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 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.
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. (We've used SimpleMDM and love them.)
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
This was a big pain in the ass for me to figure out. I ended up using the free version of Mosyle and hiring someone on Fiverr to help me figure out how to get the licenses assigned to our managed devices.
It can be done that way, but it is definitely not the norm. Businesses will generally “purchase” (many for €0) apps in ABM that are to be used for business purposes and push those to devices, the user can then use an Apple ID to download any other apps they want for personal use.
If they’re using Managed Apple IDs they will have no access at all to the app store and won’t be able to download their own apps anymore. IT department will have to buy and assign any apps that anyone needs, even the $0 ones that only 1 person needs.
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".
FWIW, my experience doing this process for a ~130 person org last year was pretty painless compared to other Domain Claims I've initiated for other SAAS vendors (Docusign in particular), and MDM nightmares (expired JAMF certificates, I'm looking at you).
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.
Yes, as an IT professional at a company where a few people have insisted on using Macs, the ABM workflow is by far the most frustrating, half baked product I've had the displeasure of using. People love to complain about Entra/Azure AD, but ABM is another level of obtuse.
Same here, I never even got in. I never managed to get in. My account is good enough to take my money for other things but somehow I can't manage to onboard into the damn thing so that I can actually manage devices for my company. I just gave up in the end. Couldn't get it done.
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.
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?
I have had the misfortune of having to get D&B numbers (for various Apple things). I believe is the source for lead lists where you start to get dozens to text and phone spam calls per day. Do not pay hundreds of dollars for this if you can at all avoid it.
Definitely avoid unless you are distributing a consumer application through the dominant app stores (App Store and Google Play) ~globally, in which case you may not be able to avoid (or avoiding will be just as much work).
Google and Apple require it for lots of mobile apps targeting certain consumer segments because some countries (eg: Brazil, IIRC? don't quote me on that) have chosen to use D&B as a qualified unique identifier of business legitimacy and it requires exposing personal information of your company's leadership to them.
Genuinely curious, what were the Apple mail service issues for you?
I hate gmail and have had zero issues with my @Mac.com email in 20+ years, that I’ve noticed. Thanks
you only need to do the domain lock part if you plan to use MAIDs. For 20 people you probably didn't need to do that, at least not at the same time as the rest. You can do it as a later step, not the first step.
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."
> 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.
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.
The reality is that every business unit needs to justify its existence and when asking for headcount, it’s easier to point to a revenue stream you’re tied to rather than “we help sell some things to businesses”
The way it works is that Apple would have committed more resources if the projected outcome was more revenue. By choosing to approach it as a free option, they committed a free option's worth of resourcing to it.
People fooled by an expectation of quality extrapolated from their end-user experience. Alternatively, people who have to carry out orders from managers who never have to interact with it personally.
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.
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 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.
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.
I have a google sheet with less than 200 rows in it. Not exactly Big Data. When I load it, the first 100 rows appear pretty much instantly, but the following <100 rows take 9 seconds to load! WTF? I don't know any other spreadsheet that takes that long to load more than 100 rows.
> 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 with just a keyboard on Excel or LibreOffice Calc.
BTW, I hate all the MS Office applications (and find them quite buggy and annoying) except for Excel. Maybe I’m just a lot more used to using Excel.
You may want to look into Karabiner Elements. Understandable if one doesn't want to have to allow a privileged daemon access to key inputs, but it allows for complex, application-focus-aware shortcuts. In the past I used a "Windows on MacOS" config preset because it allowed for my 60~70 key keyboard to operate similarly across win/linux/macos. Finally killed my last windows boot drive and main linux... but I do have a ritualistic annual step into a windows vm to file taxes on crack err with a crakced turbotax hehehe. In-tooits lobbying malpractice is deserving of petty flippancy
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 used.)
I also like Apple's office suite, the problem is network effects. I'd even argue most people don't actually need MS Office. The amount of people using PowerQuery, VBA, etc. is probably less than 2% of users.
The problem is, because everyone else (in business) already has and uses office, if you want to collaborate, that's what you have to use. Open file formats didn't win out in the end.
This is absolutely the problem - with the added issue of platform support.
I’m the only Mac user in our company of 15, which means I’m also the only person that can open a .pages file. Anyone can read a .docx, and if authored in word it will actually look the same on both computers.
Is it 2% who author content using those tools, or are you also including anyone who might need to open and use a spreadsheet using one of those technologies?
This line right he is where I will always stop reading any reply, and block any YouTube channel that uses it in a title. Mind numbingly overused. It's literally verbal clickbait.
