Why Macs are good for business

Earlier this year, Omdia told us the MacBook Air had become the world’s most popular business laptop. With that in mind, I spoke with Apple Director for Mac Product Marketing Colleen Novielli, about why she thinks this is the case.

The move in recent years to Apple Silicon in Macs delivered a major boost to the platform. Not only did the move massively increase processor power, but it did so at low energy levels — turning even entry-level Macs into viable tools for business. “The Mac product line really is the strongest it’s ever been,” said Novielli. 

There’s a Mac for everyone

What that means is choice, with a suitable Mac available for almost every task. “What we like to say right now is there truly is a Mac for every employee in business to choose,” she said. (It’s easy to speculate that the extent of the offer might expand with the introduction of lower-cost Macs next year.)

The growing prevalence of employee choice schemes means more and more workers are choosing Macs, rather than other platforms. Martin Lang, enterprise mobility leader at SAP recently told me that about 50% of his company’s employees — roughly 54,000 people — now use Macs.

That’s not unique, said Novielli. “We’re seeing tremendous momentum around Mac in the enterprise,” she said. “We’re seeing this amazing spectrum of adoption across the Mac range.”

The company isn’t sitting back. It knows hundreds of thousands of Windows PCs need to be replaced by something else now that Windows 10 has run out of standard support. That something else could well be a Mac, and the decision to introduce M4 chips inside the MacBook Air formed part of Apple’s response. 

MacBook Air: Value and performance

“The M4 MacBook Air offers tremendous value and performance for enterprises as well as consumers,” Novielli said, noting its included 16GB memory, dual display support and 13- and 15-in. sizes as part of the appeal. Mainly, of course, with Apple Silicon, it’s a performance story.

The M4 MacBook Air has “all the performance that many employees need to get their work done and be their most productive all day and every day,” she said. Apple also offers computers with even more built-in performance, scaling up all the way to current and existing M5-powered Macs, beginning with the 14-in. MacBook Pro. 

This is driving more businesses to deploy Apple hardware. Capital One recently deployed thousands of MacBook Airs across the entire company, for example.

Macs are being deployed at scale in business

Novielli shared a couple of additional examples:

In China, leading mobility company Hello Incorporated has thousands of employees and recently deployed Macs company-wide, using them for research, product development, AI functions in their biking and carpooling divisions and taxi hire. Hello Incorporated has already updated to the M5 MacBook Pros “because they see the value in the performance and AI capabilities” the platform brings.

Food retail company Haidilao has also invested heavily in Mac, with systems now in place across 1,300 stores worldwide. The company is leaning into cutting-edge retail technology using these machines, including intelligent, AI-augmented guest servicing. That means obvious things such as monitoring for table churn, insuring orders are taken in a timely fashion and served correctly, and tracking safety measures in the kitchen and other parts of business management.

“They shared with us that this has led to a 78% energy savings from, you know, the things that they’re looking at from the efficiency of the actual buildings themselves,” she said, adding the systems have delivered 52% cost savings at the company.

Consumer simple is an enterprise superpower

“We have our amazing technology, which we create for the end user, which is the consumer, but also the enterprise,” she said. Of course, consumer-simple doesn’t mean consumer-dumb, which means that for enterprise users, the ease-of-use translates into getting tasks done faster, more efficiently and with less stress. 

The result? 

“We’re hearing more and more that our enterprise customers think that Mac is easier to use than ever,” Novielli said. “It’s more affordable than ever before and provides even more value. And it’s more compatible than ever before, even in this environment that is increasingly complicated from an IT perspective. There’s many great examples of customers who have deployed Mac and are really seeing the difference throughout the business, both from the impact it’s having on employees and their productivity, their daily lives, and also on their bottom line.”

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.Agentic AI – Ongoing coverage of its impact on the enterprise – ComputerworldRead More