Our church only runs pcs as part of its managed deployment, but some members of staff, in fact only trainees, run macs.

That’s interesting Jon. Any ideas why you think it’s the trainees who are using Macs? Has the church bought them, or did they bring the Macs with them when they started working?

Today we probably have 50/50 PC/Mac amongst those that BYO hardware. Over the last few years I’ve observed an increase in use of mac’s among paid members of our ministry team.

More and more people coming out of theological training are likely to own a mac. I’d be curious to know these stat’s for those graduating from Moore College or SMBC

Steve, they brought them with them when they came. they are younger (although not much more younger than me). the churches IT guy doesn’t like macs, but i don’t think that’s the only reason we don’t run them as distributed machines. i think their price contributes in a big way to their extent of use in churches. maybe if churches were included in apples education discount they would become more affordable.

Ashley and Jon – thanks for your thoughts. You’ve got me thinking – just written an article to be published tomorrow – “Mac or PC for Christian ministry?”. Keep an eye out for it!

Our staff get a choice. The majority prefer and choose Macs. As one of the ICT guys I’ve promoted Macs as it has significantly reduced the number of support calls I get and downtime for the staff.

Most staff had used only Windows prior to their switch. No one has switched from a Mac to a Windows PC.

I often hear of people switching from PCs to Macs, but never from Macs to PCs. Why is that do you think?

To be fair, the PC community provides a much bigger pool to switch away from.

But I think that few people switch *from* OS X because they find it works better for them. It certainly works better for me, for most tasks. To each their own, but don’t ask me to support your Windows PC after I’ve advised you to get something else.

That’s true – we’re more likely to hear of people switching from the larger pool. I’m yet to find anyone who’s switched to a Mac and regretted it though. Also, most people who have Macs have used PCs, whereas most people who have used PCs, haven’t (necessarily) used Macs.

I think the other factor in switching is that the things you did on PC can still be done on a Mac using parallels or Boot Camp. Therefore those who want some aspect of PC that they cant do on their Mac can solve it that way.

We got given a bunch of second-hand PCs which I bring back to working order with minimal $ outlay as they are needed. Anybody been given a bunch of second-hand macs?

That’s interesting Jon. Any ideas why you think it’s the trainees who are using Macs? Has the church bought them, or did they bring the Macs with them when they started working?