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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.
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.
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.
One of the last great consumer companies is going B2B
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.
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)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 .
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The company that just made a $600 Macbook?
Apple knows the score internally, this won't change the world any more than the 12" Retina Macbook did.
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/
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.
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.
Apple Business Essentials with AppleCare+ for 3 devices and 200GB iCloud storage is $19.99 per user/mo. That's the same price as AppleCare One alone.
599$ 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.
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...