Apple devices >3x more stable in corporate environments than Windows

[dada_dave]

Windows devices saw 3.1x more forced shutdowns than macOS

Omnissa says Windows devices in its enterprise telemetry dataset saw 3.1 times more forced shutdowns than macOS in 2025, alongside higher crash and app-hang rates.

www.notebookcheck.net

The >3x was for shutdowns alone, Macs also had fewer app hangs and crashes.

I don't think this will be a huge surprise to people on these forums, previous studies (I think the most famous being a 2016 IBM study) have found Macs to be more const-effective in the long run than PCs for companies to deploy.

 

[Yoused]

Back when I was running Mac OS 8.6, I would average a little more than one app-takes-everything-down crash every day. I would reboot and get back to doing stuff. It was something of a nuisance but not that bad. Meanwhile, my friends on w95/98 would have far fewer crashes (at least an order of magnitude) but their system crashes, more often than not, would call for a corrective nuke&pave. To me, that was unheard of. Once my HD was set up, I never, ever, had to reformat. Not even once. Crashes were a short workflow interruption, costing much less time than having to rebuild.

I have to admit, the Windows machine I had to use at work was pretty stable. But, it was probably hardened against malware, and we could not download stuff from the internets.

 

[Cmaier]

Not a joke: yesterday I had to reboot my firm-assigned windows 11 machine 3 times. It runs separate count-down timers that start (1) every xxx number of days, (2) every time some security or other “important” update is available. A modal box pops up and tells you “i’m going to reboot in __ hours” and you can “snooze” it a few times.

So what happens is that, say, I’m using my computer for a couple days, and the “you have to reboot every xxx days” timer triggers, but there are also timers for a security update that started a couple days ago, and some update to Word or something. Rather than consolidating all those updates, it forcefully updates (even if I am in the middle of work) 3 times in a row, each time demanding that I enter a firmware password before it proceeds, so I can’t even leave it sitting over night, or else it just shuts down.

The initial “restarting” takes 10 minutes, for some reason, before it even begins to reboot.

Fuck Windows.

 

[KingOfPain]

I also had to reboot my work Windows laptop three times in one day, although I typically shut it down at the end of every work day.
I believe it was some Windows update, then a Dell update, and then an ESET update, all requiring reboots.
Two days ago I had to reboot due to a driver update. Yesterday, ESET told me that the update it just installed requires a reboot, but I was in the middle of an analysis and didn’t have the time.

Windows updates already require reboots much more often than macOS, but on a Windows PC you also have:

• BIOS updates. I guess Apple simply includes firmware updates in the macOS update process.
• Driver updates.
• Virus scanner updates, which sometimes require reboots.
• I think I even had a Microsoft Office update requiring a reboot once.

There is just too much stuff that buries itself deep in the Windows operating system that causes additional reboots.

 

[Eric]

While I can't speak for recent years the biggest thing in corporate environments has always been cost for both workstations and servers, Mac has always out performed PC/Windows but no IT department could justify the price and Windows server environments have always been the gold standard.

 

[casperes1996]

Back when I was running Mac OS 8.6, I would average a little more than one app-takes-everything-down crash every day. I would reboot and get back to doing stuff. It was something of a nuisance but not that bad. Meanwhile, my friends on w95/98 would have far fewer crashes (at least an order of magnitude) but their system crashes, more often than not, would call for a corrective nuke&pave. To me, that was unheard of. Once my HD was set up, I never, ever, had to reformat. Not even once. Crashes were a short workflow interruption, costing much less time than having to rebuild.

I have to admit, the Windows machine I had to use at work was pretty stable. But, it was probably hardened against malware, and we could not download stuff from the internets.

For most processes macOS 8 had a single memory space and used cooperative scheduling. Easy for any program to lock up crash the whole system like that.

 

[Yoused]

For most processes macOS 8 had a single memory space and used cooperative scheduling. Easy for any program to lock up crash the whole system like that.

As a consequence, most Mac programs were somewhat better written than most Windows programs and crashes were not really all that frequent. In terms of malware, in the modern age, being wide open like that would be a recipe for disaster (68K Mac OS ran in privileged mode all the time, though I believe PPC was not that reckless).

However, I could envision a mapped flat memory space being especially practical for a system using a lot of IPC. There would be one small region of maybe a couple GB for executable code and the rest of the 64-bit space would be the same for all programs (though they would only each be able to access their own sections or shared data blocks). It might be a bit tricky to work out, but I think it could be a step forward.