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I recently tried setting Apple Business Manager for our ≈20 people SME.

The first step was "Domain Lock/Capture" which takes over all Apple accounts for a specific domain.

I've never had a worse experience from Apple.

The process is buggy, filled with foot-guns and dead ends. It expects huge amounts of work from users who have had their account for more than a few weeks and are expected to remove a lot of their personal data before their account can be migrated (e.g. do you know how to delete all your Health data?). The process is also impossible to cancel.

Phone support was par for the course, e.g. tickets escalated to the abyss, suggestions to restore workstations to factory settings, etc.

Be warned.

The domain lock process was an absolute fiasco at our company. I think this could work if you did this at the time your company launched, but the moment you have employees who have Apple IDs tied to their work email that aren't from the Business Essentials system you are stuck in an impossible-to-mange place.

There are several cheap MDM solutions for Apple devices that I would rather pay for than be dependent on this. (We've used SimpleMDM and love them.)

I'm currently in that hellish process too... I don't know how to get out of it. Did you know that your employees will be forbidden from downloading from the App store once you launched that migration? It's a nightmare

Apple and MDM has always been a shit show. In the days as recently as Ventura (last time I tried it), MDM bypass was as simple as "null route 4 DNS entries during install process, remove null routing after install complete, and never be bothered by it again". This is on Apple Silicon. With no workarounds or anything, upgrades work all the way up to Tahoe.

Like really Apple, that's your device "locking"? I could test activate my work Mac with my personal Apple ID while doing this, no alarm bells, nothing, effectively "It's your laptop now".

The baffling thing is that iOS+MDM has been fantastic over the years. macOS is a completely different beast though.

MacOS used to be excellent for a short period of time when Fleetsmith existed. Then Apple purchased Fleetsmith around 2020 and killed the product not long after.

Fortunately around the same time, JamF ended the practice of the mandatory Jamf JumpStart (£5K fee), which finally made Jamf a feasible option for the company I was in at the time.

True, I remember looking at jamf at one point and the mandatory consulting was so annoying because we already had it dialled in on the free trial.

In the end we just made do with intune. It's a lot less capable for Mac but these days you can get by with it.

hopefully there's no kill switch for macs on intune, if not, the threat of wiping machines with one click is real, just ask stryker; https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/stryker-attack-device...

Of course there is a kill switch. This is one of the key features of an MDM/endpoint manager. You won't be able to sell one without it. It's also built in to apple's management protocol (which most endpoint management systems leverage) and in activesync.

You just have to secure it properly. Have limits to how many one admin can wipe etc. But trust me every company with managed IT assets has this capability. Often even in BOYD scenarios! Stryker just failed to secure access to it properly and to set sensible limits.

However, the feature isn't very effective in the field. It's very unlikely for an attacker to be smart enough to bypass the password on a stolen Mac which is needed to connect it to WiFi, yet at the same time be dumb enough to connect it to the unfiltered internet so it can receive the wipe command. The overlap between these sets of people is almost zero. We do fire a wipe at every stolen computer but I doubt it ever actually happens. If it ever happens it'll be a total end user fail (like writing the password on a post-it with the laptop)

Either you will lose it to a common thief who won't be able to breach the login (99% of cases), or to a really targeted adversary who has cellebrite or something similar and won't connect it to the internet ever again. This is still the most risky scenario because if someone like that steals it, there's bound to be something really valuable on it.

In practice this is something more suited to mobile devices.

Well yeah, the idea is that if you have ABM, you have an MDM you can use to purchase licenses for them and install the apps with the MDM.

It can be done that way, but it is definitely not the norm. Businesses will generally “purchase” (many for €0) apps in ABM that are to be used for business purposes and push those to devices, the user can then use an Apple ID to download any other apps they want for personal use.

If they’re using Managed Apple IDs they will have no access at all to the app store and won’t be able to download their own apps anymore. IT department will have to buy and assign any apps that anyone needs, even the $0 ones that only 1 person needs.

Yep. Truly horrid policy. Where I work our issued iPhones suck to use without App Store access; no Bitwarden was the killer for me personally. Everyone I checked with uses their personal email/Apple ID instead of the MAID, and there's a sword over your head if you ever accidently copy/paste something from internal emails to something like Notes which has iCloud sync (we're semi serious about leaker). Absolute failure of an MDM setup by Apple.

MDM can restrict pasteboard from managed apps to non-managed apps, as well as allowing iCloud sign-ins but restricting which iCloud services are allowed.

It's an absolute failure of the MDM server administrator for allowing such things, not on Apple.

If my employer did that to me, I would seriously consider sueing them.

You’ve never been issued a work computer that’s not yours to fuck around with?

I haven’t. Did have issued laptops that were company managed but I basically didn’t use and, in any case, I like many others reinstalled a clean operating system image and did my own support.

At most decent sized companies with a cyber security and network admin team, this is probably the fastest way to get disconnected from the internal corporate network with no way to reconnect.

I always seem to end up with local admin at the bigger places I've been at because I'm so annoying with onboarding and requesting access to download development tools.

This was a larger company and they did not care so long as you followed policies like turning on encryption. Companies do differ.

You could do that in our place but you'd lose access to everything due to not being in compliance.

In a small shop that might work but not in an enterprise with ISO norms and security certifications to meet.

I was talking about domain capture. If you own my apple ID just because I used the company email to register it, I will definitely consider sueing you.

Just on a personal note, tying your personal devices to your work email account is a very silly thing to do. Even if it's your company you could be locked out of your company email account at any time (HR grievance, SEC investigation, hostile takeover...) Losing access to your devices and not being able to access things like reset emails at the same time would not be fun.

Sue for what? Do you think you own the company email address?

This was a big pain in the ass for me to figure out. I ended up using the free version of Mosyle and hiring someone on Fiverr to help me figure out how to get the licenses assigned to our managed devices.

I did not. If I had known what would happen when we tried this we would have skipped the process entirely. Our staff (roughly 125) was so confused and it wasted a lot of time communicating about it, then trying to roll it back, etc.

> I think this could work if you did this at the time your company launched, but the moment you have employees who have Apple IDs tied to their work email that aren't from the Business Essentials system you are stuck in an impossible-to-mange place.

I had the same thing happen but with Microsoft. A friend and I had started a small consulting business and were using Google Workspace, but I needed a Microsoft account to interact with a client. I made one with my business email. None of us knew any better, but I couldn’t connect with our client’s Microsoft setup because it was a personal account. So I went to set up a business account. It was a whole fiasco and the only way I could really fix it was create an alias and use that for Microsoft.

That's why Enterprise vendors try so hard to get startups using their stuff. Lock-in is so strong. I can't imagine having a working system at a 100 person company and then trying to migrate to something else unless the current situation was truly awful.

> the moment you have employees who have Apple IDs tied to their work email that aren't from the Business Essentials system you are stuck in an impossible-to-mange place

So give all the employees an email alias they can use to create a new Apple ID for this purpose?

> I think this could work if you did this at the time your company launched

This should not be a surprise. Greenfield services have not existed long enough to resolve edge cases that inevitably arise while integrating existing operating models already in use.

The broken part of this process (domain claim) has existed for several years as part of ABE, it isn't new.

How does a company allow personal Apple IDs?

Employee needs to download Microsoft Remote Desktop (sorry, Windows App) that is only distributed through App Store.

Employee does not trust the company having access to everything else in their personal iCloud account - photos, mails, messages, calendar, reminders, etc.

Employee registers a new Apple ID with company email, as it would be only used for downloading one single app.

Got it. It’s registering with the company email first, not their personal one.

I think the idea is that it happens before they lock the domain as a business. Before that, if you have an email address you can create a personal account with it.

yes, that's exactly how it happens.

I had a "wonderful" experience as well.

I wanted to evaluate it for MDM purposes so I applied for an ABM account for a company I work for, got soft-approved, created an entirely new Apple ID (as required by the ABM), used it to log on a test device I intended to manage, then sort of forgot about it while awaiting for Apple to conclude their hard-approval for the ABM account creation.

Apple was supposed to contact the business owner to verify company details and finalize the process over the next few days, but they never did.

30 days later they canceled the ABM company account and deleted all the associated users along with the Apple ID which I used to log into a testing device, which now became a fairly expensive paperweight.

I had very little expectations about the experience and I was still disappointed.

This is the kind of failure mode that makes people nervous about tightly coupled identity + device management

> Be warned.

This is exactly what I would have expected from an Apple "business" offering. Apple's whole shtick is to take away most of your choices so that they can focus on the limited number of things they still allow you to do. Businesses need the opposite of that.

Businesses will show up needing integrations with multiple existing third party (often legacy) systems with inherent complexity and then want something that allows them to manage that complexity since it can't be eliminated. It's not really possible in that context to have the experience people otherwise expect Apple to provide, and the thing Apple normally does will often make it worse by removing choices you may have needed in order to make interaction with a third party system less of a pain.

FWIW, my experience doing this process for a ~130 person org last year was pretty painless compared to other Domain Claims I've initiated for other SAAS vendors (Docusign in particular), and MDM nightmares (expired JAMF certificates, I'm looking at you).

We had to do it as ppl had made personal Apple accounts using our domain, meaning if they logged in with such an account and left, their iPhone magically transformed into an expensive, elegant paperweight. Due to a setting in our previous MDM we were unable to migrate data cleanly using Apple Biz Manager without committing to use ABM as our MDM (we couldn't) so we told people to "move it yourself following these detailed instructions, otherwise it can't be migrated." Regarding personal data like health on company-managed devices, I certainly don't share that type of info with my employer, and make it clear to staff that it's not our responsibility to migrate such data.

Can you expand on this, specifically how it compares with jamf? It is a direct competitor to jamf right? Essentially Apple vying to eat their lunch right?

Yes, as an IT professional at a company where a few people have insisted on using Macs, the ABM workflow is by far the most frustrating, half baked product I've had the displeasure of using. People love to complain about Entra/Azure AD, but ABM is another level of obtuse.

What's bad is that it's so much better than it used to be and still this bad.

We use Apple Business Manager. Locking a domain is not a requirement if you're just doing basic MDM, I'm pretty sure. (I also had a negative experience with it, so we didn't use it and everyone just uses their personal apple IDs). Is it no longer possible to skip this step in setting up the account?

In any serious business, you don't want people to use their personal Apple IDs: that could lock their company provided devices for ever when they leave, you also don't want to buy them apps that you won't be able to re-use when they leave, ...

> that could lock their company provided devices for ever when they leave

MDMs like JamF offer override codes to disable activation lock. Hasn’t been an issue in my experience.

Apple's cloud software has been buggy as hell for a long time, at least for me.

I'm in a family iCloud group with my parents... one day I just woke up and had all my podcasts and music replaced with my Mum's :/

Would not want this anywhere near a "business" experience

I'm just gonna go ahead and say that I'm not sure what happened there but either you or your mom signed in with your account on the other device.

I have a lot of technical understanding with how CloudKit works and there's not a pathway for what you're describing to come out of a family group.

Maybe Something to do with Family Purchase Sharing. I didn’t realize when I bought an audio book it would appear in my dad’s library. Kind of embarrassing. Apple’s help pages make it sound very opt in but I think there are bugs where libraries are merged by default. Some say on a quiet night you can still hear Bono singing “sexy boots”…

Libraries are not merged, only purchase history. It does not download to their device in any scenario automatically.

A lot of people have their iTunes accounts signed in on other devices which would do what you describe, but not family sharing.

Hence, "buggy".

It's completely impossible for a 60k employee shop too yeah. They also want you to rearrange the azure ad the way Apple wants. Also impossible for us.

And we have like 20k or so users with manually created Apple IDs on their company email and every one of them has to be manually resolved. It's a joke.

AFAIK, it works with subdomains, so you can use something like employees.example.com as your domain, and capture over that.

The org I work for just makes alias's - @ourbrandmdm.com for ABM that forward to their @ourbrand.com emails.

Same here, I never even got in. I never managed to get in. My account is good enough to take my money for other things but somehow I can't manage to onboard into the damn thing so that I can actually manage devices for my company. I just gave up in the end. Couldn't get it done.

I'll try again next month see how far I get with this. This needs to be way simpler than it currently is. Hopefully they fixed a few things there.

This was my experience switching from GMail to Apple’s mail service. I switched back after a few days.

Genuinely curious, what were the Apple mail service issues for you? I hate gmail and have had zero issues with my @Mac.com email in 20+ years, that I’ve noticed. Thanks

Do you find that iCloud email can correctly handle both “true spam” (meaning the nonsense garbage kind) and “promotional email” effectively?

