Apple may be a good deal now, but historically they have been the expensive option. I would be concerned about the rug pull of spending time training people on macOS, setting the expectation that they will have it in the future, and then Apple returning to premium pricing before the next upgrade cycle.
At least with Windows you have several hardware vendors competing to force market rate pricing.
There are several good reasons to choose Apple, but I question the wisdom of choosing them for price.
Hard to know for sure, I'd be curious the breakdown in cost for enterprise laptops, it's hard for me to understand why the price has increased 50% while Apple has increased 10%.
Lenovo, Dell and HP are pretty much all the same price at this point. It's basically an oligopoly.
The prices have crept up over the past 5 years and they have no reason to lower them. They know they aren't even competing with Apple since most large enterprises are all in on Windows.
My bet is they have basically made their prices the same as Apple, and they plan to keep it that way.
If you have the freedom to buy from Best Buy, Amazon, etc, this is certainly the case.
However, depending on how you procure this hasn’t been the experience for over 20 years. By the time you’re done with CDW or whomever is your VAR, you’re not comparing a $600 basic PC laptop to a $1200 basic Mac Laptop. They know you’re like the GP and going to pay $1500 minimum and are probably game for $2000. They sell the “Business” line with whatever terms added.
When I did this in K12 in the late 00s the price for a truly terrible Dell or IBM/Lenovo was the same as an iMac.
For the corporate world there have been times you couldn’t get Virtualization support, hardware dock ports, and various other bits of support until you moved to buying the “Business” line and after a certain number of units the direct to retail options send you down the VAR path. There’s simply too much money involved for them to make it easier for you.
I have not had to deal with this as a buyer since 2019 but the song seems to be the same as I work for a company that sells through CDW. Per the reps, the same stupid games are being played.
The only times I haven’t had to deal with this is when the companies I’ve worked for just hand you a credit card to walk down to the Apple Store or are using Apple’s program which is basically the same thing but comes with a shared App Store account and some better support for swap outs.
Historically they've been the expensive option, but historically they've been much more niche than windows laptops. So their unit economics might be better nowadays due to volume.