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Comment by bsg75 | Hacker News Reader

During the pandemic, some of my company's Lenovo laptop orders were backlogged by weeks (or months for a brief period). We had difficulty obtaining laptops for remote employees, even when lowering requirements to "Anything reasonably suitable".

At the same time MacBook Pro's did not have significant changes in order times. I suspect this is because that for large corps, Macs are not as prevalent as Windows laptops. More "specialist" less "commodity".

Personally, I have 10 year old Macs still usable. This message comes from a 2012 MacMini - laptop level hardware. Equivalent age Windows laptops are either Linux (which is also not as corporate common) or our of service.

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Yes, but the MBP costs what like 1800 while the Windows laptops corporate is willing to buy often cost around half that or less?

Some of that is surely profit, but some does seem to pay for engineering and part selection of things and methods that don't suck and don't self destruct 2 months past the warranty end date.

> Yes, but the MBP costs what like 1800 while the Windows laptops corporate is willing to buy often cost around half that or less?

Yes, also why the corp waited on those Lenovo orders rather than switching some developers to Macs.

And telling IT to support a new operating system company wide could be an expensive decision.

Most Lenovo business laptops (thinkpad x/p series) are just as expensive as MacBooks for a business buyer. Maybe the E series are cheaper though.

Though I agree that a lot of employers seem to not even bother with a business line laptop anymore so ThinkPads or MacBooks are out of the question. I'll never understand cheaping out on laptops though. It's an even more bone headed move than not offering drinks or coffee at the office, because employees having to use cheap laptops as their 40h a week tool is just going to hurt the business. That's not even considering the support burden that comes with having a fleet of bad or slow hardware

Even used laptops were hot. I had a bunch of old Thinkpads that I sold for double or triple what I could sell them for today.

People wanted any computer they could get their hands on. WFH, kids attending school from home...

I'm at a large corp, and there was a backlog on Mac's. It took a year for one of my colleagues to get theirs.

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