I used word for windows 2.0 well into the early 2000s. My needs aren't crazy and I don't think word has added a single feature I've cared about since. Pages is my current go-to.
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.
Exactly. 365 gets you perfect compatibility and the 'real tools that professionals use'. Not Google Docs or some weird Apple thing - the tools that always will read the document.
If you can navigate the terrible UI enough to find the open button on the proper 'ribbon', that is. The ribbon makeover should have textbooks written about it so we can teach our future UI designers not to make the same mistakes again.
Europe here. I disagree. Many SMEs are totally happy with Google Workspace and Canva, as GP mentioned. I know people using just that. And they don't understand why there are people suffering from the Microsoft-Stockholm syndrome.
The market may not yet be 365-sized but as GP mentioned: it's there.
And there are young people arriving at an age to open a business who have never used a Windows computer in their entire life. To them Microsoft is the company that make the virus-infested, slow, computers full of ads they see at their grandparents' house. That cohort ain't buying Windows / buying Office / using Azure.
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.
Anyone on Bedrock Minecraft is probably there for the cross-platform multiplayer. The Java version doesn't substitute for that. (MS made Bedrock and Java incompatible so they can rent-seek on closed mod and server-hosting "marketplaces"; can't let people share things and have fun without paying a middleman after all, think of the wasted "productivity"!)
Everything is half-hearted from Apple since Steve died. He was the beating heart. Who has stepped into that role? Like for real? Anyone? I’m just not seeing it
Weird, never had an issue getting my hands on an Apple laptop of any desired configuration, even odd keyboard layouts for the region (UK and Sweden).
Had plenty of issues getting specific specification Thinkpads: because they are largely sold through resellers and they don’t stock all SKUs I suppose.
I don’t buy this reasoning until there is evidence of orders going unfulfilled.
I could make 20M units of something and leave my resellers as bagholders who then have to sell years old hardware at a discount- and by the internal consistency of your logic: I would have the volumes.
Isn't this an artifact of the demand side and not the supply side?
Yes, apple shipped fewer laptops than dell in 2025. That's because Apple laptops started at $1100 in 2025.
They won't have a problem securing the chips for Mac Neo's, they're the same SOC as the iPhone. What, Apple is going to have an issue manufacturing a few million motherboards?
$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.
> 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.
The companies doing that are cut in two groups. The one that don't fully plan it and they need to do with complex excel or whatever files here and there and they're still in microsoft's grasp, or those that fully do and move to disposable chromebook.
>I'd be scared if I was certain Redmond corporation who makes their money on 365 and Intune.
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.
The companies I know of that would be most likely to do this would never buy these because of the integrated webcams, and no "you can disconnect them easily" is not acceptable, as a matter of policy.
Apple would be near the top of my list of companies incapable of building software that will do this. I cannot believe anyone who has tried Mail.app would be interested in using that for their business. I tried it for 3-ish months and had immense trouble reliably threading, seeing responses, with search, etc.
There's 0 way they have competent, reliable, working group calendaring.
Are you talking Mac or iOS? I have never had an issue on iPhone’s mail app, though my desktop is Linux so I don’t know? Hence the question. I’ve never experienced any of that. Thanks
> 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...
Agreed. I'd love to see what prices companies get for volume purchases. I'm the IT Manager in a small team and if the Neo and this was available last year when we set up MDM/Exchange/SharePoint I would have considered it. Specially on the hardware side, ROI/longevity on an Apple Silicon Macbook is times higher than any given Windows laptop.
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.
The trackpad on the Neo is at the level of a Surface trackpad, which is to say it is worlds better than the typical budget junk you can pick up from Acer.
I disagree strongly. Again, I tried it in store at the exact same time as trying other laptops.
Yes, it's a little bit better than the alternatives, but, critically, not by much. Not by enough to sway a purchase decision.
It's not better than diving board mechanical trackpads by enough of a margin for most consumers to notice.
Also, macOS over-relies on trackpad gestures. You don't really need them anywhere near as much in Windows or Linux. This is Apple's intention: to try and sell more proprietary trackpads, because they know if their OS was optimized for normal mice consumers would just buy the cheap $20 mice that are better than their $100+ accessories.
The PC industry barely has to adapt to compete with the Neo. I think we'll start seeing that in late 2026 and 2027 when competitors arrive on Apple's doorstep.
One of the things is an Acer. The other is a Mac. That sways purchase decisoons - one is a nice thing, the other one is a low end PC.
I have used countless modern PC devices, including some from Acer. Few PCs have a trackpad of the level of the Neo and none from Acer.
