Many of us will have experienced bad hardware or software at work. Applications that freeze when you try and do something. A lag when typing. Some programmes ceasing to work before crashing completely. Maybe it’s another kind of performance that makes you want to throw your laptop out of the window: the battery dies after you’ve only been to a couple of meetings, or the text on the screen screen seems teeny tiny if you’re not plugged into a monitor. All of this is very annoying. But, worst of all, it’s a waste of your most precious resource: your time.
Employers should care about this because it’s losing them money, particularly if they have staff who use computers for most of their work or their staff are relatively well-paid1, or both.
1 For the sake of making this concrete, let’s take “well-paid” to mean above the current UK median of £35k.
Let’s do a back-of-the-envelope calculation to show why bad IT makes no economic sense. The mid-range hardware used in many organisations looks, at best, like a 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM, i7 touch laptop or touch surface running Windows. As examples of these sorts of machines, a Lenovo ThinkPad model 21HF000UUK and a Microsoft Surface Pro 9 with those specifications are a good fit. The laptop has a 14-inch screen; the surface 13 inches. A quick check shows that these come in at £1600 and £2200 respectively at the time of writing. In my experience, the ThinkPad has a battery life of, at best, 2—3 hours; I’m not sure about the Surface.
Now let’s take a high-end laptop: a 14-inch M3-chip MacBook Pro that can run small large language models locally (!) and has 24GB of RAM plus a 1TB SSD. It’s the same size of hard drive but has 8 extra GB of RAM, which is enough to make a substantial difference to the performance (but, also, each GB of RAM is more performant in a Mac.) This is all-important because many of the glitches, pauses, and slowness of less good laptops come down to insufficient RAM. It isn’t simple to compare the processors of these machines, but the Mac is very approximately 30% faster. Without going back and forth on claims about battery life, Mac laptops occupy four of the top six laptops with the best battery life as listed in Toms Guide and personal experience suggests they go for far longer than 2—3 hours. Our high-end laptop comes in at £2300, an extra £100 or £700 relative to the mid-range ones. Now Macs do not have touchscreens but my observation is that extremely few people use the touch feature on a laptop. My other observation is that high-end laptops have problems once in a blue moon—there’s a crash once every 3 months or so. This is so rare that I take it to be zero.
Let’s say the cheaper hardware has three incidents a day where something glitches, crashes, or goes slow enough to pause a workflow and, on average, this causes three minutes of lost time during each occurrence. This seems entirely reasonable because most people will start doing something else, perhaps making a cup of tea, if their laptop becomes unresponsive for any length of time. Now, imagine the average professional costs a business £60.0k a year (with pension, National Insurance, etc, etc)2 and works 7.5 hours a day, so 51.0p per working minute. This makes the cost of that lost time around £1200.0 per year, compared to spending only £700 to £100 more to get the higher end laptop.
2 To give a sense of what this is as a headline salary, a base salary of £50k and pension of 7% plus National Insurance of £5644 takes the total cost to the employer to £59k.
Switching to a higher-end laptop pays off by at least £500.0 just in the first year. For the laptop, it’s worth going high-end for any all-in salary cost above £35.0k (remember, the UK median headline salary cost is £35k). The benefits are likely bigger when looking at a longer period: as far as I’ve been able to tell, mid-range laptops usually last around three years while higher end laptops last more like five years–with some reports suggesting Apple laptops last longer than this. So the “payoff” from switching might be a few times this.
There are a bunch of other factors here that are hard to estimate. Staff might be more motivated by better IT, and this is hard to quantify. But if staff surveys consistently rate technology as poor, the benefits may be significant. There could be better staff retention, which is worth a lot. But better IT might also discourage some bad behaviour: if people have to deal with a laptop battery that doesn’t last long enough for two meetings in a row, they will either make no notes or start using personal devices to take notes. If people are faced with a laptop or surface that’s too fiddly to use on a train, they simply won’t work when in transit.
On the other hand, there is likely to be a cost to maintaining two or more separate operating systems in an enterprise. Apple laptops use MacOS, a different operating system to the one often installed on ThinkPads, Surfaces, and similar devices, which is Windows. But most organisations have already crossed the Rubicon on this with their use of iPhones for mobiles, and Linux for critical systems. It’s also really poor practice to hitch your organisation to a single provider of software and hardware. You’ll be backed into a corner when negotiating contracts, and may not be able to easily change things up if the software or hardware quality degrades. (It’s notable that frontier tech firms allow staff to choose between Windows, MacOS, and Linux.) I don’t know how to estimate the cost of maintaining two or more operating systems in an organisation but there are serious downsides to having just one.
I’m not suggesting that organisations should just buy Apple laptops–this is about efficiency, and the best prescription for that is to allow staff to choose what works best for them. The apparently economically optimal choice won’t make sense for everyone: some staff might want to stick with mid-range laptops because they get along better with the operating system or laptop design, and that’s okay. By allowing staff to choose what they get on best with you keep them happy, and you make your organisation more productive. The bottom line is that everybody wins when staff have the option to use a higher-end laptop—except, maybe, glaziers.