Lots and lots of missing messages. That was the big one. Anything from a SaaS just never arrived, like tickets, notifications, etc. I had random IMAP authentication failures too.

I gave up when it wanted a Dun and Bradstreet number (whoever they are) and the website to get one didn't work.

I have had the misfortune of having to get D&B numbers (for various Apple things). I believe is the source for lead lists where you start to get dozens to text and phone spam calls per day. Do not pay hundreds of dollars for this if you can at all avoid it.

Definitely avoid unless you are distributing a consumer application through the dominant app stores (App Store and Google Play) ~globally, in which case you may not be able to avoid (or avoiding will be just as much work).

Google and Apple require it for lots of mobile apps targeting certain consumer segments because some countries (eg: Brazil, IIRC? don't quote me on that) have chosen to use D&B as a qualified unique identifier of business legitimacy and it requires exposing personal information of your company's leadership to them.

Afaik every company has a DNB number. It's a credit risk company which sources company data from every country.

Dun & Bradstreet is a business credit agency. Having a D-U-N-S number, which they issue, is like table stakes for being taken seriously as a business.

I also organised this process at work, and it went rather well, (300ppl 10 year old), but of course no one had health data connected under the company domain, thats a crazy idea and it’s probably good apple enforces that to be deleted / moved / disentangled.

It is also clearly described how to move an account that is used privately to a different domain / mail.

Ohh we had a similar experience with Google Cloud. Added our organization and Domain into their Auth system and suddenly all users were migrated into a (invisible / transparent) workspace and could no longer use their calendar or google drive as the workspace had no free usage like you have on a normal free tier.

some years ago i tried this setup for a german company with a special char in its name („ä“) and failed because Apple was not able to match it against DUNS. It took months of support to get it done.

Apple's clean separation model only really works if you start that way from day one

Our recent (ongoing) experience with Apple Business Manager is just as bad. With no reason or contact they've sent "we can't verify so we've disabled your account because you don't meet the requirements". We ring support and they tell us to try again with no additional information. We then get "we can't verify so we've deleted your accounts" with no information. "Amazing" "experience".

This is also after they've verified us (and our DUNS number) for app signing and distribution. We already have a verified account in another service of theirs!

>The process is also impossible to cancel.

This sort of thing should probably be illegal.

you only need to do the domain lock part if you plan to use MAIDs. For 20 people you probably didn't need to do that, at least not at the same time as the rest. You can do it as a later step, not the first step.

Apple really seems to go out of their way to show users the middle finger.

This announcement is pretty sad. If you're wondering why Apple is an IT department nightmare, this announcement is more of a confession. Today your corporate MacBook can have ... preinstalled software! And user groups (for the Apple store and iCloud).

Wait, there's more!

> In addition, customers can now set up business email, calendar, and directory services with their own domain name for seamless and elevated communication and collaboration.

Wow, a custom domain name!

> Apple Business enables automated Managed Apple Account creation for new employees through integration with an identity service provider, including Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra ID, and more.

In the year 2026, I can finally start logging into my corporate laptop with my corporate ID. Wow!

Them stapling on the announcement of advertisements for Apple Maps is especially hilarious. I don't think the people managing fleet devices at a corporation are the same people who are interested in setting their location ad strategy. But Apple saw they had two vaguely business-y things at the same time and thought they would really hit it off together.

I have to imagine that the Apple Neo is heavily aimed at volume sales - low level white collar workers and education. These features seem to be hastily assembled to meet the needs of these potential buyers.

Why people bother with all of this to lock the environment into some kind of corporate nightmare? Why not allow some freedom for the worker. I don't see the appeal, it feels like a claustrophobic cage

There are many reasons.

* Preprovisioning - devices have the right certificates and know about your corporate networks. They have the necessary apps and just work.

* Tracking - if a device is lost or stolen, monitor where it is and remotely lock or wipe it

* Monitoring - have a log to audit if someone does something malicious

* Security - reduce the chance of your employees installing malware, spyware, etc. whether by accident or intention

* Locking things down - put gates in the way of bad actions like copying sensitive data into public apps or clouds. Even if you're unable to block everything, attempts to block remind honest employees and provide strong evidence that anyone who proceeds was intentionally violating policy and should be fired.

Etc., etc.

Bigger one:

* Predictability - eliminating the number of unknown factors that could cause a person to have issues using their computer. Reminds me of how a secretary I serviced was somehow able to install Google Desktop back in the day, and how that caused a massive argument between my boss and theirs when their computer needed to be re-imaged. Most IT approved programs are known to store user data in known locations on a computer, which makes backups and restorations very easy. Stuff like Google Desktop did not do that, which means likely breaking someone's workflow in the re-image process.

A lot of it is compliance. To get some types of customers you need to pass some security compliance certification or checks, which often have requirements like only giving access to crucial infrastructure when devices are up-to-date, the possibility to remote-disable/erase a device when it is stolen, some kind of anti-virus installed (yeah, I know), etc.

I can understand the underlying reasons, you would be surprised how many employees have bad security hygiene, which becomes an issue when they have access to high value information, tokens, etc. But since they often somewhat draconian rules, they tend to have bad side-effects (similar to password reminders). E.g. Linux users will often set up ClamAV to fulfill the anti-virus requirement. However, ClamAV parses untrusted data in C code without any sandboxing, so it probably opens a new attack vector (as opposed to Windows Defender, which as far as AFAIR uses sandboxing or a micro-VM to parse untrusted data).

The most clear and obvious use case is for school computers. You do NOT want to provision student devices en masse without protections (for both the students and the district). I envision this is a deal breaker right now that Apple is dealing with.

Even if your Corp doesn't want to do full user surveillance, there's still a lot of advantages to group policy. Roll out new software instantly, SSO enforcement, remote troubleshooting, etc.

ever worked in IT support? letting people customize their environment both increases the amount of support that users require, and increases the difficulty of providing that support.

a laptop in a stock configuration can be swapped out for a new one when it breaks. a laptop that has three years of accumulated customizations installed on it means that the employee wants their laptop back when it breaks, and they want it fixed ASAP.

when you're supporting a user who doesn't know how to type a URL into their web browser, it's a whole lot easier if you don't have to start that call with asking what web browser they're using.

Regulatory compliance. If you want to sell your product to the UK, for example, you have to (see: UK Cyber Essentials). The more you try to expand your market, the more regulations you will run into that are solved with spyware and locked down computers.

SOC2 requires to ensure all computers have the software updates installed. While certification apps can check every desktop with a monitor, ABM could just do it and enforce it.

SOC2 also encourages SSO.

Single-sign-on is actually useful.

Most of the rest of this stuff .. well, who is responsible if the laptop is compromised?

Because corporations like to control their peons. I'm sure your work laptop is laden with the same kind of corporate bullshit, it's just that MS Exchange stopped being a hot topic like 25 years ago.

It's an announcement that they're providing first party integrated first party services for something that until now has largely relied on third party solutions.

Not knowing about the exiting solutions to provision/manage Macs is one thing. Not knowing about them and claiming they're inferior because of what you didn't know is just bizarre.

I don't know what it is about the type of people who end up doing pc support, but an irrational dislike of Macs seems to be systemic. I worked in an IT department when Novell was still a thing, an a senior guy with years of Unix experience would make jokes about "toy operating system" while also alternating between screaming at and practically fellating windows XP.

Apple will probably deliver the best unified AI experience for productivity. Digging into Microsoft’s domain (which has been seriously selling off). Your workers will want iOS and right now its perfect timing to sell LLM subs. This is a very aggressive and opportunistic move.

True, like Siri.

Sorry Apple Intelligence.

Strategically, Apple's not setting themselves up for success here by giving Apple Business away for free (with paid per-user storage bumps).

As a lot of people on this thread have pointed out, Apple's Business Manager needs a lot of improvements. ("Bring your own device" support is terrible, for example. Changing business names requires a perilous migration step. Support reps don't have the tools to fix serious issues.)

If Apple Business were a real revenue source, if they charged luxury prices for a luxurious business support experience, they could pay for developers to fix their stuff.

Instead, Apple Business is a free side hustle for Apple, a hobby. But they're proposing to control your entire domain, to Domain Lock all Apple accounts for your domain, to put your businesses's life in their hands, for "free."

Don't fall for it.

> If Apple Business were a real revenue source, if they charged luxury prices for a luxurious business support experience, they could pay for developers to fix their stuff.

Apple can already easily afford those developers. They’re not exactly running at a loss ;)

Plus given how each new iteration of macOS and iOS is a steady step backwards for usability, I don’t have a huge amount of trust in their abilities to fix Business if it had become a strategic product tomorrow.

The reality is that every business unit needs to justify its existence and when asking for headcount, it’s easier to point to a revenue stream you’re tied to rather than “we help sell some things to businesses”

I don’t disagree with that. But equally most business units in Apple are not tied to revenue streams. From R&D though to developers for other non-subscription software. And that’s before you then factor in the non-delivery team (eg finance, HR, lawyers, etc).

So it’s not like a review stream is a requirement.

Moreover, even back when they did have back office tooling as a revenue stream (eg OSX Server), Apple still left it to slowly rot before finally discontinuing it.

So I just don’t think this is something anyone’s Apple cares enough about. If they did, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation to begin with.

If that were the case, the only business units that would ever be get funding would be the hardware sales.

Even with AWS I doubt many of the service teams make enough money to justify their existence alone.

Are you sure Apple does their accounting in that way?

Do you have a reason to believe they don’t? We’re not talking about some weird or obscure custom, it’s just basic business ideas.

Apple famously doesn't have conventional business units.

https://www.apple.com/careers/pdf/HBR_How_Apple_Is_Organized...

I think the burden of evidence is with you in this case. It doesn't make sense for Apple to do their accounting with such a method.

You’re not thinking it through. There’s a rich enterprise ecosystem for MDM. Microsoft, Google, Omnissa, IBM, etc.

They don’t want to compete with those partners, and wouldn’t be effective if they did. But, there’s a gap of smaller companies and institutions where they benefit from MDM capabilities but don’t have the budget or wherewithal to even know how to shop for MDM.

So they spend a bit of money, give Apple Store reps something to do and add an incentive to buy another iPhone.

"If Apple Business were a real revenue source, if they charged luxury prices for a luxurious business support experience, they could pay for developers to fix their stuff. Instead, Apple Business is a free side hustle for Apple, a hobby."

I'm wrestling with something similar to this right now in Linux. The only real player that charges "enough" to have a "absolutely zero tolerance for base OS breakage" approach to OS development is Red Hat. Ubuntu LTS is more widespread but only really because it's $0 even for large businesses, and that's honestly reflected in it sometimes having hardware breakage during a version's initial two year mainstream support run. Having Windows's business backed level of "doesn't break" on hardware is rare on Linux.

Agreed, and honestly, I’m put off by the freeness because I agree it means that support will be nothing, just the Tier 1 call center reps who can read you scripts of how to hold down the power button to reset your computer, etc.

And I’d be very skeptical any business user anywhere can skate by on the iCloud Free Tier. Of all the stingy free tiers, it’s that one.

If they cared, they would make a Teams/Slack equivalent, a Zoom Killer, maybe a Confluence Killer, and charge per head, and offer storage tiers comparable to what MS and GOOG do.

(And no, don’t even joke that Messages and FaceTime are Slack and Zoom killers.)

Seems like par for the course for a product launch like this. I'll see where they are in a year.

Who would pay them for it before "developers fixed their stuff"?

The way it works is that Apple would have committed more resources if the projected outcome was more revenue. By choosing to approach it as a free option, they committed a free option's worth of resourcing to it.

People fooled by an expectation of quality extrapolated from their end-user experience. Alternatively, people who have to carry out orders from managers who never have to interact with it personally.

599$ serviceable MacBooks, easy to use MDM, Cloud, Email and Calendar and flat-fee AppleCare all baked in?

New businesses under 50 employees are going to eat this up like there's no tomorrow.

I'd be scared if I was certain Redmond corporation who makes their money on 365 and Intune.

Microsoft is a giant enterprise software company that also publishes Candy Crush and Call of Duty.

Intune and Windows are 'nice to have' but are not the business-business. The business is 365 (which runs on Macs and is worlds better than Apple's office suite + Apple's hosted email is god awful) and Azure.

Apple's office suite is my favorite I've ever used, and it's not close.

