techradar.com - Support for Apple's Mac hardware continues to climb. According to a recent report published by JAMF Software, a company that provides enterprise management solutions for Apple products, 96% of the 500 IT professionals surveyed in September 2015 say their teams support Mac. Additionally, 81% support iPad and 84% support iPhone.
IT professionals recognize tangible benefits to switching to a Mac. Compared with a Windows-based PC, IT professionals say that the move to a Mac could result in an increase productivity, more employee engagement and a reduction in costs. These sentiments echo IBM's finding that switching to a Mac resulted in a saving of $270 (£177, AU$373) per user.
Additionally, 75% of those surveyed said Macs provide better security compared to rival platforms.
Support statistics
Mac support in the enterprise is higher than support for Windows PC. Only 92% of IT professionals say their internal teams support PCs, and 28% of those surveyed say they support Chromebooks. Support for Windows tablets is at 46%.
The JAMF report only cited support numbers, and the survey doesn't provide specifics about Mac adoption and deployment rates.
Sixty-four percent prefer Macs because Apple's computers are easier to manage than other computer platforms. As Apple standardizes on common protocols, less maintenance is required and supporting the platform becomes easier.
"While a lot of the attention of Apple's success has been on its iOS devices, the survey results also show that Mac will continue to replace the PC at an unprecedented rate because it empowers users to be creative, productive, and happier in their jobs," said Dean Hager, CEO of JAMF Software, in an interview with ComputerWorld.
With virtualization software like VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop, Mac users can run OS X and Windows apps on the same computer side-by-side. Running two OSes on a single device could result in big savings for businesses in terms of hardware, support and software costs. Macs also ship with basic productivity software, such as Apple's Pages, Numbers and Keynote apps.
User preference
However, it's not just IT departments that prefer to support, manage and deploy Macs. Users are also choosing Macs because of their own familiarity with the platform at home.
"As organizations continue to implement user choice programs, more and more employees are choosing Apple devices for work because this is what they prefer in their everyday lives," David Alampi, JAMF Software Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, told ComputerWorld. "As a result, Apple is seeing increased adoption in the enterprise because employees demand Apple."
Apple is still strong in the education market, with 94% of K-12 and 97% of higher education organizations supporting Macs.
Apple's growth comes at a time when the PC market as a whole is contracting. PC sales are expected to rebound in late 2016, according to a recent IDC report, as businesses begin to upgrade their commercial systems.

fin24.com - Global smartphone shipments are losing steam but lower priced devices and the African market are likely to be an engine of growth, says an international research organisation.
The International Data Corporation (IDC) last week forecast that global smartphone growth will hit 9.8% in 2015 - the segment's first ever single digit growth.
The IDC attributed the slowdown to dampening demand in China, but the research organisation has argued that lower-priced smartphones are expected to drive growth in Africa and other parts of the globe.
"The smartphone growth will come from the low-priced smartphones (under $150)," Joseph Hlongwane, IDC SA research analyst told Fin24.
IDC further data showed that shipments to the Middle East and Africa are set to grow at 50%, surpassing those to India and Indonesia.
"With the other regions slowing down, Africa has become very crucial to manufactures. Africa's smartphone market is expected to grow - especially the low priced smartphone (segment). However, the key for success in Africa will be to launch the right product at the right price point," Hlongwane said.
The IDC said that Android will marginally increase its global market share from 81% to 82%, while Apple's iOS operating system for iPhones should remain flat at about 14%.
The organisation forecast that Microsoft would see a 10.2% decline in its global market share despite investments in its Windows operating system.
Meanwhile, Chinese manufactures such as ZTE and Xiaomi have already actively targeted the lower price market segment in SA while Xiaomi has also entered the local space.
Xiaomi, which promotes its own Android flavour MIUI, has launched its Mi 4 in SA on contracts starting at R229 per month.
"I think that the diversity in Android is the driver of its success. The OS offers the consumer a variety of handsets brands and models to choose from, and a broad range of prices. Due to these reasons, I see Android OS dominating the smartphone market for many years to come," Hlongwane told Fin24.

mashable.com - At WWDC in June, Apple announced it would be open-sourcing its Swift programming language by the end of the year. Well, it's the first week of December and Apple kept is promise: Swift is now open source.
Apple introduced the Swift programming language at WWDC in 2014, touting it as the best language going forward for building apps for Apple platforms - which include iOS, OS X, tVOS and watchOS. In some ways, Swift can be seen as a successor to Objective-C.
