Live data from Hacker News

Apple Business

apple.com

141–150 of 461 posts

Re: Apple Business

#142
post #77

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 perso…

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?

Re: Apple Business

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use…

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

Re: Apple Business

#144

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 JumpC…

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.

Re: Apple Business

#145
post #77

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 perso…

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

Re: Apple Business

#146
post #137

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…

> 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 wi…

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

Re: Apple Business

#147
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.

Re: Apple Business

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Apple Business

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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".

Re: Apple Business

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A world of difference. Completely different products.
Post reply on HN