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Comment by genmud | Hacker News Reader

First off, that is a really faulty assumption. Enterprise laptops make almost nothing for most laptop manufacturers. When I bought Dell laptops at a F500, they were selling us laptops at cost and only making money on support / software contracts. HP/Dell/Lenovo are all making between 2-8% on their profit margin vs 25% with Apple.

Compared to 10 or 15 years ago, mac laptop adoption is increasing. It feels like most tech companies or software engineers are using macs.

Dell, HP and Lenovo all ship massive amounts more laptops, but make a fraction of the margin that apple does on their hardware. IIRC apple made more profit than all 3 combined. And each one of those has software arms of their companies that help their bottom line.

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> It feels like most tech companies or software engineers are using macs.

This is a very US-centric perspective. I honestly don't know a single software engineer who uses a mac as their primary machine (except where a mac is necessary or very useful, such as writing apps for macOS or iOS). The typical machine that people who do software development use privately is rather some high-quality ThinkPad model with either GNU/Linux or Windows on it.

In india we get macbooks or thinkpads at work depending on the volume of the company. Voluminous consultancies give thinkpads probably due to cost, while product companies all use macbooks as far as I have seen.

I think this is how it is largely across the US as well (not the valley or NYC) Support at the corporate level for apple products isn’t a serious thing for large corps. They expect to operate at the same margins as consumer companies.

Apple is tolerated because some users demand them, but for the vast majority of mid and lower level employees? You’re getting a dell.

I will update this to say I think I underestimate the share Apple has in the enterprise - they are, according to one source at 25% of enterprise share across the world.

Very global workforce, one of the biggest banks globally, nobody has any apple device from work, even at its most expensive locations :)

I know, hard to grok for SV crowd who often worship Apple unlike any other company, but I would fight very hard to not have anything like that.

CPU power alone is almost meaningless to me, bottlenecks are always elsewhere and Apple brings absolutely nothing on top of cheaper competition with much better corporate support package in that area.

EU unicorn with 5k+ people, whole organization (including sales, marketing, etc.) is strictly Mac only. MBPs and Airs.

Stripe?

What regions are you talking about?

For software developer desktops, MacOS is about as popular as Linux, and both still trail Windows.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/869211/worldwide-softwar...

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-most-...

Anecdotally, over the last 15+ years working in tech, only 2 of my employers out of 7 were windows shops. Over the last 10 years it has been 0.

> It feels like most tech companies or software engineers are using macs.

unpopular take around here, but here goes: after 15+ years of developing on Windows targeting Linux deployments, ~3 of which were spent on WSL2 as soon as it shipped, switched to macOS. It sucks for backend development; currently on my second year and I'm only getting more confused as to why it's so popular. I guess it's everything except actual development.

> I'm only getting more confused as to why it's so popular.

I have a theory that there are a lot of users in places like the public sector and behemoth corporations who get issued with the cheapest laptop on the market, by default.

And because Apple's laptops start at $1500 that means for people in those organisations, if you ask for Windows you get a $500 laptop with a 1080p screen and a 1-hour battery life, but if you ask for a Mac you get a $1500 laptop with a retina screen and an 8 hour battery life.

I know a lot of people use this trick. At office I am still stuck with a 2016 Model Windows Machine but has a low end spec that is somewhat closer to 2014. That is coming close to 10 years of technology progress gone. And with increase awareness on security every single year they added more security programs, applications, policy etc to the machine that makes it felt slower than a Machine with HDD.

Unfortunately my section is one of those that hasn't been clear to use a Mac which means I could never do something like that.

> It feels like most tech companies or software engineers are using macs.

At last few workplaces we targeted Kubernetes\Linux but we used Windows laptops. I don't know how using Macs would help us do a better job.

> they were selling us laptops at cost and only making money on support / software contracts.

those contracts will come only when the laptops are sold. Companies aren't giving Dell contract to support Mac/HP. So, you should see the profit from both as profit of PC sale. Though, agree Apple has higher profit margin.

Funny enough, we paid dell to support a number of IBM laptops at one place. Was kind of funny.

I don’t disagree but HP has much higher profit margins than Dell and Lenovo in some segments.

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