Lure a wider class of people into buying things from the App Store to generate more recurring revenue? Make macOS a more promising alternative to Windows in the corporate space?
Last time I checked it's not like they have excess inventory. And Macs are quite viable in the corporate space - so far, in the past 10 years or so, I have been issued precisely one Windows laptop. All other machines were Macs.
For tech and art, yes, that's been a solid Apple domain for decades. But your average paper pusher bureaucrat? They get a crap 500$ Dell/HP that constantly has issues because there's no budget for better stuff and 90% of the non-Web/SaaS software in that area is solid Windows-only.
From my past couple years, I only saw Windows laptops in accounting and HR. You could get a Windows loaner when you needed to check something a customer was experiencing you couldn’t reproduce on the Mac.
Linux has been rare mostly for compliance and regulatory issues - corporate IT thinks it’s too easy for a determined Linux geek to take over the machine and bypass all safeguards.
> Linux has been rare mostly for compliance and regulatory issues - corporate IT thinks it’s too easy for a determined Linux geek to take over the machine and bypass all safeguards.
And that's because it is... when Grub boots, press e, add init=/bin/sh (or rdinit), and boom you have a root shell. In case the admins did think far enough to deal with implementing Grub password protection or secure boot of some kind, wait a couple months, and there will be some sort of local privilege escalation exploits (there's about one a year).
In addition to that, Linux doesn't exactly play nice with corporate snake-oil solutions - these are more hassle than they're worth it as they constantly break.
> 500$ Dell/HP that constantly has issues because there's no budget
So they wouldn’t buy any macOS licenses unless they are <$50 either? Which makes it totally not worth it and would result in a significant decline in revenue for Apple
The point isn't that there are many shops that don't really do Macs. The point is that there are many that do support Macs. It's pretty common in tech-company circles, at least. That's not everything, but it proves it's not weird.
Of course, most companies aren't going to spend on a Mac laptop; a $500 Windows laptop (or whatever) is usually good enough for many roles.
They would cannibalize their hardware products and with the massive margin (especially on upgrades) that’s not worth it at all. The App Store revenue is peanuts (on macOS but I would assume on iOS as well relative to hw sales).