After that, old copies of MSOffice.

Next-best would be a hodgepodge of the lighter options on Linux and such. Gnumeric, Abiword, that sort of thing. Not great, but at least they're light on resources and easy to use.

Distantly after that, LibreOffice.

Then, modern MSOffice in last place.

The only reason I'd count any of them as "worse" than modern MSOffice is that ~perfect office compatibility and a bulletproof excuse when things go wrong ("I'm also using MSOffice, don't know why your document isn't working") is non-negotiable in any business context.

[EDIT] Oh I forgot about Google. That's actually the true last-place. Modern MSOffice isn't worse than that. Christ the performance is awful.

Crazy how different people experience this.

For me it’s completely inverted; Google is top place, then Libreoffice, then MSOffice, then anything by Apple last place.

Yeah that would by my ranking too. At work is Google because it's the best, particularly for collabotation, personally all in on FOSS.

I value performance and stability highly, and Apple's productivity programs are so light I can leave them open in the background and forget they're running for months at a time even on fairly old, weak machines. And I'm not sure I've ever seen any of them crash (I can't say the same about, say, LibreOffice or pretty much any other Linux-associated productivity software). That they're a ton more polished and stable than things like Abiword or Gnumeric, and have most modern features I'd expect (even live collaborative editing) puts them solidly above those other light options.

I hate modern MSOffice's UI, plus it's full of slow, heavy webtech which deducts a lot of points from basically anything for me. Google's leaks memory (like most of their software... so do Gmail tabs) and is so slow that it introduces a ton of input latency, which drives me nuts, I hate to type in it, aside from my experience with most of its formatting and editing features being that they're very janky even by the standards of GUI word processors. Both are very heavy on resources, which means they have a huge hurdle to overcome on the feature side before I'd consider them anything but extremely-unpleasant.

Old (like... '00s) MSOffice is pretty good because it's not such a resource hog, and the UI used to be really good.

I have a google sheet with less than 200 rows in it. Not exactly Big Data. When I load it, the first 100 rows appear pretty much instantly, but the following <100 rows take 9 seconds to load! WTF? I don't know any other spreadsheet that takes that long to load more than 100 rows.

Google does essentially everything I need. If I were more of a spreadsheet power user these days, Excel. And maybe other Office apps as needed for compatibility.

I do like Keynote (their PowerPoint alternative) but I do agree that everything else is absolute garbage. But I guess someone has to like it.

That's my exact ranking as well.

> Apple's office suite is my favorite I've ever used, and it's not close.

I’ve written many comments criticizing this. Do you use a lot of keyboard shortcuts when you use Numbers or Pages or Keynote or do you use the trackpad/mouse a lot? I generally find these apps and others lacking on the keyboard front, by which I mean that it’s almost impossible to use them without a trackpad or a mouse. I can completely live with just a keyboard on Excel or LibreOffice Calc.

BTW, I hate all the MS Office applications (and find them quite buggy and annoying) except for Excel. Maybe I’m just a lot more used to using Excel.

You may want to look into Karabiner Elements. Understandable if one doesn't want to have to allow a privileged daemon access to key inputs, but it allows for complex, application-focus-aware shortcuts. In the past I used a "Windows on MacOS" config preset because it allowed for my 60~70 key keyboard to operate similarly across win/linux/macos. Finally killed my last windows boot drive and main linux... but I do have a ritualistic annual step into a windows vm to file taxes on crack err with a crakced turbotax hehehe. In-tooits lobbying malpractice is deserving of petty flippancy

Numbers has a lot of keyboard shortcuts [1]. Are there particular ones you're missing? Or is your issue that Numbers has different keyboard shortcuts from the ones you're used to in Excel?

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/numbers/tana45192591/m...

Actually both.

A lot of menu options don’t seem to have keyboard shortcuts. I know I can assign them, but defaults should be better.

But the second one hits harder for me: “Or is your issue that Numbers has different keyboard shortcuts from the ones you're used to in Excel?” Considering that Numbers came much later than Excel, some of the common ones could’ve been directly adapted with Mac specific substitutions (like using Cmd instead of Ctrl).

Can’t you set up keyboard shortcuts for basically any action in a MacOS app?

My issue is with the defaults that are (not) available in comparison to Excel or LibreOffice Calc.

As long as it has a menu item (easy) or is exposed to Automator/Shortcuts (more complicated).

There are apps to assign a key combinations to any menubar dropdown menus.

You don't need an app for that, you can do it through through System Settings -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> App Shortcuts.

I liked the way Pages 09 looked - it was beautiful - but the compatibility wasn't there. Modern Pages is hideous.

And you hit the nail on the head with the whole 'Office = the document always opens/looks right' thing.

It's not pretty, but both Pages and Numbers are pretty powerful in their modern incarnations. If you actually need Microsoft Office, then you need it, but a lot of people who don't think they could get away with just Apple's freebies probably could.

(Disclosure: I write 99% of my stuff in Emacs now, so I'm not going to go that far out on a limb for iWork. It's just that it's the best "Works"-style suite that I've used.)

> If you actually need Microsoft Office

I also like Apple's office suite, the problem is network effects. I'd even argue most people don't actually need MS Office. The amount of people using PowerQuery, VBA, etc. is probably less than 2% of users.

The problem is, because everyone else (in business) already has and uses office, if you want to collaborate, that's what you have to use. Open file formats didn't win out in the end.

> the problem is network effects

This is absolutely the problem - with the added issue of platform support.

I’m the only Mac user in our company of 15, which means I’m also the only person that can open a .pages file. Anyone can read a .docx, and if authored in word it will actually look the same on both computers.

Is it 2% who author content using those tools, or are you also including anyone who might need to open and use a spreadsheet using one of those technologies?

> Open file formats didn't win out in the end.

It's not "the end" yet. Many governments and sufficiently motivated orgs are switching to ODF - it's only over for proprietary file formats that pretend they can stand toe-to-toe with docx. By eschewing open formats you're making all the mistakes of .docx with none of the upsides of the network effect.

Needing VBA is more common than you think. Excel really has no competitor.

Personally, I like Apple's iWork. Keynote is slightly less fiddly than Powerpoint. I like that in Numbers you can have multiple movable tables on one screen without constraining column widths etc to each other. I also like that Pages is simpler than word with much more manageable styles, especially when copy and pasting from multiple other documents. But lots of people don't have Macs or like iWork, and in most businesses you eventually need MS Office to work with outside parties so for work the choice is really iWork plus MS Office vs MS Office.

MS Office collaboration features work well these days but when you are using Office 365 for work, it's almost inevitable that different files get saved locally, on MS teams, Sharepoint, and OneDrive. It's a version control nightmare.

I really like google's suite for work because it nudges everyone towards using only one location for all files, without a other places to save a copy. And it's good enough with Office files that you might only need a few roles to also need MS Office.

You can drag a pdf into Keynote, and get a vector quality image. This feature is great for science when a plot is made elsewhere (R or matplotlib). Or you can even drag in an SVG, even from something you find in a browser. Drag, drop.

Why in heaven's name is it nearly impossible to do the same with Powerpoint is a mystery. You still have to paste a bit image.

And below everything else is the web version of MSOffice. How I hate whenever I’m forced to use that…

I used word for windows 2.0 well into the early 2000s. My needs aren't crazy and I don't think word has added a single feature I've cared about since. Pages is my current go-to.

Frankly, if you think that, you're not exactly a power user of office suites. Apple apps are a complete joke in the professional world.

Did you really have compatibility issues with MS office in the last 15 years?

>and it's not close.

This line right he is where I will always stop reading any reply, and block any YouTube channel that uses it in a title. Mind numbingly overused. It's literally verbal clickbait.

A lot of new businesses are going the Notion/Google Drive route for docs, tables and knowledge, plus Canva for presentations and more visual work. It's not the majority, but the market is there.

That might be true for tech startups, but many businesses (even "new" ones) go with Microsoft 365 as a default, especially outside of the west coast or NYC.

Exactly. 365 gets you perfect compatibility and the 'real tools that professionals use'. Not Google Docs or some weird Apple thing - the tools that always will read the document.

Google docs actually has better MS Office compatibility than the 365 Web Apps.

If you can navigate the terrible UI enough to find the open button on the proper 'ribbon', that is. The ribbon makeover should have textbooks written about it so we can teach our future UI designers not to make the same mistakes again.

Meh. Techies keep ranting about it but regular users are just fine with it.

As someone 'technical' who sat close to 'normies' who hated the helpdesk guys so much they would interrupt me with their problems, no they do not.

I don't see why the ribbon would be inherently worse than a menu. It's still hierarchical, everything is labeled and has an icon and it's bigger. Oh, and everything has a shortcut that's highlighted...

Europe here. I disagree. Many SMEs are totally happy with Google Workspace and Canva, as GP mentioned. I know people using just that. And they don't understand why there are people suffering from the Microsoft-Stockholm syndrome.

The market may not yet be 365-sized but as GP mentioned: it's there.

And there are young people arriving at an age to open a business who have never used a Windows computer in their entire life. To them Microsoft is the company that make the virus-infested, slow, computers full of ads they see at their grandparents' house. That cohort ain't buying Windows / buying Office / using Azure.

I’m talking about the context I know which is Barcelona companies

Plus Pages, Numbers and Keynote are free on Macs, minus the new paid features. I think it's a no brainer for new businesses

Unfortunately, there's a reason people prefer paid office software over Apple's free suite. Apps like Numbers are chaotic in the face of Excel.

Exactly. So many people on hn have no idea how diversified Microsoft is, and have no inkling of what the enterprise market is like

On the contrary, nobody here is suggesting Microsoft isn't really diverse. They're suggesting that Apple is going to start to eat into their SMB market.

Nobody at Microsoft is saying, "we don't care if Apple chips away at SMB because we have Call of Duty"

Microsoft offers Office for Mac. It's a thing they do. It's the full fledged Office suite. They see a Mac user the same way they see a Windows user - a source of revenue.

Office for Mac is increasingly getting feature parity with the windows version, but it is not fully there yet.

For example, if you want to use "data model" in Excel, it is only available in the windows version.

Yeah and ms access is completely missing. It lacks the full version of onenote too.

The one thing that shines is Mac outlook where on windows you'll soon have to put up with that joke of a web app.

Not always. There's no Minecraft for Mac, they even prohibited Macs running the iPad version. It's essentially been ported to Apples APIs but purposely withheld from macOS.

I'm talking about enterprise software, not games. Minecraft exists for Mac, grab the Java version.

Anyone on Bedrock Minecraft is probably there for the cross-platform multiplayer. The Java version doesn't substitute for that. (MS made Bedrock and Java incompatible so they can rent-seek on closed mod and server-hosting "marketplaces"; can't let people share things and have fun without paying a middleman after all, think of the wasted "productivity"!)

No way. Intune and Entra are the vendor-lock in technologies that cement a business via m365 for the long haul.

No, it isn't 365, it is 365 + (forced ai)

They need to _commit_ to this, and execute, though. This feels very much like yet another half-hearted Apple initiative.

Everything is half-hearted from Apple since Steve died. He was the beating heart. Who has stepped into that role? Like for real? Anyone? I’m just not seeing it

Does it matter? Apple's revenue/profit was $108B/$25B in 2011. It was $416B/$112B in 2025. They're clearly doing something right.

I think the average idiot can take a really strong business and weaken the bones for some quarters or years of extra profit, possibly insane profit, before lack of focus on what really made the company strong starts to erode the fundamentals. I think we’re seeing that with Apple personally. It’s just colossal though so there’s a lot of squeezing and a lot of profit before it really catches up. And they don’t even disappear. They just become lumbering monsters like Microsoft, IBM, and HP that people don’t use because they want to. HP was legitimately a great company.

But this isn’t some quarters or years, it’s been _fifteen_ years. I think we’ve seen enough genuine innovation (Apple silicon, to name the major one) that it’s clear Apple isn’t shutting down the innovation pipeline to squeeze margin out of revenue.

Apple Silicon started under Steve didn't it? He died in 2011, first A4 was out in 2010 IIRC? That implies to me that Steve had a hand in it -- because he reputedly had a hand in everything.

But that's it, thats the innovation. The singular one since he died. I think my point stands tbh: everything is half-hearted since Steve died.

Only looking at these numbers and not the general sentiment around the company, I'd say yes, it matters. Myopically focusing on profits and assuming profit = good is, well, its super common but also pretty nutty.

