(Credit: Brian Westover)
If you remember the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" TV ads which ran from roughly 2006 to 2009, you’ll know that Apple has long leaned on claims about its arch-rival operating system being unreliable and crash-prone, though the ads didn't exactly come with corroborating facts and figures attached at the time.
But according to a new report from endpoint management firm Omnissa, Windows users do in fact experience 3.1 times more forced shutdowns than Mac users. In addition, Windows users experience 7.5 times more app freezes and 2.2 times more app crashes (where the app needs to be rebooted) than Mac users, according to new telemetry data collected from the firm’s enterprise clients in sectors like retail, healthcare, education, finance, and government during 2025.
“What IT may see as a 60-second device reboot could very well be a 20- or 30-minute ‘refocus penalty’ of lost business output,” read the report.
Unfortunately, Omnissa’s data didn’t detail exactly how many crashes both Windows and Mac computers suffered in absolute terms, only that Windows came in behind Macs. It also only looked at data from devices it managed, so it might not reflect the realities of consumer Mac users.
The firm's report also indicates that Macs showed more longevity in an enterprise context. Nine out of ten Windows machines in its fleet of managed devices were under three years old, and only 2% were over five years old. Meanwhile, 65 percent of Macs were less than three years old, and 11.5 percent were over five years old.
Apple also came in ahead when it came to its users installing regular updates. Omnissa found macOS devices were updated 1.5 times faster than Windows hardware, and iOS devices on average get updated 8.1 times faster than Android ones. The vendor chalked this up to Apple controlling the entire update stack, as opposed to Android, where updates are likely fragmented across diverse manufacturers and device types.