Apple’s custom M1 chip could save businesses millions of dollars in comparison to traditional PCs, despite the larger initial expenditure, new analysis suggests.
As per a report from analyst house Forrester (albeit commissioned by Apple), businesses could save $843 for each M1 Mac over the course of its life. This figure factors in the cost of hardware, software and maintenance, as well as more abstract items like security risk and employee engagement.
Based on interviews with large-scale businesses that use M1 Macs, the report asserts that companies could save $12.4 million over three years in IT support costs alone, because zero-touch deployment and mobile device management is made simple on macOS.
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Over the same time period, Forrester claims M1 Macs could also help companies eliminate $37.5 million in “reduced and avoided costs related to PC deployment”, thanks to lower energy consumption and greater performance per dollar, and gain a whopping $75 million in increased employee productivity.
Apple M1 chip
Apple’s custom Arm-based silicon made its debut in the 2020 MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac mini, delivering dramatic performance improvements over previous generations of Intel-powered Macs.
Until now, the new range has largely targeted the consumer audience. However, beyond highlighting the merits of Apple’s new chip, the Forrester report can be taken as an indication Apple is preparing a major push into enterprise.
“Prior to using Macs, the organizations [surveyed] were largely PC-based. However, the interviewees said their focus on enterprise PC deployments introduced common challenges,” Forrester explained. “Managing and deploying PCs (especially remotely) was manual and time-consuming for IT and employees wanted to use Macs and were used to using their own personal Mac devices in unsupported states.”
“As Apple improved the performance and power efficiency with M1, customers were able to deploy more Macs while staying in the same price range of a baseline PC that most workers use.”
Along with the new cost-saving figures, Apple also published benchmark data that highlights the performance improvement afforded by the M1 across typical enterprise workloads. The chip is said to offer double the Microsoft Excel performance and Zoom battery life, as well as a 50% speed improvement across web applications.
While all vendor-commissioned reports must be approached with a critical eye and PC vendors will most probably dispute some of the findings, what’s obvious is that Apple now has business buyers in its crosshairs.
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Via ZDNet
