Mac's in a web development office?

[macally]

I know, I know....this has been discussed countless times, however, I'm in need of some opinions and a sort of sounding board.

At present, our web development office are using a mis match of computers and I want to improve the look/feel of the office and that will possibly include changing the computers that are in use.

At present, they are using:

1 x Custom PC with a Core i5 2400 3.1GHz CPU, 8GB Ram, 120GB SSD, ATI 5570 GPU
1 x Dell Laptop with a Core i7 720QM 1.6GHz Quad Core CPU, 8GB Ram, 250GB 7200rpm Hdd, nVidia GPU
2 x HP DC7900 with a Core 2 Duo 3.16GHz CPU, 4GB Ram, 500GB 7200rpm Hard Drives, ATI low profile GPU

We've just invested quite a lot of money and time setting up an internal HP server running Windows Server 2012 to store all client work, etc, and I was surprised that when connecting the computers to the domain, there was the option to connect Mac computers and this got me thinking.

Would there be any advantage to using Mac's in the web development office? I'm unsure what we would go for but it would be either the quad core mac mini's or the lower end 27" iMac's.

The other option would be to ditch the 2 HP desktops and build 3 more custom PC's but that wouldn't really improve the look of the office as such because the pc's would just go under the desk and monitors would be the same.

We use Adobe software quite a lot but we have this on the Creative Cloud program so can use this on Mac and PC's. We use Office365 so again, have access to the Mac version of Office without any extra expense so software costs really aren't much of a concern.

I would be interested to know your thoughts.

 

[macally]

All of the users in our office are comfortable on both Mac and Windows so that's not a major concern.

As for changing monitors, I think our current monitors are pretty good - Dell U2312HM's (plus one HP 23") but it's difficult to find a good quality monitor with the same 'class' as the iMac screens.

In terms of cost, obviously, it would a fairly big outlay but that's one of the reasons I was considering the Mac Mini + Apple Cinema Display as we could keep the displays and just upgrade the mac mini every now and again.

 

[macally]

Sounds like a plan! Want to hire me?

Depends...any good at graphic/web work?

Liking the Mac Mini idea, although I don't think they offer much in the graphics department so aslong as you're not going to be working with very demanding projects where you'll need to work a lot with graphics, etc. then I guess you'll be ok with the Mini's!

Yeah, I was just looking at the specs of the mini. I'm sure the mini used to have an option with a dedicated GPU. Will have to give that some thought.

 

[macally]

Thanks for all the comments.

I can see why many of you are saying it's a waste of money but when half of the team are using 5 year old Core 2 Duo PC's that are really showing their age, it comes down to whether we build custom PC's or get something that looks a bit more classy and that helps improve the overall look of the office.

Will have to give it more thought me thinks.

 

[macally]

It's funny, I went into a design agency this morning macally and all there monitors were different. It gave me a negative impression and I thought about this thread. If all of the computers would have been Apple with a clean look I would have had a different impression.

Image is important in business, in your game I don't think it is a waste of money. How can you lose, staff morale will improve and customer impression will be considerably improved.

Exactly. I could understand peoples scepticism if we had 12 month old PC's or something but that's not the case. 2 of the PC's have lasted longer than most people's computer life cycle so are long overdue being replaced anyway.

As you said, image is important to us but out of interest, would your impression have been as different if they'd had say 3 matching Dell Ultrasharp monitors?

Is the office customer facing?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to spruce up the place, but I'm not sure how one goes from a lick of paint and a few new monitors to blowing away all the Windows boxes on a Windows domain and replacing the lot with Macs.

It's bonkers.

And I don't mean that in an offensive way, I mean it in a slap in the face/reality check sense. You're going to pull the rug from underneath your existing network for the sake of aesthetics.

If you want my advice, buy *a* Mac. I can see a definite business advantage for a web development shop to have *a* Mac running OSX. See if it plays nicely with your LOB software, your printers, your domain/policies/file shares, your backup software, your external drives, your encryption software etc.

Only then are you going to have a realistic idea of what the implications are, and whether it's worth it in the long run.

Yes, the office is customer facing. For a lot of clients, the office is the first impression our clients get of our company.

I do get what you're saying but like I said, if we decorated the office then put back 5 year old PC's in there, what impression would that give?

That's what started me thinking about replacing the computers and it's only after looking at similar web development offices and seeing what they use that made me think of Mac's.