For the first time, IBM offers to buy employees a Mac and will become one of the biggest Apple shops

IBM's huge partnership with Apple is giving IBM employees a never-before-offered benefit. IBM is, for the first time, offering to buy employees a Mac as their main work PC, reports 9to5 Mac.

That's pretty ironic considering that IBM is considered the inventor of the PC, (although IBM shed its PC business by selling it to Lenovo way back in 2004).

Macs weren't exactly forbidden at IBM, but that's not the same thing as actively telling employees to go ahead and choose a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or a Mac PC when they are due to get a new PC, or as an option for new hires.

According to an internal memo seen by 9to5 Mac, IBM says that it currently has around 15,000 Macs deployed through its BYOD (bring your own device to work) program. That's a drop in the bucket for a workforce comprised of nearly 380,000 people.

But IBM plans to deploy around 50,000 MacBooks by the end of the year, according to the memo, making IBM one of the biggest enterprise Mac shops. (We've reached out to IBM and asked about this memo and these stats and will update when we hear back.)

As we previously reported, Apple had insisted that all of IBM's salespeople selling the partnership use Macs running Keynote presentations developed by Apple. One analyst viewed this as a show of power on Apple's part, meaning Apple held the cards in this partnership.

This new option for employees may or may not be an extension of Apple's power in the relationship. However, some IBM employees seem happy about it and have taken to Twitter to cheer.