Though the whole setting has changed, this harkens back to NeXT's stated mission prior to merging with Apple: To be the preferred business alternative to Microsoft.
Business Essentials
241–250 of 316 posts
Re: Business Essentials
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Business use is a collateral win for apple. There’s a lot of effort that goes in to support and partner channels for enterprise offerings. Making servers seemed easy enough? Look where that ended up. It’s a completely different business.
Is it? Apple is the go to solution for all media types (photography, film making, design, architecture). The alignment with Adobe products has existed longer than either was cool.
Yes, but that is a completely different setting than an enterprise one.
Having supported large enterprises and pieces of the movie production industry I can tell you there’s a vast difference in how end-user IT is treated.
The users you are referring to are power users that get to select their own tools, more akin to developers (at decent places at least).
Currently a dev manager, about half of my dev team want to use mac. They can, with zero support from central IT.
That’s not a choice our sales org have, for example.
Re: Business Essentials
#243Smart play to focus on businesses with fewer than 500 employees, as those are the most likely to grow in the next 3-7 years into larger accounts, and they don't have the 12-18mo sales cycle and shennanigans of an enterprise. It's a strategic departure from being a consumer luxury product company, and the shift to enterprise suggests they're out of ideas, but at the rate they're losing consumer growth I'd say they've…
Smart to focus on smaller businesses but foolish albeit expected to only include Apple products in the solution. I'd put money on the overwhelming majority of businesses that have any Apple devices also have non Apple devices. Very few will be purely Apple environments and those that are would hardly qualify as enterprise environments. The reason is simple, Apple has failed to provide the needed suite of enterprise s…
> Smart to focus on smaller businesses but foolish albeit expected to only include Apple products in the solution.
Apple isn't here to be end-all-be-all for their customers. They are there to sell products and services that make sense for their customers.
If others undercut them or provide more comprehensive service, then that's a market Apple has decided not to compete in now. Good for their competitors.
Re: Business Essentials
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should still do some blocking to make sure he learns how to circumvent them. Those are valuable skills to have later in life, I still profit from the lessons I learned circumventing high school internet restrictions.
Through Norton's suite I had filtered out YouTube app from being installed. It took ~10 minutes for my 5 yo to figure out use it via Safari :-| Since then it's been education over enforcement as OPs have mentioned.
Does the Norton suite not have website/URLbase filtering? Weak sauce.
Re: Business Essentials
#245So just to make sure I'm reading this correctly (this is not my area of speciality so bear with me): This is Apple-hosted MDM, yes? I took a brief spin through this world on a consulting project a few years ago and I found it SUPER weird that Apple didn't do this already. You had to do this weird dance between Apple Business Manager and the MDM solution (we ended up with SimpleMDM but looked at a bunch). I kept sayin…
Agree I manage 500+ Apple devices and have been in disbelief that Apple recommends using JAMF to manage their own devices. I use profile manager included with the Server App of MacOS and it is functional but limited in scope. I have expressed for years frustration that Apple recommends using MDM/ profiles to manage their devices … and then doesn’t even really offer an enterprise version of the software. Google by con…
We used JAMF at my last place of business, and it would occasionally kill apps with a 15 minute warning. Normally this was fine, but it really sucked to get JAMFed (as it came to be called) in the middle of a presentation.
At my current company, we use something that destroys CPU and battery (unused 2019 high end MBP hangs sporadically for tens of seconds on any file system syscall, computer gets uncomfortably hot, battery lasts ~1hour on a full charge—happens to everyone I’ve talked to). Not sure what it’s called, but this falcond process always seems to be the culprit. I know nothing about MDM, but I would love it if Apple Business Essentials would be a viable alternative (hard to imagine Apple shipping such miserable software, anyway).
Re: Business Essentials
#246The challenge for Apple is going to be their unwillingness to integrate with others. Business Manager only integrates with MS Azure Active Directory for IAM. The vast majority of small business do not have Azure Active Directory. They either have nothing, or they have Google Workspace. Apple needs to not just launch a competitor for AD. They need to properly support integrated directory services with a broader range…
I suspect integrating with Google is just a v2 feature.
Not to mention Okta, etc. Though for Apple's target market Azure was probably the best initial integration.
Re: Business Essentials
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make an appointment 2 weeks from now, go there to hand it in, return in another 2 weeks to be handed a refurbished machine with your data gone? Sorry to say, that's not competitive with what other vendors offer as business support.
> Make an appointment 2 weeks from now, go there to hand it in, return in another 2 weeks to be handed a refurbished machine with your data gone? Every time I've visited an Apple store with a problem I've left within 30 mins with either it fixed or a replacement. What you're describing sounds more like the traditional Dell or HP approach! One of the best things about Apple is being able to visit a store in almost any…
If you have a more serious issue the default procedure is to just wipe the device and replace the logic board for the flat rate repair fee. I have a macbook that just shuts off randomly and turns on with CPU1 halt error messages. I bring it to the apple store and they told me flat out they don't know what is going on with the device, gotta replace. Also had macbooks with gpu issues, same deal send away wipe the device and replace the logic board and hope that fixes it. I had a macbook where the flex cable to the screen was going and same thing, wipe and send away. All they do in the store is software based solutions, they scan for hardware issues and they send it away to be repaired.
I wonder what sort of issues you had that could have been fixed in 30 minutes or what sort of replacements you've been given? That's not been my experience at all at apple stores and I've been bringing them screwed up laptops to fix for ten years. I've never been just handed a replacement laptop that day, its always been send away the computer for at least a week and they try gutting it and putting in all new parts vs troubleshooting the underlying issue and replacing the perhaps one bad component that is the root cause.
Re: Business Essentials
#248The challenge for Apple is going to be their unwillingness to integrate with others. Business Manager only integrates with MS Azure Active Directory for IAM. The vast majority of small business do not have Azure Active Directory. They either have nothing, or they have Google Workspace. Apple needs to not just launch a competitor for AD. They need to properly support integrated directory services with a broader range…
At the MSP I work at every single customer we have uses Azure AD. G Suite isn't a proper business e-mail solution for a business with any more than 3 users - Exchange and Azure AD are the gold standard for cloud based office for SMB.
Re: Business Essentials
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Make an appointment 2 weeks from now, go there to hand it in, return in another 2 weeks to be handed a refurbished machine with your data gone? Every time I've visited an Apple store with a problem I've left within 30 mins with either it fixed or a replacement. What you're describing sounds more like the traditional Dell or HP approach! One of the best things about Apple is being able to visit a store in almost any…
If you have a more serious issue the default procedure is to just wipe the device and replace the logic board for the flat rate repair fee. I have a macbook that just shuts off randomly and turns on with CPU1 halt error messages. I bring it to the apple store and they told me flat out they don't know what is going on with the device, gotta replace. Also had macbooks with gpu issues, same deal send away wipe the devic…
I'm not some kind of power-customer - just a normal consumer. They always say 'sorry we'll fix that' and fix it then and there or they say 'sorry can't fix it immediately we'll swap it' and I walk out with a new one in minutes. If they wanted to keep it over night I'd be extremely surprised.
Re: Business Essentials
#2502TB of storage for $12 a month? Plus the multi-device management options? Sign me up.
Google One has 9.99/ month for 2TB Option. Which also comes with a VPN. If Price is the differentiator, I think google provides the best value, but also provide additional services with their storage plans.
Google drive business also offers infinite storage