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Here's a joke you've probably heard before. Businesses are going to buy Apple Macs. Feel free to laugh now.

Not very likely you might think, but that hasn't stopped a small independent analyst in the US claiming in portentous fashion that a survey of business spending plans has turned up this old chestnut once again.

Apparently, 68 percent of 700 US businesses polled said they would allow their employees to deploy Macs as their work systems in the next 12 months. That sounds like an astonishing percentage, and of course, it doesn't say how many Macs that adds up to. One, two? It also doesn't exactly define the difference between ‘allowing' and the deployment actually happening.

If that statistic was gathered competently, people are just indulging in throwback Pollyannaism. As swanky as MacBooks are, cute computers are for good times. The fashion of necessity now is austerity and that doesn't sound like a good reason to buy a $2,000 laptop.

And why exactly were Macs shunned in the first place? Because they were expensive to buy (they still cost about twice what an equivalent PC for the same power despite Apple's endless claims to the contrary), and admins didn't fancy supporting Macs as a second or even third platform on top of all their other software troubles.

I see no evidence that either of these factors will weigh less heavily on the average business even if the board level staff want to carry around an expensive portable.

There's a recession starting to rage, with the US leading the way. That is more likely to kill the Mac in businesses than feed a longing to buy more of them, adding to support and capital costs at a bad time.

In fact, if the recession gets much worse, companies won't be buying any laptops let alone Apple laptops.

There is one realm in which Apple computers will continue to reign supreme and that's on movie sets, where any computer used in a storyline invariably has the fabled logo. But since when did people watch movies to see how life is actually lived?

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