At WWDC, Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi said one of the reasons the company felt it was important to open-source Swift was because of its thought that "the next big programming language" would live on for years to come.
The lack of an open-source license hasn't slowed Swift's adoption - StackOverflow surveys show interest in the language continues to be high - but it has limited it to the Apple community.
Open-sourcing Swift has the potential of making the language take off on other platforms, too.
Open-source details
Apple has set up Swift.org as the main hub for the Swift open-source community. This website will contain the mailing lists, reporting tools, tutorials, documentation, blogs and binary downloads for OS X and Linux.
But what's an open-source project without a Github profile? Nothing, so Apple is putting its public source-code repositories for Swift on Github at http://github.com/apple. The company says it will be accepting pull requests - so it really does seem like this is a full open-source effort and not something half-assed.
Apple is also launching a new Swift Package Manager. This package manager is in its early stages but will be open from the beginning. The early stages of the package manager are on Github, and Apple says it will work with the community to help define how it will work.
In addition to making the compiler, debugger and REPL open-source, Apple is also making a bunch of core libraries used in Swift open-source as well. This includes Foundation, libispatch and XCTest.
A permissive license
Apple is licensing Swift under the Apache 2.0 license with a run-time attribution exception. The Apache license is one of the most common open-source licenses on the planet.
It's not GPL (which historically, Apple would reject anyway, for complicated reasons), but it's ratified by the Open Source Initiative and fits the goals of the existing communities.
A key part of this license is the run-time attribution exception, which basically opens the door for other IDEs (integrated development environments) to add Swift support to their tools.
This is huge because as of right now, the only IDE that supports Swift natively is Xcode. Xcode is a great development tool, but it's Mac-only.
Targeting Linux first
Although the nature of the open-source license and the community resources mean Swift can come to other platforms, the initial platform Apple is focusing on when opening Swift up is Linux.
On the surface, it may seem odd to eschew Windows for an operating system with much lower market share, but in the developer world, it makes complete sense.
Linux dominates the server market. Right now, developers can write their client code in Swift but if they want to write code that executes in the cloud, they need to use something else. Having Linux support opens the door to making Swift a more robust language for more than just client apps.
This isn't to say Swift can't still find its way to Windows - but Apple hasn't indicated Windows is its focus, at least not right now.
Running like a community
The real test Apple will face with open-sourcing Swift is integrating into the existing Swift developer community as well as the broader open-source communities.
Apple says its governance model with Swift will be similar to the way the compiler LLVM is governed (this makes sense as the creator of Swift is also the original author of LLVM) wherein there will be code owners that oversee certain aspects of the project.
Right now, those code owners are Apple employees, but that will change over time and the plan is to create new code owners based on merit and contribution - rather than employer - as is currently the same with LLVM.
Still, it will be important for Apple to be open with the broader non-Apple community - not to mention the cadre of Swift developers - as it builds out the language.
When large companies steer open-source projects, there can often be conflicts between the whims of the corporate overseer and the needs of the greater community.
We've seen this play out before at Apple with WebKit. The rendering engine that powers most of the web is steered by Apple but was forked by Google in 2013 because of disagreements over its future.
The good news for Swift is that because it shares so many similar players as the team behind LLVM, the understanding of open-source - especially at a language level - appears to be better.
TL;DR
The bottom line is that Swift being open-source is good for Apple, good for Swift developers and good for open-source software in general.
If Apple really does want Swift to be the programming language of the next 20 years, this is an important step in making that happen.

ubergizmo.com - If there is a unique feature of the Windows 10 operating system is that it allows developers to create apps for both the desktop and mobile devices. This means that one could technically have access to desktop-class applications on their mobile devices. However the downside is that unlike iOS and Android, there aren't as many apps for Windows 10.
Granted we probably won't even need a million apps, but the point is that there are options so that even if there is something obscure that we want, there is a good chance you might find an app for it. Apparently former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer feels the same way, and has expressed his opinion in an interview with Bloomberg that what Windows Phone needs is actually Android apps.
This is something that BlackBerry 10 used to be able to do, which was run Android apps. Microsoft had even initiated a similar program codenamed Astoria. This project would allow developers to rework Android and iOS apps for Windows, but it seems that the project has since been put on hold.
At the moment Android is the largest mobile operating system and together with iOS they both take up a huge chunk of the market, with both platforms' ecosystems to thank for that (amongst other things). It is unclear as to when Astoria will be back on track, but even then we have to wonder how many developers will actually take advantage of it.