At this point to take part in modern life a smart phone is required. Having captured a market for an essential "luxury good" doesn't mean they're doing something right. It just means we have no other choices.

$599 per device? Redmond will make more profit the first year selling a 365 subscription than Apple does on the Neo.

The real competition is going to come from companies using the $599 Neo + Google Workgroups or whatever they're calling it - now Microsoft is cut out entirely.

> The real competition is going to come from companies using the $599 Neo + Google Workgroups or whatever they're calling it - now Microsoft is cut out entirely.

The companies doing that are cut in two groups. The one that don't fully plan it and they need to do with complex excel or whatever files here and there and they're still in microsoft's grasp, or those that fully do and move to disposable chromebook.

>I'd be scared if I was certain Redmond corporation who makes their money on 365 and Intune.

scared of what? microsoft doesnt need to care about new businesses with under 50 employees at all. they have governments, banks, universities, colleges, and large non-tech enterprises completely locked down. small business with 10-50 devices are a drop in the ocean.

>New businesses under 50 employees are going to eat this up like there's no tomorrow.

i seriously doubt people outside of the tech or design spheres (i.e. most people) are going to go with apple for their businesses. when you are starting a business, you dont want to also have to teach all of your employees (and possibly yourself) how to use a new operating system.

you are going to look up "local IT company" or "local MSP", ask them to set you up, and they will integrate you into their existing microsoft ecosystem and send over some thinkpads, while you focus on your business.

It really depends on the context and the context within the context. I used to manage a medium sized IT firm in Colombia on a hybrid manner.

One of our biggest clients had a sort of high end boutique set of businesses and two bigger businesses that interacted quite more with the regular public.

For the high end boutiques he asked us ONLY and ONLY to use mac's both because down there they are synonym of "prestige and class" and because the (very attractive) women that he hired for most roles were only familiar, or preferred mac's and were consumer's exclusively of apple's walled garden.

We had a bunch of customers like that, the real issue is that if this were on place I would have made it an option for my clients, eventually some things like security or software may move a significant number of users there, specially after the new mac mini, the neo and the ma air become budget options compared to a lot of what microsoft is offering in latam and some parts of Europe.

This ignores that Apple is unable to manufacture enough computers per year to be disruptive.

25m Macs in calendar year 2025. Lenovo manufactured 19m PCs in Q4 2025.

Apple simply lacks volume.

I imagine the company that currently ships 250m iPhones a year can figure that part out.

Especially due to Apple having a lot less SKUs (compared to Lenovo) and having a lot more control over important parts such as CPUs.

Weird, never had an issue getting my hands on an Apple laptop of any desired configuration, even odd keyboard layouts for the region (UK and Sweden).

Had plenty of issues getting specific specification Thinkpads: because they are largely sold through resellers and they don’t stock all SKUs I suppose.

No where did I say you can’t get a hold of one, I said they don’t have the volume. They’re behind Lenovo, HP, and Dell.

The x86 market is massive and dwarfs Apple’s Mac manufacturing.

I don’t buy this reasoning until there is evidence of orders going unfulfilled.

I could make 20M units of something and leave my resellers as bagholders who then have to sell years old hardware at a discount- and by the internal consistency of your logic: I would have the volumes.

Isn't this an artifact of the demand side and not the supply side?

Yes, apple shipped fewer laptops than dell in 2025. That's because Apple laptops started at $1100 in 2025.

They won't have a problem securing the chips for Mac Neo's, they're the same SOC as the iPhone. What, Apple is going to have an issue manufacturing a few million motherboards?

So Lenovo wins in both quantity and quality (at least for T/X series), let alone configurability.

okay dude, how many phones did it manufacture in Q4 2025?

87m

https://www.semiconductor-today.com/news_items/2026/mar/tern...

do you think lenovo would rather manufacture 19m PCs or 87m phones? i don't know, you raise an interesting point that is wrong.

It looks like you have this discussion confused. This is about Macs, not phones.

Sure, Apple's dominance in sourcing, manufacturing and all other aspects of logistics surely has no place in this conversation. '

The NEO is a masterclass in how integrated these systems actually are.

The Neo is a phone with a big screen.

Does it matter if the main difference is the OS? Chromebooks are way worse spec wise, and they’re still “phones with big screens” and a different OS. If someone made a windows laptop that was actually good without compromises in an ARM SoC, I’m sure it’d sell well too. The Qualcomm ones seem to have too many compromises today with the OS/driver layer unfortunately.

That last part is the stumbling block for sure - the Microsoft Surface Laptops are nice machines but damn if the driver thing doesn't continually piss me off.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-lapt... but at $900, and the Neo literally just being a Mac and doing everything any other Mac does (except some hardware related limitations like driving a 6k monitor, but doing 4k is "enough for most") means you save $300 and don't run into annoyances like "can't install my printer driver".

I recently switched from a Microsoft heavy company to an Apple heavy company.

Since the early 2000's, I've been bad mouthing Outlook, for a whole lot of reasons.

Let's just say: I miss Outlook. And it's still terrible.

The companies I know of that would be most likely to do this would never buy these because of the integrated webcams, and no "you can disconnect them easily" is not acceptable, as a matter of policy.

Apple would be near the top of my list of companies incapable of building software that will do this. I cannot believe anyone who has tried Mail.app would be interested in using that for their business. I tried it for 3-ish months and had immense trouble reliably threading, seeing responses, with search, etc.

There's 0 way they have competent, reliable, working group calendaring.

I have had plenty of issues with outlook, I had to force close it at least once per day. Macos mail app was very good for my business need, it was a small one but had to deal with hundreds of mails everyday.

Plus you don't get that proprietary format pst when you backup the mails.

Are you talking Mac or iOS? I have never had an issue on iPhone’s mail app, though my desktop is Linux so I don’t know? Hence the question. I’ve never experienced any of that. Thanks

*499$ with an EDU discount which definitely means they have margin for business deals.

Revenge of the Mac. Theirs simply no reason for any normal person to buy anything else. The year of Linux is deferred yet again.

I keep shouting from the rooftops the fact that the Neo is really not that disruptive or even necessarily that good of a deal.

Like, have any of you actually looked at street prices at Micro Center or Best Buy recently? In the price range of the higher model Neo you can get a Yoga 7 with an OLED convertible touch screen, 1TB storage, 16GB of RAM, along with a processor with better multicore and iGPU performance (Ryzen 7 AI 350) in a 2-in-1 convertible package that has better battery life doing office tasks.

Yes, the Neo is a cheap machine, with a lot of the exact same cheap machine compromises that are all over the $500-800 laptop market. Not really the best CPU, extremely cut-down battery, missing features, etc.

It even loses keyboard backlighting which is such a standard feature that it might be the only laptop on sale without it.

Losing the haptic trackpad means that the Acer you can buy at Micro Center for $530 with double the RAM and way better I/O (USB4, USB-A 3.0, microSD, and HDMI) has a pretty similar quality of trackpad experience. Yes, I tried both in store, the MacBook Neo's trackpad is really at the same level of all the PC competition.

MacBook Pro/Air Trackpad: 10/10

Best PC haptic trackpads available: 8/10

MacBook Neo trackpad: 7/10

Typical PC mechanical trackpads: 6 or 7/10

Hell, the older generation HP EliteBook 840 G10 that Micro Center sells as a business laptop makes a bunch more sense in a lot of ways. It's also an all-aluminum build thin and light system, comes with more RAM, which is upgradable, has a fingerprint reader, backlit keyboard, etc.

The trackpad on the Neo is at the level of a Surface trackpad, which is to say it is worlds better than the typical budget junk you can pick up from Acer.

I disagree strongly. Again, I tried it in store at the exact same time as trying other laptops.

Yes, it's a little bit better than the alternatives, but, critically, not by much. Not by enough to sway a purchase decision.

It's not better than diving board mechanical trackpads by enough of a margin for most consumers to notice.

Also, macOS over-relies on trackpad gestures. You don't really need them anywhere near as much in Windows or Linux. This is Apple's intention: to try and sell more proprietary trackpads, because they know if their OS was optimized for normal mice consumers would just buy the cheap $20 mice that are better than their $100+ accessories.

The PC industry barely has to adapt to compete with the Neo. I think we'll start seeing that in late 2026 and 2027 when competitors arrive on Apple's doorstep.

One of the things is an Acer. The other is a Mac. That sways purchase decisoons - one is a nice thing, the other one is a low end PC.

I have used countless modern PC devices, including some from Acer. Few PCs have a trackpad of the level of the Neo and none from Acer.

Your logic with "Apple's intentions" reveals a person who is incapable of decent analysis; macOS relies on gestures a lot because the vast majority of macOS devices are laptops. The desktop market is an after thought because the people keep buying laptops. That's it. There's no conspiracy, just a focus on the devices that the users choose to buy.

The PC industry has almost no shot of competing with the Neo. You have to spend much more than $1000 to get a nice object that looks and feels nice. Right now, the PC industry is selling Old Navy products when Hermès is the same price. That is a real problem.

Microsoft is going to be fine. Companies that rely on selling low end devices to consumers are going to suffer.

My point is that Apple is in many ways joining Acer, not bringing their luxury product down to the masses.

Yes, in many ways they’re bringing a very polished product to the space. But in many other ways, look closely and you’ll see the cut corners.

Again, I’ve felt the Neo in person. The chassis feels nice, sure. It’s not built to the same level as Apple’s other products, though.

The bottom plate is not CNCed, it’s a stamped aluminum plate. That means there is variation in the gap along the bottom of the laptop between the man case and the bottom plate that doesn’t exist on the Air or Pro.

Again, the trackpad is good but is worse than many haptic trackpads offered by PC manufacturers like Lenovo.

Again, if you think the PC industry has no chance of competing, go to your retailer website and look at street prices. Look at laptop reviews from places like Just Josh Tech on YouTube. PC manufacturers aren’t making trash.

Acer is actually a great example of a really solid PC. I felt the $530 model Micro Center is selling and it seemed to do the job: thin and light enough, felt sturdy, similar trackpad to the Neo, better specs and I/O. I’d say I only wanted the display to be a little better, though on the plus side it was bigger than the Neo’s cramped 13”.

This isn’t 2005. There is a misguided assumption to assume that PCs are still trash like they were 10 years ago. They just aren’t.

One little random bit to point out: there are 100 million Mac users globally as of 2024. There are more than 900 million PC gamers globally.

So, if I’m a high school student or college student who has money for one computer and I am a member of that group of 900 million PC gamers, I might just go get a last gen Lenovo LOQ with the RTX 4050 or something similar in the current gen from someone like MSI with an RTX 5050.

I would deal with a chunkier plastickier laptop but it would get similar battery life to the Neo for office tasks and I could actually play games. 16GB RAM. Modular storage. Price is around $700.

And I’ll be honest, that trackpad ain’t gonna be much worse than the Neo. And I’ll get to keep my backlit keyboard and have some I/O.

You are deeply confused (you do not understand public perception/you do not understand how choosing a ''good pc'' is hard for most people/you don't grasp that a luxury brand versus Acer for the same price is a no brainer for most people, regardless of I/O or whatever) and - frankly - you are not worth discussing anything with. Have a good rest of your day.

>Look at laptop reviews from places like Just Josh Tech on YouTube

I stopped reading here.

Okay? So you don’t look at reviews or something? What’s the problem that made you stop reading?

I will be absolutely shocked if any current pc company can even approach the neos build quality/performance/price combo. See you next year, happy to wait .

I think we’ll actually see some serious responses from PC manufacturers. They basically have to.

They really aren’t that far off as it is. I’ve brought up a number of similarly priced models in my other comments on this thread.

Even on the premium end, the surface laptop really isn’t that far off on pricing. It was priced and specced to essentially match the Air. I think there’s no reason a cut down model couldn’t match the Neo.

I think the most important thing is for Microsoft to crack down more on OEMs’ use of third party junkware like McAfee. They need to just disallow it as a hard policy. Hopefully the Neo is also a wake up call to Microsoft.

I also think that an x86 processor that performs 20-40% slower really isn’t a big deal in the context of the Neo’s competitors. They mostly need to match the pricing and build quality. Nobody cares that the hybrid Toyota Corolla is slower than the hybrid Honda Civic when they go buy the car. They care that it has the attributes they’re looking for (packaging, reliability, quality, price). And I think the Neo’s great chip is hampered by RAM anyway. The SoC package was designed for a mobile system that only has partial multitasking.

And it comes with Windows.

