[nunez]

Well sure; they're using a Microsoft stack to do the job!

You can manage and provision thousands of Windows machines with a configuration management tool like Puppet or Chef, though you'll spend more on the engineers needed to dole that out. This is what Google does to provision all of their machines (Windows, Mac and Linux) and it's working out well for them.

SCCM and InTune get VERY expensive at scale and the clients don't work well on anything other than Windows. (You can deploy to Macs with it, but I've heard that it's choppy.)

Then there's the whole issue with their fleet. I'm curious to see what their numbers would be like if they got Surface Pros for everyone instead of a mish-mash of Dells, HPs and Toshibas. The build quality on the Surface is at par with the Mac and Microsoft definitely have great support options to back them with.

What I'm basically saying is that they're comparing a likely-outdated deployment infrastructure and crappier machines (Windows) with a more modern stack and better hardware (Mac), so of course they're going to conclude that Macs are cheaper.