As I said they took up about 50% of the second line support capacity for the entire organisation. So yes they were properly supported, unless you want a dedicated tech to hold the hand of every exec, dev and bioinformatician.
While it is entirely possible the problem here is those execs, devs and bioinformaticians. There do seem to be many other common factors than the macs here.
Maybe they all need nonstandard software? God forbid, maybe they need administration permissions, but the org doesn’t want to give it to them, so they end up calling in every other day to get something unlocked (I know that’d be true for me).
Maybe it’s the problem solving skills of the IT team when it comes to mac, so people keep coming back with the same issues (good ones are Outlook/Teams being permanently broken, or VPN not connecting).
On the whole, I’d steer away from any explanation that would require all 500 mac users to be idiots.
Or the technical infrastructure doesn’t support them well. Or the support team doesn’t know MacOS or Linux, so it becomes a lot harder to provide support. There could be many reasons.
MS makes it very easy to secure and admin at massive scale. You can roll out policies and updates to hundreds of thousands of machines with like 1-2 admins, and the other 8 IT people manage 200 Linux and Mac machines.
Oh, so it's not the users at all, it's that you have tools to manage Windows and didn't set up tools to manage anything else even though they exist; like a Linux admin complaining that Windows is unmanageable because ansible doesn't work well on it.
You're maliciously misunderstanding. The tools available to manage Windows are simply either much, much better, or much better value.
And everything just works out of the box with like... 3 lines of PowerShell.
You can replicate some of it with Ansible, sticky tape and a few spare weeks, but it's not the same at all.
I'm actually Linux admin, grew up with open source and spent my career serving pages and automating myself out of a job. I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but for enterprise use they are _next fucking level_.
They also make it really easy to screw things up. I work at Microsoft, and a few weeks ago they rolled out a botched group policy change for our whole org that somehow deleted all O365 apps and Docker from most people’s machines. The best part is you’d try to launch, say, Excel and you’d get an error about it being removed for being possibly malicious.
If my org doesn’t give me a supported way to do absolutely necessary thing X, then I’ll find my own way to do it.