Back in the normal world people don't use Linux. If you have the funds you can get an M4 Air with 16GB for 800$.

I still have a 8GB M1 air, it's fine for filling out paper work and watching YouTube, which is the extent of what most people do

> Hell, the older generation HP EliteBook 840 G10 that Micro Center sells as a business laptop makes a bunch more sense in a lot of ways.

And the best thing is that you can format the drive, install Linux, and be completely free of Microsoft and Apple.

... the Yoga doesn't run MacOS though.

Okay? Windows and macOS are basically the same.

Only biased fanboy people say otherwise.

Agreed. I'd love to see what prices companies get for volume purchases. I'm the IT Manager in a small team and if the Neo and this was available last year when we set up MDM/Exchange/SharePoint I would have considered it. Specially on the hardware side, ROI/longevity on an Apple Silicon Macbook is times higher than any given Windows laptop.

Less stuff to go wrong.

One point of contact for support.

Microsoft isn't going to get it together anytime soon, it's a new dawn.

> Theirs simply no reason for any normal person to buy anything else.

My wife currently has an old MacBook with 8GB of memory, and she hits the memory limit somewhat regularly just from web browsing and light productivity work. But whether more breathing room in terms of memory is worth almost double the price...

Intel or Apple Silicon? The latter manages memory much better.

Intel. That's good to know! Do you know why this is? Presumably because of the shared memory pool across CPU/GPU, or are there other factors?

[dead]

The next neo might have the SSDs of the current pros, making swapping less problematic.

[dead]

Serviceable != upgradable or long-lasting.

So many people are going to get burned by the hypnotism of these Neos. They're going to be gateways into being traded in within 2-3 years to get something with more RAM and storage when their owners find out how much they struggle with basic tasks due to insufficient RAM and storage.

If you actually go on Best Buy or Micro Center websites and look at street prices you'll realize that the Neo isn't actually that disruptive.

The trackpad is mid. I've tried it. It's mid enough that basically any PC can compete with the trackpad experience. There are multiple $500-800 PCs that are easy recommendations as alternatives, all with 16GB of RAM, all with modular storage.

The battery in the Neo is so small that even with the extremely efficient iPhone processor inside, basic Windows laptops can beat the Neo in battery life. Grab a Yoga 7 and you've got double the RAM, 2-in-1 convertible touch screen, and better battery life. Oh yeah, and you get a better OLED panel, too.

I think you might be very surprised by what you can do with eight gigs of RAM on Apple Silicon. Apple does hardware compression into memory - it performs as well as a 16 GB machine did with an Intel chip.

I don't think you get it, OC tried the trackpad in a MicroCenter. It's game over.

Thank you, point well made!

I don't know where this myth has come from that macOS magically uses less RAM even though you are using the same applications as everyone else.

The Just Josh Tech review of the MacBook Neo demonstrated that the Neo cannot do a fractional resolution playback of a very simple Adobe Premiere project. We are not even talking about doing any editing work, simply playing back the project in the timeline.

The ~$500 Acer loaded with 16GB of RAM performed much better on that workflow.

I think it's worth pointing out that the base RAM on a MacBook Air was 8GB six years ago.

The Neo is a low end machine that trades RAM, storage, keyboard backlight, I/O and battery capacity for fit and finish and aesthetics.

It is a machine that will introduce many people to the Mac, and it will be very successful, but I also think it is a machine that for many people will not last them a very long time. And who knows, that might have the same negative impact that cheap Windows PCs have had for Microsoft in the long run, which was the whole reason they started their premium Surface brand.

> I don't know where this myth has come from that macOS magically uses less RAM even though you are using the same applications as everyone else.

Well, you're certainly not running the same code on both systems. Some applications absolutely use less RAM on MacOS... some use less on Windows.

Some of this is due to the various builds of the software itself, some of it is due to architectural differences in memory management, CPU instructions, differing memory access capabilities, etc.

8GB is tight for power users, definitely. But it is certainly very usable for on a Mac for the average person.

I agree that it’s usable, but I think it’s still worth pointing out that it was the base configuration of the M1 Air almost 6 full years ago.

It feels to me a lot like past cut down systems such as the eMac or that horrendous 21” 1080p Intel iMac that sort of make sense by being cheap but don’t make as much sense in wider context of available choices.

Of course, I think the Neo will be a huge success and is a good product overall, but a product where an informed buyer can do better.

It is potentially a purchase decision that really won’t last as long as a cheap Acer with 16GB of memory, even though the Neo is built better.

8gb on a apple is not enough and its not surprising at all.

Source: dealing with dozens of Mac devices with 8gb memory that clients had which all can't handle their workloads. I've switched whole companies from Mac back to pcs. And I've watched companies try switch to Apple and go from reasonably problem free operations to a nightmare of broken systems. Want to use apples data transfer to migrate from windows to Mac? Good luck it just plain doesn't work.

Device management on macs is an absolute nightmare along with the hell hole that is apple ID and the app store. Not to mention their absolutely abysmal performance with rmm. You can literally configure a machines permissions to allow remote access apps to work then a week later they just break the software and your access to manage the device is broken too.

Apple products are absolutely terrible for business from phones to laptops to their entire office suite.

$500 for 2-3 years is great. And it will last much longer than that in reality.

It's pretty plain to see that the Neo eats any competitors lunch at that price point. It isn't close.

The computer is $600. It’s only $500 on the education store. Many Apple customers will not have access. Anyone who walks into a physical Apple Store will have to prove their eduction status.

I am not sure why it’s eating competitors lunch when many very well-regarded competitors are in the price range available at stores.

What’s better about a Neo than a Yoga 7? Same price range.

https://www.bestbuy.com/product/lenovo-yoga-7-2-in-1-copilot...

This is $40 more than the Neo’s top model and you get double the RAM and an OLED convertible touch screen.

Aside from the pitiful screen resolution for a 14-inch screen and the fact that the Lenovo has a fan, they are indeed similar.

But I don't know why you cannot see it as terrible for the PC makers that Apple finally has entered the sub-1000$ market. Since Apple has existed they've been in the high-end of the market, and now they're not. The Lenovo I'm sure is fine, but what it doesn't have is clarity of purpose. The Neo is a laptop and nothing else. Which leads me to question whether that very complicated Lenovo hinge will survive the 7 years my Mac laptops give me.

160 ppi is not pitiful, it's the same as a 27" 4K monitor.

Is "clarity of purpose" ghost of Steve Jobs speak for refusing features to customers?

Why is it so hard to conceive of a student wanting to write hand-written notes on a 2-in-1 laptop? Apple would rather sell you a second device.

Why are we assuming the hinge on 2-in-1 laptops can't survive? These are not new products. These are well-regarded, highly reviewed products from the #1 PC manufacturer in the world (Apple is #4).

> What’s better about a Neo than a Yoga 7?

If you already have an iPhone, there are lovely little integration things that sound like small beans but are really valuable over time, eg.:

- copy-paste text between devices

- get verification codes from text messages to auto-fill in Safari on Mac

I don't know if Yoga 7 is good in this regard, but when you open the lid on a Macbook, it's awake and interactive before you've finished swinging it open. And battery life is outstanding. I'd miss things like that.

So the Apple advantage is, essentially, the evasion of antitrust rules. Nice. In any event, I use KDE Connect to send my clipboard around between iOS, Windows, Android, and Linux.

The whole "instant on when you open the lid" thing is not impressive in 2026. Even with Linux my laptop is instant-on from sleep in a very similar fashion.

And, again, here I am as a broken record repeating this since nobody is listening because they've been indoctrinated by Apple marketing:

The MacBook Neo does not have as good battery life as the more expensive models! In comparison testing with other similar PC laptops the battery life is very middle of the road!

My last Windows laptop was a 2-in-1 Yoga. It was the reason I switched to Macs.

Sure, the specs were good... on paper. But all of the little firmware bugs really destroyed the experience. Mine had both throttling and display output issues, which really suck for a development machine. Also Windows kind of sucks in general these days -- and when I installed Linux on the thing, then I got the classic lackluster power management issue where it would slowly discharge in my backpack. So there goes the battery life advantages.

Apple benefits from great vertical integration so their damn firmware usually works, and if there are issues, they tend to fix them, where as Lenovo and most PC integrators seem to be happy just abandoning products from last quarter and releasing fifteen new models instead. And it's posix and doesn't put ads in my start menu, right out of the box.

Throttling issues?

Did you know the MacBook Neo has no fan? It can go 2x faster FPS in games if it’s cooled better:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lswbpVtAhrc

Even a simple quiet and mostly-off fan would have been a $5 addition to the system that would have boosted performance by ~10%. But Apple wanted to make an iPad computer.

Apple advertises their subscription services directly in the system settings when you buy the system (they give you a trial that is shown as a system settings notification and when you refer it they do the thing where you have to cancel on the last day or else forfeit the remaining trial term before it’s over; accidental subscription dark pattern where you can’t turn off auto-renew without forfeiting remaining time) and also advertises apple subs via toast notifications.

As far as device firmware, I dunno, I felt like my Intel MacBook Pro 16” had pretty shit firmware that ended up abandoned because Apple went straight to M1 and the whole T2 thing where they tried to customize Intel’s stack never really worked all that well. Apple almost certainly half-assed that machine knowing their next platform was on the way.

Like the whole “instant open lid wake from sleep” that was great in the past but turned into crazy lag on those late Intel machines.

Oh yeah and I just got my last settlement check for my 2016 butterfly keyboard. That machine was a lovely ownership experience.

So this idea that only PC laptops have firmware issues and bad long term support…idk man, I just don’t fully buy that. I’m sure Apple is mostly better but I’ve had enough bad experiences that I don’t consider them to be anything wildly special.

It didn’t have “throttling issues” as in “it implements throttling” but as in “the throttling was broken and it throttled when it wasn’t even hot”

> I just got my last settlement check for my 2016 butterfly keyboard

That’s nice, I didn’t get anything

Tomato, tomato. I would consider removing a basic feature like a small and quiet fan as “throttling when it wasn’t even hot.”

Sorry in advance to continue ranting about this, but the consumer-hostile bit is it’s used as a price segmentation strategy. Consumers don’t care if their laptop has a modest quiet cooling fan, but Apple acts like customers hate them. The cooling fan inside the Nintendo Switch has alienated zero potential customers, is basically inaudible, and it’s still an extremely portable device.

The only reason the MacBook Air M5 is slower than the MacBook Pro M5 is the lack of cooling. It’s done on purpose. It’s not “save costs and offer a cheaper product,” it’s “purposefully remove a ‘free’ benefit to push you up the product lineup.”

Similarly, it would have cost Apple almost nothing to bump the Neo to 12GB of memory but they’re going to hold back that upgrade so that first gen buyers buy their next system sooner.

I think I got the settlement email because I took my system in to Apple to get the keyboard fixed and the lawyers for the class action had my contact info as a result.

My phone costs twice as much and I replace it every 2-3 years.

You know what people who outgrow their applebooks are going to do? Buy a macbook air or pro. They aren't going to buy a windows machine. Some might buy a linux machine.

Millions and millions of normal people have used 8GB M-series Macbooks for the past 5 years, and nobody has those problems you describe. In fact, everybody is happy to have machines which don't have the usual problems that PCs have.

Computing tasks related to real world scenarios don't need giant RAM repositories, as evident in that people could do these tasks just fine when 32 megabytes of RAM was enough.

So what you're saying is that the same 8GB of RAM that MacBook Air M1 had 6 years ago is a good idea for a brand new laptop?

Like I said, the MacBook Neo is squarely a low-end device. Make excuses all you want, it trades RAM, storage, keyboard backlight, and battery size for a nice chassis and portability.

Yes, it's an excellent idea. For normal people a computer is a tool to get things done, and any 8GB Apple Silicon machine will serve them very well.

Think about it this way: If you loose 5 days of productivity then you have lost $500. A Windows or Linux machine is guaranteed to cause many more days than that of productivity loss per year.

And with "normal people" I mean everybody who is not a developer or hacker, including millions and millions of people who work professionally with computers.

The RAM doesn't matter as much as people here insist. What do I care that my computer has half the RAM, when it completes any and every task blazingly fast and never freezes up or crashes? RAM turns into an abstract.

Look at it this way: You're arguing that a diesel truck is always better than a motorcycle because it has more horsepowers. Okay, but the motorcycle gets me where I want twice as fast and is more comfortable, and doesn't break down all the time. That's what I care about.

