The last time we asked readers about the desktop PCs they use for work was in 2021. Because the COVID pandemic was in full force at the time, we concentrated on work-from-home systems, which were dominated by Apple and Lenovo.
This year, we expand our coverage thanks to our colleagues at Spiceworks and its Aberdeen Strategy & Research division. With the reach they provide to IT pros, we're able to report brand recommendations for the desktops employees prefer to use in the office, as well as the preferences of the IT managers who deploy them. Read on to discover the desktop computer brands your business should consider first.
(Editors' Note: Spiceworks is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company.)
The Top Desktops for Work (2023)
Apple almost always wins in this category. (The last time Apple didn't win the Business Choice award for work-from-home PCs was in 2020; Dell won that year.) But this year, the award goes to a brand that didn't even make our list when we last gave one out, back in 2021. In fact, our winner has never appeared before in our rankings of desktop PCs for work, making this underdog story even more interesting.
In 2023, Asus takes the title. It earns an excellent overall satisfaction rating, in a tie with Apple. But Asus stays ahead of Apple in the likelihood-to-recommend score, another key factor we consider when evaluating a winner. Couple that with Asus' stellar score for cost and value, and the brand is a no-brainer pick for the top desktop PC brand for those who work from home.
(Note: Click the down, left, and right arrows in our interactive charts to view different elements of our survey results.)
Keep in mind that Apple's desktops—from the tiny Mini to the all-in-one iMac—are still beloved. Apple earns high scores for ease of use and reliability. It's also on top for tech support and repairs, but those are subcategories in which Asus doesn't garner enough responses to get a score. So if those are areas of importance to you, keep that in mind when you're requesting a new PC for working at home.
Note that the most-used PCs among our readership are the desktops they build themselves. As we've seen before, people truly love their home-built systems—the overall satisfaction score for a self-built desktop for work at home is higher than for any vendor.
That said, building PCs isn't for everyone. Our PC-building survey respondents don't recommend that others do the same as highly as they recommend just about every vendor on the list, which indicates they realize the challenges. We encourage enthusiasts to give it a try, though.
Interestingly, HP sits at the bottom of every category in which it has enough responses to appear. That's not a huge endorsement for the brand with the second-highest number of users in the survey, right behind Dell.
Employees' Choice Desktops for 2023
When in-office employees get to pick the brand of PC they work with, they are inclined to go with Apple. The Mac-maker nails the top scores in every category. Prominent scores include setup, reliability, and tech support.
Apple's lowest score is for value. That's not surprising, considering the cost of Macs: A baseline Mac Pro tower starts at $6,999, for instance. But that "low" value score is 8.5, which easily beats the other vendors. The Mac Mini starts at $599, which helps.
When Apple takes the top slot in these surveys, we always award a secondary winner, since not everyone business uses macOS. Dell's numbers outperform the other two Windows-based PC brands in the list (Lenovo and HP). Dell has impressive scores for ease of use and setup, almost on a par with Apple. It ties with Lenovo for cost and value and for likelihood to recommend, but in all other areas, it trumps the others.
IT Managers' Choice Desktops for 2023
Being responsible for every desktop PC in an office, deploying PCs to new staff, buying replacements, and regularly upgrading, updating, managing, and repairing them is a huge task—one that falls to the IT department. And IT managers prefer two brands.
The first is Apple. It has always been celebrated for ease of use and simple setup, going back to the first desktop Macs in the 1980s. And those are the categories in our survey results in which Apple shines. It shows similarly high numbers for reliability. Apple is on top with IT in every category except repairs.
The top brand for repairs is the number-two pick overall for IT, and it is our secondary Business Choice award winner: Dell. In almost every other category, Dell is a close second to Apple. The biggest gap between the two is Apple's half-a-point-higher score for tech support. The closest the two come is in a tie for likelihood to recommend.
HP does a little better with IT managers than with employees, but it shares third place with Lenovo in most of the important measures. Their scores solidify the fact that that Apple and Dell are the right choices for wide-scale deployment.
Full Results
The PCMag Business Choice survey for Desktop PCs and Components was in the field from May 15 to June 5, 2023. For more information on how we conduct surveys, read the survey methodology.