. It seems these days companies have given in and realized that a lot of their incoming employees have abandoned Windows in their personal lives and are not only more comfortable on Mac, but will probably balk at being forced to use Windows just because the company won't spend a few extra dollars on a Mac.

Yeah, this is giving some flashbacks. Besides the fact of many horror stories of crap Dell laptops (and some servers) even… For a solid while, I’d take whatever Dell/HP/Thinkpad I got and just image it, reload with Linux and dump the image into a VM for if/when I ‘really’ needed it (initially usually for must be in AD domain, some VPN variants etc.). Over time I’d start to see some of my fellow *nix geeks/devs running Macbooks, many being self-purchased. Absolutely was no chance pre-OSX with that craptastic classic OS(sorry Classic fans, was just rubbish IMO), but OSX was pretty much BSD and GNU wrapping some Mach/Next internals so was ‘close enough to a real OS.’ I bought my first Macbook myself, brought over the ‘work laptop’ VM into the first beta of VMWare Fusion, and while it took me about a year to stop considering wiping OSX and replacing it with Linux, it mostly grew on me.

I’ve had a few jobs offer the choice (Mac or PC), including the current one (I have an M1 MBP from them..somewhere), while others I was able to convince them to let me use my own, which wasn’t always an easy sell but was usually able to work out. My last job before this one was a multi-billion dollar company who acquired a larger startup tech company - all of their employees coming with MBA or MBPs, so it’s definitely growing.

I had a contract gig not too long ago for ‘a bigger well-known company that sells consumer and commercial pc and server systems’’ among other things and on day 1 I went into some team meeting, didn’t have a work-issued laptop yet for whatever eason so pulled out my MBP. That got some truly amusing looks, somewhat understandably, and think someone may have joked/threatened to put a <big company> sticker on my laptop. Turned out to be a huge suck job, some decent people but worst manager I’ve seen in my career, zero remote work at the time officially (except for overtime antways), so wa stuck on PC for the workday then back to my MBP for after-hours work and meetings. Iroonically, previously working at a different ‘very large well known hardware and software company’ they had zero issue with me running my MBP. So glad I’m outta there…

Thankfully the past two jobs just hasn’t been an issue with macs, tensorbooks, PCs, you name it across the company.

Back to OPs question - depends on job role, and am working at a much smaller company now (tens to hundreds of employees vs thousands or hundreds of thousands). Mac-wise we were doing M1 MBAs 8gb 256gb for non-engineering, 13” M1 16gb/512gb for moderate duty, or Intel MBP 32-64gb on the higher end, or tensorbooks or 32-64gb Wintel. Not sure if thing have moved into the M2 Pro/Max as an option yet at this point, partially as we’ve had some downsizing like a lot of companies so have a fair # of ‘fairly high-powered systems waiting for an owner’ and while we do some work with ARM-based systems, a lot of infra as well as build systems are Intelx86-64. Now am curious and will try to remember to check on latest ‘high end dev mac’ system details.

 

[Marshall73]

we were getting studios but the Pro Mini's are good enough now.

 

[NT1440]

Refurb M1 Pros, far and away overkill for photoshop and other Adobe programs but I wanted to get the entire Creative team on AS.

 

[spiderman0616]

Refurb M1 Pros, far and away overkill for photoshop and other Adobe programs but I wanted to get the entire Creative team on AS.

I bet that entire Creative team wants to hug you. 😃

 

[NT1440]

I bet that entire Creative team wants to hug you. 😃

Just the dramatic difference in battery life alone has made a huge impact with their satisfaction of their devices.

The funny thing, by going the refurb route we essentially got the AppleCare for free. Knowing M1 was perfect for them it was an instant thumbs up to buy because each device basically cost roughly what we pay for our Dev machines. Previously Macs had to be budgeted separately because they were roughly 1.5x the cost of our normal purchases. Now they’re all on brand new (refurb) devices. The entire team on one model and we shouldn’t have to replace them for probably 5 years now. I plan on having the batteries replaced under Apple care in 2.5 years time to guarantee it.

Next upgrade cycle will cost us even less because now even the 15” MBA would fulfill their needs.

 

[senttoschool]

All developers, designers, and product managers receive 16" MBPs where I work.

 

[sterex]

Base model 14" is what most of us are running around. 32GB would have been great but at this point we just host the VMs on the cloud as we can't run the x86 VMs quite well enough on these new Macs.

With everything open I'm using around 60% of the memory.

Exactly this. Base model with 32GB RAM upgrade is what I have from my company.