I don’t understand why there’s a strange assumption that Windows or Linux users are just burning productivity all the time and macOS users are the only ones where “everything just works.” Heck leave Linux out of it for all I care: Windows isn’t some kind of immature OS that that requires tons of fiddling. It’s basically the same thing as macOS when it comes down to non-technical users. They open up the windows store or Mac app Store click a button and get their apps and they’re on their way.

It’s just a biased take that is 100% subjective.

I think this narrative comes from the Windows XP user experience from 30 years ago that no longer exists.

Yeah, the RAM fucking matters because Google Chrome has 90% browser marketshare, because Spotify is the market leader, not Apple Music, because more people use Microsoft Outlook than Apple Mail, more people use Slack than…well, Apple doesn’t have a workplace chat program. These are big memory-sucking apps.

8GB of RAM is great for Apple native optimized apps but regular users run many more things than that.

Linux is too complicated for a normal person to use productively, and it doesn't have the productivity software needed by non-hackers.

Windows: Yes, the user experience is that bad. My observations of Windows users is that it's hard for them to get things done effectively because of the faults of the system. Talking about non-hacker people, who might be very proficient in photo editing or spreadsheets or word processing.

Just booting a Windows machine is a chore. These have the same specs or better specs than Macs, but how come you can instantly use a Mac by opening the lid, and Windows PCs take their merry minutes to be ready?

I won't even mention malware and such.

For a normal, non-technical person, there isn't any problem in using stock Mac Mail, Safari, and native productivity tools. And honestly, those memory hogs you mention aren't a problem either on Apple silicon. It's still faster to use than on a PC with double the RAM.

Can you go into more specific details about these observations you made? Which people were they?

Do you have any benchmarks that show this “faster than a PC with double the RAM” claim?

Because when I saw real world tests on the Neo versus the Acer Aspire AI 14, the Acer machine was faster at video playback in Adobe Premiere (as an example) due to the lack of memory pressure.

I can tell you at work we have a mixed environment and the Windows users and Mac users don’t seem to have any difference in difficulty doing things like showing their work in presentations. Our company metrics show zero difference in employee productivity based on what operating system they use (I’m a manager and can see these things).

Well, just about everyone I know who uses Windows machines. The most common problem is that the laptop starts downloading and installing Windows updates as soon as it boots up. This hogs all of the CPU and all of the internet bandwidth. And there's no way for non-technical users to understand what's going on. They just say "Well, my computer is slow because it's old. Better go and buy a new one soon, what has the most RAM per dollar spent?" Because their techie friends told them that this is the only thing which matters on a computer.

Or there's a ton of pop-ups of every kind when they're using the machine. Most people just click the biggest button on any popup appearing, without even looking at what it says.

And these are people who work professionally with their computers, but they're not sysadmins or operating system experts.

I don't doubt what you say about Adobe Premiere playback speed. That might be an exception where more RAM does actually matter. But that's hardly a reason to dismiss the 8GB Macbooks. They are great for most users and most professional users.

Will we be able to change our company details? A couple of years ago we changed the business name, so let's change it in the account for billing and such.

Not possible.

Ok, let's ask support what to do: the only thing we can do is create a new account, get the approval, etc. and then ask for a migration that may or may not be approved and may or may not end succesfully.

In the end we keep receiving the bills in the old name, then change it manually or append a note.

A bit like the awful workflow around developer agreements in App Store Connect. Every few months our CI breaks because Apple has updated one agreement or another and someone has to go pester the executive who's marked as the account owner and has legal authority to sign new agreements to unbreak our CI.

It's also impossible to delegate this authority to anyone other than the account owner, and there's no concept of shared or service accounts, so nobody other than the account owner, with access to their 2FA method is able to do this.

Heaven forbid if the account owner was ever to put their 2FA method as a personal device / phone and then leave the company.

Years ago when the ARM China CEO held the company hostage with the company seal, there was much reporting that exoticized seals. But I was just thinking, the modern systems we've built with 2FA aren't much different!

(Product idea: seal that also prints time and TOTP?)

All of these, too. Then for some goddamn reason i no longer can just input the username and password: for one of the developer accounts it has decided that i also have to decide wether i want to authenticate with an apple device, or by password. So it's another couple of clicks i can't get rid of

I guess ultimately it's easier and works better than when you move country and would like to update the country for PSN (PlayStation Network). Sony's advice? Close the old account and open a new one with the correct country, then buy the same stuff again.

Haha ah of course. It’s not like you ever actually owned them in the first place.

I'm called by a name that is not the same as my legal name. I somehow got an Apple Developer account during the first few years of it with my preferred name, but it had my parents' house as the mailing address.

I was essentially told that I could update the mailing address but going through the steps for that process would result in the name on my account being changed to the legal name. And so today, it still has my parents' mailing address. Thankfully they haven't moved.

I've still got a phantom child on my Apple account because when I tried to create a child's account many years ago for my son it somehow messed up and used the current year instead of his birth year. Support said too bad, no possible way to fix that. So I had to create another account for my real son, and while he grew up and moved out, my phantom son still lives with us for another nine years until it is old enough that I can delete it.

I hope he at least gets his own cake on his birthday.

Jamf shareholders got very lucky. The acquisition closed less than 2 months ago. Tough day for the new PE owners, though.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/francisco-partners-completes-...

Not so sure about this. The level of configurability in AB is significantly less than what is available in established platforms like Jamf, Addigy, etc. The AB offering seems squarely targeted at smaller orgs, and may be a great fit, but is nowhere near as mature as a midsize/enterprise customer would need.

That said, who knows where this will go in the coming years.

A few months ago, on a price hike announcement for Office365 posted here to YC HN, I made a comment that MDM is expensive, had high MOQs (Mosyle, Jamf) and fundamentally still doesn’t work as well as Windows and Intune. I also lamented that Microsoft keeps hiking prices and that it’s silly we’re normalising $20+ per user per month when we used to pay once for these things.

I lamented how Apple hardware is now the same price as the other vendors, yet best in class for quality and how Dell and HP are hiking their laptop pricing lately due to supply shortages. Especially on their pro lines, which have been quoted to me as twice the price of equivalent MacBooks.

I mentioned Apple would be silly not to make a further global move into MDM and email hosting territory. Particularly for small business owners: 1-10 person shops and retail who use mostly cloud based POS applications.

Others responded at the time, and I agreed with it, that it seems unlikely Apple would make a business move. After all, they don’t have much history with business, or perhaps they did but they didn’t like the market and wrapped it up.

Well, with this announcement, and with the confirmation that *Apple native email hosting is coming* I am very excited to trial it when it lands in April. Over the last few months, our small business has already cracked it and downgraded most of our email hosting to Exchange Plan 1 and dropped the desktop Office suite in favour of Pages and Numbers, which are both free and absolutely working fine. In fact, I’ve found Pages to be less laggy and more stable than Word in very large documents such as 300+ pages. The logical next step for us is to fully drop our third-party MDM and review whether Apple’s native MDM, email and identity systems are adequate for transition. We have saved thousands of $$ so far and stand to save a lot more!

I wonder if this was timed to lineup with the MacBook Neo launch, which makes the idea of equipping your entire company with Mac laptops a lot more compelling from a cost perspective.

There’s a grey one. So obviously, it was timed.

[dead]

So do enterprises still need Jamf [1]? For context, Jamf is one of the most common MDM tools for organizations.

[1]: https://www.jamf.com/

Yep. People who have never tried to add Mac support to an existing organization do not realize how freaking expensive it is.

There are basically two cases. If you use Microsoft, you are often already paying for Entra ID and Intune, then still adding the Apple-side pieces for Mac support: Apple Business Manager and often Jamf or Kandji. If you do not use Microsoft, you are buying the full stack yourself: Okta or JumpCloud for identity, Jamf or Kandji for device management, and Apple Business Manager for enrollment. Apple Business Manager is free, but the rest is not, and the cost adds up fast.

This means that, in practice, a managed Mac can easily end up costing close to twice as much to support as a Windows device.

Actually Intune handles MacOS reasonably well, you don’t need Jamf; that’s the way we went, and it’s okay-ish for the most part. By far the annoyingest thing is getting Macs bought before we went down the Business Manager integration route into MDM.

You think there’s a standard way to do that? Just install company portal? That worked in exactly 1/20 cases. It’s an exciting new error on every single device. Awful. Just awful.

Totally agree on the hidden costs. We've seen some great value in going with Mosyle for this. Lots cheaper, and it "just works."

https://mosyle.com/

The only thing you need out of any of those to correctly support the Mac is an MDM, of which there are free ones and expensive ones and everything in between. So long as it can deploy configuration profiles and declarative management configs, you can spin up Munki to be your pkg/script runner and script the rest. Installomator to install and patch applications.

But if you also wanted identity, there are plenty of free selfhostable SSO/ID providers out there. If you're just starting out and not at the scale where a big Microsoft CoPilotM365OfficeWhatever contract makes sense, you probably don't even really have a need for a lot of this stuff. A minimum contract for Jamf Pro is like $5k a year or something. That's two well kitted developer MacBook Pros per year in license costs.

Big yes. Enterprises need support and a relationship with their supplier where their needs can change product direction.

Jamf will do that. Apple will not.

Dunno if you've ever had a business relationship with Apple but they're really good on that front. Proactive and helpful, along with always trying to sell you stuff, but proactive and helpful nonetheless.

A B2C relationship and a B2B relationship are not the same thing. Apple does well with the B2C pipeline, but they will only surpass Jamf in the B2B department if they play dirty.

By business relationship I meant B2B. They're excellent.

I have managed multiple relationships with Apple business and the only thing I can think you could possibly be talking about is having a local store reserve devices for you to buy.

As far as identifying a bug in the software and getting it fixed, or requesting a feature, you run into a brick wall. Taking that feedback from customers is not the Apple way. This is why there is a market for third party MDM companies in the first place.

I've decided you're probably right, I retract my earlier comments.

By excellent, you mean excellent at not being able to talk to someone about your real world problem and need to rely on your linkedin contacts to find someone to talk to?

Relative to what? The top comment in this thread is a 3-person chain explaining how their B2B accounts were locked with no communication or recourse.

I would say that most SMBs don't need Jamf because they provide overlapping features. The most important thing you want is remote erasure of company data (for compliance purposes), app assignment, and ensuring your devices have screen lock. This basically makes the most important parts of MDM for Apple devices totally free.

It's not apparent that this apple mdm will do internal distribution or just provide for encouraging a set of installed apps already on the app store. If it does, that would be the biggest reason for me to jump to the free product.

I read the first page of text of Apple's announcement, and still have absolutely zero idea what "Apple Business" is, apart from the fact that it will "manage devices" and "configure employee groups".

Since I have no employees and my devices are under control, I guess it's not for me, whatever it is.

It's a way to manage a fleet of corporate workstations, and some other things that businesses with lots of people on laptops end up needing.

How does this differ from the existing "Business Essentials" tool? The landing page for each looks like much the same product, at least the MDM stuff does?

> https://business.apple.com/preview

> https://www.apple.com/business/essentials/

One of the footnotes at the bottom of the page says:

> Apple Business Essentials, Apple Business Manager, and Apple Business Connect will no longer be available once Apple Business launches.

So it's a consolidation. They call out Business Connect data as "including claimed locations, place card information, photos, organization information, account details, and more," so that's some of what differs from Business Essentials.

Email, Calendar and company directory built in, custom domains in emails I think... It's more like a MS365 basic version. Which for most small teams is more than enough

Maybe also 200 countries included, instead of just the USA?

It's kinda crazy it took Apple this long to make this.

I've worked with two agencies now that used only Macs across the business and had a really fun time signing in to and integrating 58 Google services every time they hired someone new.

It's possible people may continue to use Google Workspaces in these places, however, the fact that there was never even an Apple option was always wild to me.

There is now an option ONLY if you're in the US. The mail, calendar etc. stuff is US-only.

This is interesting to me as the IT support for my family. I have been considering using MDM to provision Wi-Fi credentials and other device configurations. 3rd party solutions are a little bit too much for what I need.

Apple Business Essentials with AppleCare+ for 3 devices and 200GB iCloud storage is $19.99 per user/mo. That's the same price as AppleCare One alone.

For home use I think you can just generate configuration profiles manually ? If you don't want to pay

I wanted to use the existing ABE product for exactly that, especially as you can actually lockdown apple devices properly to stop teens from undoing VPN settings etc … however it’s explicitly against their policies to use ABE for personal devices and I’d guess the same for this new iteration of it.