Your logic with "Apple's intentions" reveals a person who is incapable of decent analysis; macOS relies on gestures a lot because the vast majority of macOS devices are laptops. The desktop market is an after thought because the people keep buying laptops. That's it. There's no conspiracy, just a focus on the devices that the users choose to buy.
The PC industry has almost no shot of competing with the Neo. You have to spend much more than $1000 to get a nice object that looks and feels nice. Right now, the PC industry is selling Old Navy products when Hermès is the same price. That is a real problem.
Microsoft is going to be fine. Companies that rely on selling low end devices to consumers are going to suffer.
My point is that Apple is in many ways joining Acer, not bringing their luxury product down to the masses.
Yes, in many ways they’re bringing a very polished product to the space. But in many other ways, look closely and you’ll see the cut corners.
Again, I’ve felt the Neo in person. The chassis feels nice, sure. It’s not built to the same level as Apple’s other products, though.
The bottom plate is not CNCed, it’s a stamped aluminum plate. That means there is variation in the gap along the bottom of the laptop between the man case and the bottom plate that doesn’t exist on the Air or Pro.
Again, the trackpad is good but is worse than many haptic trackpads offered by PC manufacturers like Lenovo.
Again, if you think the PC industry has no chance of competing, go to your retailer website and look at street prices. Look at laptop reviews from places like Just Josh Tech on YouTube. PC manufacturers aren’t making trash.
Acer is actually a great example of a really solid PC. I felt the $530 model Micro Center is selling and it seemed to do the job: thin and light enough, felt sturdy, similar trackpad to the Neo, better specs and I/O. I’d say I only wanted the display to be a little better, though on the plus side it was bigger than the Neo’s cramped 13”.
This isn’t 2005. There is a misguided assumption to assume that PCs are still trash like they were 10 years ago. They just aren’t.
One little random bit to point out: there are 100 million Mac users globally as of 2024. There are more than 900 million PC gamers globally.
So, if I’m a high school student or college student who has money for one computer and I am a member of that group of 900 million PC gamers, I might just go get a last gen Lenovo LOQ with the RTX 4050 or something similar in the current gen from someone like MSI with an RTX 5050.
I would deal with a chunkier plastickier laptop but it would get similar battery life to the Neo for office tasks and I could actually play games. 16GB RAM. Modular storage. Price is around $700.
And I’ll be honest, that trackpad ain’t gonna be much worse than the Neo. And I’ll get to keep my backlit keyboard and have some I/O.
You are deeply confused (you do not understand public perception/you do not understand how choosing a ''good pc'' is hard for most people/you don't grasp that a luxury brand versus Acer for the same price is a no brainer for most people, regardless of I/O or whatever) and - frankly - you are not worth discussing anything with. Have a good rest of your day.
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.
I think you might be very surprised by what you can do with eight gigs of RAM on Apple Silicon. Apple does hardware compression into memory - it performs as well as a 16 GB machine did with an Intel chip.
The computer is $600. It’s only $500 on the education store. Many Apple customers will not have access. Anyone who walks into a physical Apple Store will have to prove their eduction status.
I am not sure why it’s eating competitors lunch when many very well-regarded competitors are in the price range available at stores.
What’s better about a Neo than a Yoga 7? Same price range.
Aside from the pitiful screen resolution for a 14-inch screen and the fact that the Lenovo has a fan, they are indeed similar.
But I don't know why you cannot see it as terrible for the PC makers that Apple finally has entered the sub-1000$ market. Since Apple has existed they've been in the high-end of the market, and now they're not. The Lenovo I'm sure is fine, but what it doesn't have is clarity of purpose. The Neo is a laptop and nothing else. Which leads me to question whether that very complicated Lenovo hinge will survive the 7 years my Mac laptops give me.
Millions and millions of normal people have used 8GB M-series Macbooks for the past 5 years, and nobody has those problems you describe. In fact, everybody is happy to have machines which don't have the usual problems that PCs have.
Computing tasks related to real world scenarios don't need giant RAM repositories, as evident in that people could do these tasks just fine when 32 megabytes of RAM was enough.
My phone costs twice as much and I replace it every 2-3 years.
You know what people who outgrow their applebooks are going to do? Buy a macbook air or pro. They aren't going to buy a windows machine. Some might buy a linux machine.
This announcement is pretty sad. If you're wondering why Apple is an IT department nightmare, this announcement is more of a confession. Today your corporate MacBook can have ... preinstalled software! And user groups (for the Apple store and iCloud).
Wait, there's more!
> In addition, customers can now set up business email, calendar, and directory services with their own domain name for seamless and elevated communication and collaboration.