appleinsider.com - Steve Ballmer, who remains Microsoft's largest shareholder, offered some scathing criticism of how the company is reporting its revenues and profit margins from cloud services and hardware, as well as its universal app strategy for wooing developers to create apps for Windows devices.
Obscured revenue and profitability from cloud, hardware
Speaking at the company's shareholder meeting, as noted in report by Dina Bass for Bloomberg, Microsoft's outspoken former chief executive first took aim its cloud services and hardware business, which the company has touted as key to replacing lost licensing revenues from a PC industry in decline.
Rather than reporting actual revenues and disclosing profit margins across all of its cloud services, the company has only offered a "run rate," an extrapolation that assumes revenues remained constant throughout the year based on a snapshot of real data.
Microsoft reported 44 percent gross margins on its commercial cloud business, but does not report its total profits from cloud services or hardware.
Microsoft's gross margins from its legacy software business have historically been very high (peaking at over 90 percent over the last decade, with a median rate of 81.44 percent). However, Ballmer pointed out hardware and cloud services-two businesses the company has been pursuing since Satya Nadella took over as chief executive in 2014-contribute far lower margins than software.
"It's sort of a key metric," Ballmer said. "If they talk about it as key to the company, they should report it." He specifically called Microsoft's reporting of a revenue run rate "bullshit."
Apple reports actual revenues for its hardware business, and specifically details net revenues and unit sales for iPhone, iPad, and Mac as well as providing net revenues for Services (including iTunes, App Store, Apple Music, AppleCare, Apple Pay and licensing) and Other Products (which bundles Apple TV, Apple Watch, iPod, Beats and other accessories). It also reports its overall gross margins.
Microsoft reports overall revenues from three segments: Office, Server/Cloud/Enterprise, and "More Personal Computing," a segment that includes Windows licensing; phones, Surface and PC accessories; Xbox and all gaming subscriptions and royalties; and search advertising. The company also offers some details on revenues (but not unit sales or margin) for Lumia phones, Surface and Xbox.
While pundits have castigated Apple's decision from last fall to not detail Apple Watch unit sales or revenues, there hasn't been similar criticism of Microsoft's refusal to detail Surface or Lumia tablets or other hardware products like Microsoft Band. No other hardware makers apart from Apple detail the number of tablets they sell either.
Windows Phone apps
When a shareholder asked Nadella to address the lack of apps for its Windows Phone platform, the company's current chief executive outlined his Windows universal apps strategy, which hopes to entice developers to create new software that can run on both desktop and tablet Windows 10 PCs and Windows Phone.
Ballmer began talking over the top of Nadella, stating "that won't work," and saying that Microsoft should instead develop software to enable users to run Android apps on Windows Phone.
This spring, Microsoft announced plans for Windows 10 and Windows Phone to run a new type of universal Windows 10 app, while also enabling developers to easily port their software from Android or iOS into universal Windows apps.
Last month, Tom Warren of the Verge reported that Microsoft had put on hold its plans to facilitate Android software ports in order to focus on development tools for porting iOS apps.
Microsoft currently offers bridge tools to allow developers to create Windows 10 universal apps that reuse their existing Objective-C code developed for iOS apps. This hasn't resulted in a quick fix for Windows Phone users however.
In part, that's because the Windows Phone market is insignificantly small and Windows 10 adoption has begun to slow down after an initial surge of upgrades. Data from StatCounter and NetApplications (cited by PCWorld in October) indicates that Windows 10 accounted for around 7 percent of online users, compared to the roughly 80 percent who are still using Windows XP, 7 or 8.
That makes Windows 10 roughly as large as Mac OS X as a platform, but representing a less attractive demographic of users. Apple's Mac App Store hasn't received the same enthusiasm developers have showered upon the iOS App Store, in part due to requirements that Mac apps be signed, among other restrictions. Microsoft imposes similar restrictions on its universal Windows 10 app store.
Further, given that the vast majority of Windows PC users have older OS versions installed, developers wanting to target Windows desktop users are far more likely to write conventional Win32 apps than learn an entirely new development style specifically to target a minority of Windows PCs and the extremely small segment of Windows Phones and tablets that can't run conventional Windows software.
In October, Ballmer said in an televised interview that he believed Microsoft represented the only serious competition to Apple.
"If there's going to be any competition at all for Apple it will come from Microsoft," Ballmer said, adding that unlike Samsung, Microsoft has the "software and the hardware capability" to offer real competition.