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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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

This sort of thing should probably be illegal.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

Apple simply lacks volume.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Jamf will do that. Apple will not.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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.