[cortesoft]

I haven't worked with TOO many different companies, but I have worked at a few of various sizes (from small startup to huge Fortune 100), and none of them ever provided upgrades for machines. It was always full replacements. Sometimes you would get a used machine, but they were from someone else who left, not an upgraded machine.

Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?

[themadturk]

As a recent retiree from a Fortune 500 company...no, there's no such thing as an upgrade. We were virtually exclusively laptops on the desktop. It was full replacement every time.

[thewebguyd]

> Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?

I doubt it. I'm certainly not, and none of my peers at other companies locally are either. Even less so now that plenty of business class laptops are coming with soldered ram anyway. The MO is to just replace the machine once its out of warranty.

[michaelt]

It's not common, but it's not unusual either.

If your standard developer laptop has a 256 GB SSD, but a certain team needs more disk space due to the work they're doing, you can just add a second nvme for a fraction of the cost and inconvenience of replacing the whole laptop.

[spankibalt]

> "Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?"

My experiences cover only Europe, mostly in sasec (safety and security, not infosec) shops, including sasec-related engineering and product development. The only Macs I see in any pro capacity are those of clients and rent-a-lecturer/instructor-types, the latter seldomly part of the industry. In my neck of the woods we run mostly on machines from Panasonic and Lenovo; in-house repair labs are a thing (some of them with expertise and equipment that makes the Rechenzentren at the local universities bow their heads in shame).

What a lot Apple people don't seem to get into their heads is that there's user segments to whom the virtues of Apple's "silicon" is utterly irrelevant; the small benefits you'd get out of it are completely negated by a litany of cons that makes their products completely undesirable.

[fragmede]

It's for specialist users. Eg video editors or CAD systems. They need a 10-Gig connectivity to the SAN and want a Mac and not a Dell.