You are right. I didn't read the terms. Looks like ABE can only be used by a business entity.

I’ve been doing exactly this with Jamf Pro for my personal devices. I’ll be interested to see if I can scrap it now.

Who will Apple serve? Users, Apple or their partners?

It has always been Apple > Users > Partners.

There's a reason why Microsoft is still the king of enterprises. Anybody getting involved with this with Apple will deserve everything thats coming their way

Thousands in annual savings?

Not on iOS, being locked into the App Store never saved me a dime.

Anyone who's downvoting me better pay full price for FFVI Pixel Remaster instead of emulating it, you filthy dogs.

One of the last great consumer companies is going B2B

Apple always had a B2B component. This is just the latest attempt to not make it completely subpar.

This sucks. This page makes it clear this is the motivation for "Ads on Maps", as they talk about it prominently here - they are now directly selling the attention of their device consumers to their business customers.

I guess they were doing that before in the App Store, which is of course also awful.

Their voice assistant is somewhat opinionated about how it will search the App Store for you

https://i.ibb.co/zV8d9gbc/IMG-2177.jpg

They dynamically reveal 1-3 results and only show a “see more options in App Store” button when they feel like it.

I think what they've announced is the best fit for small businesses, not large enterprises. They can still treat it as a B2C-style service - many tiny customers with similar needs. Mom and Pop can now get a domain name through Apple, with email accounts - for a lot of people that might be the only way they'd know how to do something like that.

The business needs here aren't so different to family manangement features, say.

Throwing in Entra ID / Google Workspace authentication and multiple Apple IDs per device is probably the most "interesting" part as to where that ends up in the distant future.

I had the same thought. When you're a B2B and B2C company and you have to make a bold decision, the B wins because they hold the enterprise $$$.

Apple has gone the way of AmEx and Uber. There are no massmarket "great consumer companies" left in the USA, as far as I can tell.

They need to go OEM.

They did it in the 1990s and it failed so hard that it almost took down the company.

Why can others do it?

Apple's entire success story is their vertical integration. They can't do that and OEM.

As for the PC makers: they don't innovate. Microsoft doesn't care who sells PCs, Intel doesn't care who sells PCs. Every PC maker is essentially an assembly company. If you appreciate Apple's innovation in the laptop space over the past x years, then you don't want Apple to be an OEM.

Who has successfully managed this kind of transition? The obvious case is IBM which is now essentially a consulting company and doesn’t sell PCs anymore.

its the only path to go to be able to continue to support their pricing models - they've priced the consumer/pro-sumer out of the market prettymuch and so B2B is the more sustainable paying population.

> they've priced the consumer/pro-sumer out of the market prettymuch

I'd argue that (the low end of) Apple products are the cheapest they've ever been - the $599 iPhone 17e is below the inflation-adjusted price of the original iPhone, and at $599 the MacBook Neo is the cheapest launch price an Apple laptop has ever listed at (not even adjusting for inflation!)

The maximum amount you can spend at the high-end has certainly gone up over time, although the basic MacBook Pro Max config costs roughly the same as it's peer from 10-15 years ago - nobody's forcing folks to shell out for the 128GB of RAM (something that didn't exist on laptops at all till very recently)

The company that just made a $600 Macbook?

Yes, the phone company that is known for taking home a bronze medal in personal computing for the past 30 years running.

Apple knows the score internally, this won't change the world any more than the 12" Retina Macbook did.

The world's firs trillion dollar and three trillion dollar company. Yes, completely insignificant.

The company that captures 60-70% of the global PC industry's profits. Definitely completely insignificant.

Apple has known the score internally for decades and is laughing that score all the way to the bank.

None of that refutes anything that was said. macOS is a third-class citizen measured by market share, and the total sum of annual Mac profits is lower than what the iPad ecosystem makes in a year.

Consumers do not want the Mac. Datacenters don't want Apple Silicon. People want the iPhone, they want Airpods, but the M-series Macs have spent 5 years changing absolutely nothing.

> and the total sum of annual Mac profits is lower than what the iPad ecosystem makes in a year.

So the company that makes between 50-60% of all profits in personal computers has created a market where it makes 100% of the profits, but albeit smaller than the whole PC market. That's terrrrible, what was Apple thinking!

Market share is far from everything when people live in poverty and do not have money to spend on good hardware and software. Apple makes stuff for affluent people, and then makes a ton of money from those rich folks. Making Apple the most valuable company in the history of humanity. Boy, that's a terrible place to be in!

I shouldn't have to repeat myself; this still doesn't refute the claim that Apple has ceded the consumer compute market. Cheap Macs have flooded the used market for years, and people still gravitate towards plastic Wintel boxes and Chromebooks.

> Apple makes stuff for affluent people

is just repeating the original claim upthread:

>> they've priced the consumer/pro-sumer out of the market prettymuch and so B2B is the more sustainable paying population.

The fact Apple maximizes for profits, and does not care about market share, does not mean it has ceded the market at all. It’s the exact contrary. Apple’s making money akin to the #2 position while being #4 and that’s an issue for you?

Once again you retreat to anecdata; how can you prove that used Mac laptops are not popular?

> Consumers do not want the Mac

Really? As far as I can tell, consumers mostly would love to use Macs, but aren't willing to pay the price of entry

> Datacenters don't want Apple Silicon

Do you know how many people salivate at the prospect of an M-based return of the Xserve?

> but the M-series Macs have spent 5 years changing absolutely nothing.

You clearly keep up with tech news, kudos! I’ve seen no changes from other major pc manufacturers in response to Apple silicon, at all. /s

Would be nice if you could buy a Macbook with a proper on-site warranty.

Dell, Lenovo, HP will gladly send a technician to your house, and their NBD warranties cost about the same as Applecare. And they don't care if you're an enterprise or an individual buying one measly laptop.

They're cheap enough and Apple stores ubiquitous enough that you just go and replace it as needed, and send the now-defunct one in for repair.

Out of curiosity, why would any business with an IT department choose this over an in-house solution built from standard open source components. Think email server on premises or in the cloud using postfix/dovecot/LDAP, maybe Nextcloud with OnlyOffice, Jitsi as a Zoom substitute, etc. These are all mature solutions that are free of vendor lock-in, and can be easily managed by any competent IT team.

so they can fire the IT department and save $500k+ / year

you wouldn't. a business without an IT department would choose this.

> And Apple Business can help millions of companies grow their reach and connect with local customers across Apple Maps, Mail, Wallet, Siri, and more, including a new option coming this summer that will enable businesses in the U.S. and Canada to place local ads in Maps during key search and discovery moments. Apple Business will be available starting Tuesday, April 14, in more than 200 countries and regions

Burying the lede about ADs coming to everything in this announcement. Seems like the contract most people implicitly signed when choosing Apple just broke.

This is just Apple saying "We own all user compute now". Yeah you guys can fight over data centres. But every device that a user physically has will be an Apple device. They've now got the full range of price points from low cost to prosumer, and they've got the software stack to back it up so you can have your sales staff running neos logging in to their CRM, engineers running their Mabcook Pros.

It's kind of insane the advantage Apple Silicon has brought along with the brutal price competition PC sales. The only question I have is whether this touches the sides. That is to say - they sell a billion iPhones, is the consumer laptop and low end business sales enough to bump the numbers. They're thinner margins, and that market has to some extent been on a downward trend (which is why the stock market is running to data centres where the compute actually happens).

When Apple vertically integrates it works for them. All the way from the cloud to the OS to the hardware. Pretty sure this will beat out tools like JAMF on user privacy alone by running trusted MDM adjacent tools in kernel space.

Yes sure you can use a different tool for any of these, defaults dominate for the same reason Google pays ~15 billion to be the default search engine on iPhones.

> Starting April 14, Apple Business will be available as a free service in the U.S. and 200+ countries and regions to new and existing users of Apple Business Connect, Apple Business Essentials, and Apple Business Manager.

> Apple Business Essentials, Apple Business Manager, and Apple Business Connect will no longer be available once Apple Business launches. Business Essentials customers will no longer be charged their monthly service fee for device management after April 14. Existing Business Connect data — including claimed locations, place card information, photos, organization information, account details, and more — will automatically migrate to Apple Business at launch.

I don't get it. Is this free? If so this is insane value compared to everything else.

Given previous Apple adventures on the server room, not sure if I would bet on this staying around.

> Starting April 14, Apple Business will be available as a free service in the U.S. and 200+ countries and regions to new and existing users of Apple Business Connect, Apple Business Essentials, and Apple Business Manager.

Does this mean — Always Free or Introductory Free for now?

I understand it's free to set up the business but iCloud, AppleCare and Email/Calendar storage past the free (I suppose tiny) allowance are paid. As Apple loves, freemium with in-app purchases!

I occasionally trial complete switches to Apple services to see if they're viable as Google alternatives. This weekend was Apple maps and it's finally met my standard of "usable", though not quite "good". One of the places it beat Google maps was the lack of integrated advertising places, which have enshittified the latter.

I'm glad Apple announced their own plans to enshittify before I got my hopes up.

Live gas prices on GMaps is the only feature yet to make it over to Apple Maps, as far as I can tell. Once Apple integrates that one, my phone will finally be free of Google services.

Such a huge bummer.

Hey, Big Ad Tech, come try enshitify my Rand McNally.

So will Apple users be able disable these ads in maps?

The nice thing about many of the native apps compared to their Google pendants is the absence of ads, with the glaring exception of the app store, which looks like a dumpster-fire. It is so disheartening to see the trend of shoving ads everywhere continue with Apple as well. I guess the profits are just too tempting to stick with idealistic UX decisions, if there was any of that left in the first place.

I would expect, much like the App Store, they will not. Their maps will give you directions to navigate the enshittification curve.

There's a real gap for small businesses that are too big for ad-hoc setups but too small for full IT

> including a new option coming this summer that will enable businesses in the U.S. and Canada to place local ads in Maps during key search and discovery moments.

It's happening. The end is near !!!

Considering the discussion here, i am still looking forward to, since it's the best solution apple provided so far with comprehensive management and in the end, after enrollment, what do you really need? the management looks very simple and flawless, all necessary things are covered (mail, calendar, icloud, backup, management). Excited!

It would be great if you could get correct invoice and pay price without VAT in EU as a VAT registered business. It is incredible they can get around without providing such a basic thing for so long.

Worth repeating: Never tie your personal phone to your work stuff.

Worth repeating as well: Never tie your work stuff to Apple.

Does Apple support multiple iCloud accounts on a device yet?

Mac requires separate users as other have said.

However, for iOS and iPadOS, the answer is “Sort of”.

As taken from https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep4d9e9cd2...:

> If a user is signed in with a personal Apple Account and Managed Apple Account, Sign in with Apple automatically uses the Managed Apple Account for managed apps and the personal Apple Account for unmanaged apps.

Can you not make two user accounts on a Mac and sign them into different iCloud accounts? I know you're limited to one on iPhone and iPad, though.

no, but many apps can independently use a different Apple (nee iCloud) Account specifically for that app.

that said, you can create multiple users per macOS device, and each can have a different Apple Account. that's a nightmare, because some significant areas of device management assume a single Apple Account. So for example you can use a 2nd account to get around Activation Lock in some cases.

Apple's really late to this.

They are just combining existing services: Apple Business Essentials, Apple Business Manager, and Apple Business Connect.

It's like Microsoft now - put everything under one massive convoluted control panel.

Apple is “late” to everything which is why it’s the leader

Being early is the same as being wrong and there’s no business value in costly exploration of new territory at least in the 21st century

Name me a single company that is still in business and dominating a market based on being first to market with a new product.

TSMC. They dominate the semiconductor market because they're consistently first to market with the world's most advanced chip fabrication.

But they're an example of the same phenomeon; they were founded in 1987, long after chip fabrication was a thing. They just did it right.

They took extreme risks on EUV lithography and accumulated market share by being the first to shrink nodes.

I think it's hard to know where to draw the line between derivative product and something unique. If we follow your logic that TSMC hasn't done anything new, then aren't all computer manufacturers just rehashing the ENIAC or whatever? Is a Tesla just a better model T? No, arguably we would say that these products are new to market because they've integrated new technologies in unique ways and often expended massive capital on R&D to do so. TSMC is no different.

Absolutely not TSMC was and has always been a pure play “execution” of chip foundry, based on the government of Taiwan taking financial bets on a growing chip market.

