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Re: Apple Business

#91

Post by zzyzxd »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #81
zzyzxd wrote: post #79

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.

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.

Re: Apple Business

#92

Post by alcidesfonseca »

RussianCow wrote: post #80
999900000999 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*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.

> 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...

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

Re: Apple Business

#93

Post by AndrewKemendo »

valzam wrote: post #57
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Apple Business

#94

Post by bombcar »

martibravo wrote: post #17

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.

$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.

Re: Apple Business

#95

Post by echelon »

MidnightRider39 wrote: post #82
genthree wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 moder…

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.

That's my exact ranking as well.

Re: Apple Business

#96

Post by genthree »

MidnightRider39 wrote: post #82
genthree wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 moder…

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.

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.

Re: Apple Business

#97

Post by dfabulich »

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.

Re: Apple Business

#98

Post by layer8 »

bitpush wrote: post #13
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vision Pro.

Dominating the market??

Re: Apple Business

#99

Post by dangus »

999900000999 wrote: post #33
martibravo wrote: post #17

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.

*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.

Re: Apple Business

#100

Post by martibravo »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #58
martibravo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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