By skyforbes 
“The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data.” — Charles Babbage
Contrary to the rhetoric applied in most heated debates concerning Mac or PC superiority, there seems to be a more objective approach at our disposal to address this age old debate. Unlike consumer focused debates which seem to be focused on initial price and upgradability, enterprises do not have the luxury of prioritizing initial costs in front productivity losses and management overhead as they tend to eclipse the initial hardware costs by a large margin over the duration of use. Instead of focusing on individual computers, it is more constructive for enterprises to observe on the macroscale, where their individual virtues will be magnified many fold and much more tangible.
When IBM compared their Mac@IBM program to their PC counterparts, they noticed that ownership costs of Mac users dropped to 1/3 that of a Windows/PC users within the first year, at any scale. IBM also found that their PC users generated twice the support calls and 5x more of those resulted in desk side support than Mac users. This means that on average at IBM, there are 500 Mac help desk cases for every 1,000 PC help desk cases with only 25 Macs requiring further desk side assistance compared to Windows 7 PCs requiring 270 desk side assistance or 10.8x that of Macs. After a year, Apple products already represent 1/3 of IBM user devices while only necessitating 1/20 of their help desk staff to handle the work load. Something else worth considering about Mac@IBM’s savings is just how efficiently they can manage PCs at scale; few companies manage PC infrastructures at scale as efficiently as IBM and companies that are less competent at managing Windows PCs than IBM may stand to see further reductions in ownership costs, beyond what has been reported by IBM.
According to Gartner, a well managed PC user should expect 2 hours of downtime per month on average whereas a Mac user will only require 15–30 minutes. A significant contributing factor for this disparity in downtime between PCs and Macs can be found in their relative defect densities of their operating systems. IBM also noticed that Windows 7 required 135 non-feature updates compared to macOS only requiring 31 in 2015. On face value, this only tells us that Windows 7 has almost 4x the non-feature updates (defects) than macOS; however upon further inspection you may find that macOS also has more than twice the lines of code that Windows 7 has, which brings MacOS to an effective defective density that is 9.4x less than that of Windows 7. This allows us to project that Windows 10 will require 220–290 non-feature updates in 2016 and believe this is largely due to their codebase making a significant leap in size.
Assuming that Gartner knows what they’re talking about, when considering the inherent downtime of Windows PCs and Macs, you find that Macs allow for 99.95% uptime compared to PC’s running Windows yielding 99.7%. Given that Windows 10 has already required 270 non-feature updates in 2016 alone, we believe that this may drop the SLA of PCs running Windows down to 99.5%. While lines of code is admittedly far from ideal as far as measuring their defect density, this much disparity cannot be ignored in conjunction with the reported cost reductions.
Another major contributing factor to IBMs observed reduction in ownership costs was that Apple provides free support for their products including their productivity tools via AppleCare. By having employees simply call Apple, they are able to have a ratio of 1 support agent per 4,340 devices or 1 support agent per 1800 laptops (users). In comparison, organizations with Windows PCs require steep internal support overhead and are lucky if they can even get a 1:500 support agent/end user ratio, often while still having to maintain premier support agreements with Microsoft.
When considering all of the downtime and ownership costs involved with managing computers at an enterprise scale, even a free comparable Windows PC cannot compete with a full price Mac over time. Simply put, this much disparity doesn’t really leave much room for debate, at least as far as the enterprise is concerned. As far as a business is concerned, PC’s are the modern equivalent of an idiot tax when compared to a Mac.