What sort of ongoing support does Apple offer?

We have quintessentially corporate Dells, which retail for about the same as Macs, and they come with full corporate support contracts... they sent someone to change the motherboard in mine, for instance. Support contracts are important in corporate settings, not just cost.

And of course, very often corporate IT only knows Windows and MS in general so says they can't support anything else.

I’m always amazed how people dismiss the contributions of people who actually bring in revenue so that you can get paid.

I’m not in sales. I’m what would be considered a “post sales architect” who is the first person a client talks to once the sale is closed and responsible for delivery. But I’m high enough up the funnel and work closely enough with sales and marketing to appreciate them.

What a weird take. I'm an engineer and I haven't worked at a single company that has issued windows laptops to engineers unless they asked for it. The default for a lot of dev work has been mac for a very long time. I think that's shifted in recent years, but still I'm actually kind of astonished to hear your take.

Years ago, when my vantage point was support and consulting, I had the same view of sales and marketing. I encountered too many buyers who did not know what they were buying, too many sellers who did not know what they were selling, and me in the middle having to reset everyone's expectations. The authority held by sales and marketing to steer the product into insane directions seemed like an injustice. It's an unfortunate reality that customers who already paid for something are often de-prioritized for new customers with different requirements and less expertise.

Much of my job is now customer onboarding, so I work closer with sales and solution architects. I also fill in for the solution architects when they're spread too thin for the events marketing has set up. The struggles faced by those teams are entirely different than those on the engineering and support side, and while it might not seem fair, a good corporate culture means everyone is motivated to work hard. Many of those roles are based on comission, so their financial and career prospects are worse than ours when they're not fully dedicated and producing results.

In terms of who gets what computer, it's unfortunate that the majority of users will be people who have average (or less than average) technical skills. That means a lot of them are afraid to even try macOS and will want to go back to PCs as soon as some trivial difference gives them the slightest uncertanty. Personally, I'd love to work on a rice'd hyprland system all day, but the fact that the business relies on BS like MS/Google collaboration software, our CRM has no keyboard shortcuts, etc. means technical users will always be held back.

> Also, screw Apple for their ridiculous prices, lawbreaking, gaslighting of their users, their stance on repairability, and intentional choices to limit functionality of their devices.

Why would I care about repairability of a work laptop? If something breaks, I talk to my IT department and since they have a business contract with Apple, I take it to the Apple Store and if they can’t repair it right then, they give me another one.

True AirPods aren’t fiddly. But neither are just plugging in wired headphones.