In no way was TSMC the first to market for chips or chip production or even any major chip fab product at its outset.

In fact they did exactly the Apple model and took what TI was doing and used government money to scale it. I don’t know a single unique product from TSMC

If anything Texas Instruments (which is I grew up around in Houston) could be considered actually building a good product from scratch, look at them now…

TSMC had the first copper interconnects, kind of their breakthrough node at the time, and the first EV-based process.

Depending on how you define "new" but there are certainly examples of this, Spotify is the first to come to mind, AWS could be another.

AWS was a literal spinout that’s a different thing entirely

Ok but "Business Email" wasn't exactly invented yesterday...

Which is my point. They did basically nothing new internally and will be able to capture what...10-20% of overall business suite market?

That’s genius

Vision Pro.

A costly gamble for tech they really wanted that wasn't mature yet.

They were still late, just not late enough.

Dominating the market??

Vision Pro failed

Apple fails at every novel thing they try and crushes it at every thing they copy

The iPhone was revolutionary. There really was nothing like it at the time. The closest thing (the PDA) was _nothing_ like it.

there were tons of smartphones on the market prior to the iphone. i used several of them. mostly windows mobile devices that required a stylus or keypad for input. they had apps stores, web browsers, email, etc. copy and paste, which the iphone lacked at release. from a functionality stance there were many options very much like the iphone available. the interface on the iphone was nicer for most things, and it had a nicer web browser. not a different world of functionality at all, just a bit nicer overall but also with some big trade offs.

A world of difference. Completely different products.

i don't understand this take at all. what did the iphone do that the existing devices did not do?

Multitouch

thats certainly a nicer input method, but is that what you're referring to when you say its an entirely different product?

Couldn’t agree more. Those amalgam windows mobile devices were an interesting for the time, but hellish experience imho.

That doesn’t fit: Apple’s been experimenting with VR since the 90s and Vision Pro was hardly novel–well executed, but not novel. I think it’s more complex where you have to think about the products executives and Wall Street analysts want to exist providing pressure against the “is it good enough to buy?” response.

Apple Watch.

There were literally thousands of smart watches that were launched prior to the Apple Watch

Garmin anyone?

I think Timex and Casio even had ones in the 90s

Which ones of those can do notifications, health tracking, sleep cycle, temperature/blood pressure? I’ll wait.

Garmin.

Does anyone take this bozo seriously?

He writes like.... the worst comments. I genuinely hope he gets much needed help. He seems like a bitter sad man.

+1

I appreciate that you made a whole ass new account just for this comment

Cheers to that

Honestly seems like a supportive argument. Yea, your amendment clearly shows Apple isn't always right/late, but Vision Pro is an example of them being early and how far they miss when they're early hah.

(I don't have a side in this discussion)

And I’d add that like AI, there was clearly a conflict inside Apple between people who wanted to be in the game and the people who correctly recognized that it wasn’t yet where most consumers wanted.

Like AI, the Vision Pro would have been a better product if Apple told the detractors to shut up and ship out. NPUs and AR are not going to sway consumers or compete for market share.

Nevermind the godawful Liquid Glass UX they cooked up and imposed on everyone else...

Can I please just have multiple users on my iPads, please?

Doesn’t Shared iPad do exactly this?

Yes, but you have to have MDM. I don't want to run MDM for my kids.

Apple future strategy seems to be to sell ad placements throughout their ecosystem. Very sad about that. :( I especially chose Apple because of the clean experience.

If I’m understanding this correctly it’s a one stop shop for an entire out of the box it department.

No, there's no mention of MDM.

Ctrl-F MDM

"Apple Business offers built-in mobile device management (MDM) [...]"

It’s not clear to me if the MDM is included for free as well or if that will continue to be charged separately (or on top). I looked into their MDM, but ended up going with Mosyle instead because the costs were significantly lower for me.

I believe it said it will be free, starting April 14.

We use Jamf Pro for a small company. I'm not a big fan of the minimum 20 seat pricing model. I hope this will be something small companies can move to easily and have enough coverage to satisfy security reviews.

I was hoping to see more geographies in which AppleCare would be available.

Hopefully some actual competition against GSuite (or whatever it's called these days)

> Enhanced Discoverability in Apple Maps

My first thought from that heading was “my company will know where I am at all times”. Though that was not the point thankfully.

Wow… I might be missing something, but not once did I see AI mentioned! Apple is no slouch in the marketing department— this is surely a deliberate omission. It looks like marketers are finally catching up with public sentiment. I’m sure a lot of people will say it was their abject failure to productize their AI initiatives driving this decision, but I doubt it: the people they’re trying to sell business services to probably don’t know, let alone care about that. I think this term and the industry hype around it is just too radioactive to be beneficial in copy.

I’m happy to be corrected if I missed anything, or entertain alternate conclusions. I’m no expert.

Wow, Apple's finally competing with Google and Microsoft, I can see businesses adopting this everywhere lol, then again Idk as a lot of companies are already in Google and Microsoft's ecosystem.

This is probably an attempt to retarget the education space more with the launch of the neo. Of course targeting a bigger enterprise space is not a bad idea

I assume this is a SaaS by Apple which covers some parts of Workday and Google suite for the beginning

They're basically planning to enter the market where Microsoft has dominant position.

This is cute but it's missing programmable documents (Microsoft) or hooks to use AI (Google) to really challenge either competitor.

It is very funny that a business-oriented product does not highlight Apple's business productivity software in iWork (Pages/Numbers/Keynote).

I thought that's now considered creator productivity software.

After bricking a 2 year old phone after a software update, I'm reluctant with handling my entire business with them.

As long as I don't have to buy/pay for software to manage devices I provide to employees I am satisfied.

Apple should compete with Google workplace or at the very least at least offer custom domain e-mail inboxes.

Custom domains (BYO or buy through Apple) and email hosting is in the announcement, too.

business.apple.com doesn't work in Firefox, it redirects you to https://business.apple.com/abm_unsupported_browser?reason=Br...

Fuck you Apple.

Yes, and it works with a user agent switcher extension for Firefox, which is always the cherry on top.

This is annoying, but that they use user-agent solely to check irritates me even more; even (alternative) Chromium based browser like Vivaldi don't work out of the box. I usually use Vivaldi as an alternative when Firefox doesn't work.

It's 2026. I think we can expect more from Apple. It's not a small indie company after all.

  Supported browser:  
  Safari (14.1 or later)  
  Chrome (87 or later)  
  Microsoft Edge (87 or later)

We live in fantastic times

Hard pass on ads in apple maps. Their navigation was already pretty terrible, this was the reminder I needed to download something else

Incredible. What is this? Actual competition? I don't believe my eyes. Is Apple search next?

they had an opening in search with Siri and AI and missed it.

Not necessarily missed. Maybe just late.

Will this allow iPad profiles? I think that’s a feature in edu? Would be a game changer.

Doesn’t Shared iPad enable that already?

Machines spec’d and priced for education? Support for businesses?

I remember this!

Feels like yet another distraction. I personally believe Apple would benefit from a renewed focus. Product lines are growing, software too, software qualify is not doing well... this is the same pattern that got Apple into a mess before Jobs returned. Sure, things are not exactly the same but it feels like time is echoing here.

I am sure "BUT BUSINESS AND MONEY" is the answer but that feels like a cop out in this case.

I had to look at my calendar to be sure it wasn’t 2001

Apple is terrible for business. Every portal and product require a new apple id. apple store and apple business can't be same apple id. your device id can't be the same as either. Its madness. Last count i have 4 apple ids that I have to shuffle around.

The statement that Apple has been supporting businesses for decades is just the most self-serving bunch of crap. You can tell how thin this is by the way they push local ads on Maps as some kind of headline feature. What a joke.

Hey Siri, should I use Apple Business?

between the neo and now this, apple is setting itself to eat a lot of google's lunch

Yeah that's great and all, but can I get something which will let me delete iPhone contacts in bulk?

It's 2026 and you have to delete contacts one at a time, or press and slide to select a group of them until you reach one you don't want to delete, delete that group, then start over again.

Other basic functionality I'd like includes being able to remote control an iPhone from a device which isn't a modern Mac, and being able to plug in an iPhone and use it as a removable storage device.

do they demand 30% of turnover?

Of course, that's only fair.

>Company data remains secure while employee data remains private, with cryptographic separation of work and personal data on devices.

Does this mean that I'm able to enroll two Apple Accounts on an iPhone at once? Or does Apple actually think that I'm gonna be storing personal data, such as my health data, on a company device with a company-managed Apple Account?

At the moment I just have two iPhones: my personal iPhone that has my data and is connected to my Apple Watch, and my work iPhone, which sits on a desk and does nothing. The separate Apple Account on the work one means that I can't connect it to an Apple Watch and I can't download my apps on it, so you either can't accumulate any personal data on the device, or you need to submit all of your personal data to your employer's Apple Account. Including whatever health data your Apple Watch produces.

I previously tried buying Apple for Business and it was an endless runaround with terrible signup nterfaces and having to call dumb flunkies. The whole process sucked and was disrespectful to their business customers, who do not have the time to deal with such nonsense.

Incidentally, today I saw this video of Steve giving a speech in 1999, published just a week ago. I hadn't seen it before and wouldn't be commenting weren't it for the video.

You may, and probably will, call me a fanboy or argue that reminiscing the good old times when Apple had 4 products are long gone and we live in a different world now. That is true, we live in a different world and focusing on 4 products wouldn't suffice for Apple to survive.

And now again, you may, and probably will, think that I'm burying my head in sand and ignoring many aspects a business needs to consider in order to survive, just to focus on the ones I like or am nostalgic about.

But there is something very special in this simplicity communicated by Steve in the speech. There is something that makes me want to buy a product when I see clearly what it is I'm buying.

On the other hand, there is something very repulsive when I read phrases like: seamless, streamline, gain valuable insights, build trust, in a product announcement.

Don't get me wrong, I am indifferent about Apple Business, probably won't use it and it won't harm me either. My observation is just a coincidence having heard the speech and having read the announcement here. Link to video: https://youtu.be/EoM2Y2KO6kU?si=0DybhDUiqKsWG_Nz

It would be nice to kick google to the curb. I hope this product matures.

A non-terrible MDM that actually works would be really nice. The rest I doubt they get much traction on. Gmail is too easy, Google docs and sheets if you don't need Microsoft is also way better than Apple's free apps.

They’ve had a MDM solution for a number of years now, i’ve not used it because the price was higher than I could afford so I can’t speak to if it actually works or how it is compared to their competitors.

I can say that the MDM solution I went with leaves a lot to be desired, but it works and it’s cheap. Since I’m only managing iPads, I really wanted to go with Apple for the simplicity, but, like I said, the price was too high (at the time at least).

Is it possible to make a non-terrible MDM?

Not a particular area of expertise for me, but the times I've had to deal with it just seemed like an inherently complex and messy problem.

That's because it is a complex and messy problem. Especially MDMs that try to unify the experience for fundamentally different platforms like Apple's and Google's, and even Microsoft's. I think if it's a platform-dedicated solution it actually does have the chance to be much easier to operate. So this thing by Apple looks interesting.

I would expect Apple to actually simplify the problem and not overreach and just do activation / provisioning / deactivation / lock and none of the other stuff MDMs try to do that introduces the complexity.

> including a new option coming this summer that will enable businesses in the U.S. and Canada to place local ads in Maps during key search and discovery moments.

The enshittification knows no bounds.

The big news here is the MDM, for free!

It used to be necessary to use a slew of dodgy providers like Jama, with is 2000 website (and why would I trust any small company with all my enterprise data). ABM didn’t provide the MDM part and that was most annoying. It seems normal to integrate account management and MDM, so I’d love to use it.

That ABM is full of bugs, the Apple team incompetent, and D&B being Dumb and Dunber is another question.

If Apple can turn it into a replacement for 365, they could kill microslop altogether. They rinse basically every organisation in the country, even though their products suck.

Are they taking 30% of the payments?

Nothing like account termination with all your corporate email with no recourse and support because fuck you that's why.

Absolutely do not touch this product with a ten-foot pole.

So they try to pull a Microsoft?

Capitalism works, it may work slowly enough for HN to complain but it works. When MSFT fails their customers, Apple picks up the tab...

now Apple is going for the jagular.

if they can also monetize - location api - via Apple Maps + business messaging that's easily 3+ Billion of revenue yearly.

I detest Apple for constantly bothering me at the store for small business sales pitch. Apple Store experience has really gone down the hill.

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