Mac users are consistently the highest needs users in my environment. Ymmv. Samba is still broken. Microsoft apps don't work.

You can use them for Adobe. But even then, performance per dollar is poor. Adobe flies on much cheaper Windows hardware in the side by side testing we've done.

I'm the Director of IT for a 160M revenue company.

We allow Macs, and we support them. But I don't share your take on the benefits. I can't think of a single benefit frankly. It's a loss for the business.

Oh well, it's not my money.

This reads like the last time you've evaluated is 2018. The entire office suite works great on Apple silicon with the exception of, obviously Win32 VBA macros and some PowerQuery features in Excel.

As for Adobe, I'm assuming you're issuing desktops then? Because for an equivalently performant laptop with heavy Adobe workloads you are going to spend the same as a MBP on the higher end Thinkpads, or dell precisions. There's no cost savings there, really (again, unless you have everyone on desktops).

If you're still domain joining macs, trying to use SCCM & GPOs, and treating them like any other windows endpoint, of course you are running into problems. Kind of a square peg/round hole situation.

Not doubting your experience, but to have relatively problem free mac endpoints you have to do things differently. Maybe not worth it for every company, especially any that are super deep into Microsoft. But I can say, they've worked great for mine and we are phasing out Windows entirely, and IBM, Cisco, and SAP all had similar lower total cost of ownership & less help desk workload after introducing macs. Then again, we no longer use smb/samba, we eliminated on-prem file shares a long time ago.

Was that side by side comparison with all the security cruft running, because this is totally contrary to my experience with both sets of hardware managed by IT.