Walk into almost any high-growth startup and count the laptops. The answer is overwhelmingly Mac. It is easy to write this off as developer preference or a vibe. There is more to it than that, and the reasons have gotten stronger, not weaker, over the last two years.
Start with the obvious: people want them
Employee preference is real and it matters. Engineers entering the workforce grew up on Apple hardware and expect it at work. For a company competing for technical talent, the standard-issue laptop is a small but visible signal. Fighting that preference rarely saves enough money to be worth the friction.
But preference alone would not explain why CIOs at serious companies keep expanding their Mac fleets. Something else is going on.
The Apple Silicon advantage in the AI era
Here is the part that changed the math.
On a traditional PC, the processor and the graphics card each have their own pool of memory, and data gets copied between them. On Apple Silicon, there is one unified pool of memory shared across the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine. Everything reads from the same place, no copying.
For AI work, that architecture punches above its weight. A Mac with a generous amount of unified memory can load and run larger models than a comparable PC, because the model is not boxed into a small, separate graphics-memory budget. That is exactly why a growing share of enterprises now reach for Macs specifically for AI processing. For teams building AI features, the Mac is not a lifestyle choice, it is often the more capable tool for the price.
The security and management story
The other quiet reason is operations.
Apple devices tend to be less exposed to commodity malware than the Windows fleet, which matters when most breaches start at the endpoint. Just as importantly, modern Macs slot cleanly into zero-touch deployment. A device can ship with its security profile, apps, and policies already defined, so it configures itself the moment the employee powers it on. That cuts manual provisioning time meaningfully and closes the gap where a fresh, unmanaged machine is most vulnerable.
For a lean IT team supporting people across several countries, a fleet that enrolls and secures itself is worth a lot.
The catch nobody mentions
All of this is great until you try to actually run a Mac fleet across borders at speed.
Apple hardware is premium, which makes capital allocation a real decision for a company that just raised and would rather not sink cash into laptops. Sourcing the right configurations in every country, getting them delivered in days instead of weeks, keeping them under warranty, and recovering them when people leave, that is the work. The decision to standardize on Mac is easy. The logistics behind it are not.
How we think about it
The right answer for most scaleups is not "buy Macs" or "do not buy Macs." It is: get your team the hardware that makes them productive, without tying up capital or building a logistics function to do it.
That usually means leasing the high-spec machines your engineers actually need, having them delivered configured and secured wherever the person sits, and treating the whole lifecycle, from order to retrieval, as one managed flow rather than a pile of vendor relationships.
You pick the machine. We handle everything between the order and the offboarding. In any country, on any spec.