There are choices, better than ever before, but to vast types of users this doesn't matter.
Some examples - corporate users (nobody big seriously considers Linux for desktops for various reasons, Apple would be easily 3-5x that expensive for no good enough added value), gaming (again some good options, but subpar to windows on probably every aspect).
Everybody knows Windows, everybody can somehow get by with just clicking around. If I've put Linux on my fiancee's notebook (she is a doctor), I would have to do 24x7 support for it, forever. No, thank you.
In our branch we have tiny windows desktop boxes (20x20x3cm), they cost below 300 USD to buy. Our corporation has around 100,000 of those around the world. Good enough for any office work you will ever need. We devs are forced to use them too, and they are OKish with 16gb RAM. I've seen these kind of computers in every single employer I ever worked for in last 15 years, corporate or tiny. There are 100s of millions of similar computers in offices around the world.
What does Apple have that's cheaper? To save 535$ they would have to pay us to take them.
Topic might be different for high-end notebooks, especially with some sweet corporate deals. That's NOT the bulk of computers used for office work around the world. Cherry-picking some specific relatively marginal scenario doesn't affect the big numbers.
If the machine is more expensive to buy but significantly less expensive to manage (if, say, OS updates don’t delete all your data necessitating hours of recovery), the total cost goes down.
The initial purchase price of a machine is near-insignificant to the TCO of a corporate machine.
You don't know much corporate environment, at least you give off such an impression. We don't get patches straight from Microsoft servers, we have our own update servers. Only tested patches get through with some delay, something like this wouldn't make it. This is standard in big companies.
And we don't use Win10 at all, no sane CIO would ever approve it and stayed in his position for more than a week. Windows 7, no issue paying directly to Microsoft to produce patches long after public support is finished.
You're claiming that your internal IT department does better QA on Windows than Microsoft does. That's amazing. Do you have evidence to support this? How many major bugs do you report upstream? What's your QA system like? Can you confirm that your test suite checks upgrades using Known Folder Redirection when the default path is still in use?
I find it awfully hard to believe that you're arguing for using Windows on the basis of TCO, while on the other hand apparently have (and need) a QA department and test protocol that exceeds Microsoft's, and are willing to pay Microsoft to produce patches for an old OS just for you.
You've got 100,000 systems in a highly constrained environment. You pay for the licenses, and to run your own upgrade servers, and to do your own QA on their software, and to get patches for it, and you can't even run the current version because you think it's not "sane". I'm sure there must be external constraints you're not telling us, because this doesn't sound rational.
Windows 10 is rapidly becoming the standard, the "no sane CIO" remark is absurd. The entire DOD has standardized on Windows 10, and they're the largest enterprise in the world.
> You don't know much corporate environment, at least you give off such an impression.
Based on one post, where I point out TCO is not significantly driven by hardware purchase price? Ok then.
Anyway, the argument of lower TCO cited by the GP comes from (not exclusively) IBM, who I’d say know their own business, also used WSUS/SCCM and claimed they were better off with Apple and Jamf.
If there's anything IBM does better than anyone else, it's metrics. It's almost like they invented the field of IT metrics measurement and analysis, in fact.
Some examples - corporate users (nobody big seriously considers Linux for desktops for various reasons, Apple would be easily 3-5x that expensive for no good enough added value), gaming (again some good options, but subpar to windows on probably every aspect).
Everybody knows Windows, everybody can somehow get by with just clicking around. If I've put Linux on my fiancee's notebook (she is a doctor), I would have to do 24x7 support for it, forever. No, thank you.