The purchase price is the only PC cost that's easy to see – and it's only 20–30% of what a PC really costs to own. The rest arrives quietly, year after year, as repairs, downtime and a member of staff waiting on a machine that was never up to the job. Put in your numbers and watch the "cheap" option get expensive – penny wise, pound foolish.
Estimates are fine. Everything updates as you type. We compare two ways of buying the same seat: a cheap consumer-grade PC run until it fails, versus a business-grade PC specified for the work your staff do today and in five years' time, replaced on schedule before failure.
We add 30% on top for the real cost of employing someone (KiwiSaver, ACC, overhead).
Consumer-grade, generic components, one-year warranty, adequate for today at best.
Business-grade, three-year onsite warranty, specified to stay ahead of the work for its whole life.
Waiting on boot-ups, spinning cursors, crashes and reloads – in year one. It compounds as the PC ages and software demands grow.
across your team
same team, same five years
Cumulative cost per person over five years. The cheap PC starts lower – and then never stops climbing.
This model is indicative and deliberately conservative. The cheap seat assumes a consumer-grade PC that is marginal for the work from day one, out of warranty after year one, with repair costs and user downtime rising as it ages (industry research puts the jump in support costs at over 100% between years three and four, and finds annual user downtime roughly doubles after year four). Failure is treated as inevitable in year four, forcing a second purchase mid-cycle plus an emergency rebuild. The fit-for-purpose seat assumes a business-grade PC with a three-year onsite warranty, specified with headroom so it stays adequate for its full planned life, and replaced on schedule at the end of it. Productivity loss is costed at your fully-loaded wage across 230 working days. It excludes the harder-to-price costs – security exposure of unpatched aging hardware, staff frustration and turnover, and the impression a struggling machine makes in front of customers – so the real gap is usually wider. Figures are indicative; talk to us about specifying the right fleet for your work.
A PC is the tool your staff use for almost every minute of their working day. Specify it for the work they do today and the work they'll be doing in five years, and it quietly earns its price back many times over. Under-specify it and you pay the difference every single day – in wages, in waiting, and eventually in an emergency.
Every PC has a life cycle, and beyond it failure isn't a risk – it's a schedule. Best practice is to replace machines before they fail, on a planned refresh, so the replacement is an orderly event instead of a crisis with a member of staff idle in the middle of it. That's how Tanglin manages client fleets: business-grade hardware from major vendors, specified with headroom, covered by real warranties, and retired on schedule – so the numbers above stay hypothetical.
The true cost of PC ownership is one of the most studied numbers in IT, and every credible source says the same thing: the sticker price is the smallest part of the bill. A few widely-cited findings:
Sources: Gartner PC total-cost-of-ownership and life cycle research; Dell/Forrester PC lifecycle studies; Tech Pro Research, How to manage the lifecycle of your company's computers; Texas Department of Information Resources, Guidelines for Establishing Life Cycles for Personal Computers; Intel PC lifecycle management research. Figures are international and shown for context; Tanglin's calculator above uses your own inputs in NZD.
Tell us what your team actually does, and we'll specify business-grade PCs that stay ahead of the work for their whole life – with a planned refresh so nothing runs to failure.
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