Wow, a custom domain name!
> Apple Business enables automated Managed Apple Account creation for new employees through integration with an identity service provider, including Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra ID, and more.
In the year 2026, I can finally start logging into my corporate laptop with my corporate ID. Wow!
Them stapling on the announcement of advertisements for Apple Maps is especially hilarious. I don't think the people managing fleet devices at a corporation are the same people who are interested in setting their location ad strategy. But Apple saw they had two vaguely business-y things at the same time and thought they would really hit it off together.
I have to imagine that the Apple Neo is heavily aimed at volume sales - low level white collar workers and education. These features seem to be hastily assembled to meet the needs of these potential buyers.
A few months ago, on a price hike announcement for Office365 posted here to YC HN, I made a comment that MDM is expensive, had high MOQs (Mosyle, Jamf) and fundamentally still doesn’t work as well as Windows and Intune. I also lamented that Microsoft keeps hiking prices and that it’s silly we’re normalising $20+ per user per month when we used to pay once for these things.
I lamented how Apple hardware is now the same price as the other vendors, yet best in class for quality and how Dell and HP are hiking their laptop pricing lately due to supply shortages. Especially on their pro lines, which have been quoted to me as twice the price of equivalent MacBooks.
I mentioned Apple would be silly not to make a further global move into MDM and email hosting territory. Particularly for small business owners: 1-10 person shops and retail who use mostly cloud based POS applications.
Others responded at the time, and I agreed with it, that it seems unlikely Apple would make a business move. After all, they don’t have much history with business, or perhaps they did but they didn’t like the market and wrapped it up.
Well, with this announcement, and with the confirmation that *Apple native email hosting is coming* I am very excited to trial it when it lands in April. Over the last few months, our small business has already cracked it and downgraded most of our email hosting to Exchange Plan 1 and dropped the desktop Office suite in favour of Pages and Numbers, which are both free and absolutely working fine. In fact, I’ve found Pages to be less laggy and more stable than Word in very large documents such as 300+ pages. The logical next step for us is to fully drop our third-party MDM and review whether Apple’s native MDM, email and identity systems are adequate for transition. We have saved thousands of $$ so far and stand to save a lot more!
Will we be able to change our company details? A couple of years ago we changed the business name, so let's change it in the account for billing and such.
Not possible.
Ok, let's ask support what to do: the only thing we can do is create a new account, get the approval, etc. and then ask for a migration that may or may not be approved and may or may not end succesfully.
In the end we keep receiving the bills in the old name, then change it manually or append a note.
A bit like the awful workflow around developer agreements in App Store Connect. Every few months our CI breaks because Apple has updated one agreement or another and someone has to go pester the executive who's marked as the account owner and has legal authority to sign new agreements to unbreak our CI.
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.
All of these, too.
Then for some goddamn reason i no longer can just input the username and password: for one of the developer accounts it has decided that i also have to decide wether i want to authenticate with an apple device, or by password. So it's another couple of clicks i can't get rid of
I guess ultimately it's easier and works better than when you move country and would like to update the country for PSN (PlayStation Network). Sony's advice? Close the old account and open a new one with the correct country, then buy the same stuff again.
I'm called by a name that is not the same as my legal name. I somehow got an Apple Developer account during the first few years of it with my preferred name, but it had my parents' house as the mailing address.
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.
I've still got a phantom child on my Apple account because when I tried to create a child's account many years ago for my son it somehow messed up and used the current year instead of his birth year. Support said too bad, no possible way to fix that. So I had to create another account for my real son, and while he grew up and moved out, my phantom son still lives with us for another nine years until it is old enough that I can delete it.
Out of curiosity, why would any business with an IT department choose this over an in-house solution built from standard open source components. Think email server on premises or in the cloud using postfix/dovecot/LDAP, maybe Nextcloud with OnlyOffice, Jitsi as a Zoom substitute, etc. These are all mature solutions that are free of vendor lock-in, and can be easily managed by any competent IT team.
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 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.
Actually Intune handles MacOS reasonably well, you don’t need Jamf; that’s the way we went, and it’s okay-ish for the most part. By far the annoyingest thing is getting Macs bought before we went down the Business Manager integration route into MDM.
You think there’s a standard way to do that? Just install company portal? That worked in exactly 1/20 cases. It’s an exciting new error on every single device. Awful. Just awful.
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.
Dunno if you've ever had a business relationship with Apple but they're really good on that front. Proactive and helpful, along with always trying to sell you stuff, but proactive and helpful nonetheless.
A B2C relationship and a B2B relationship are not the same thing. Apple does well with the B2C pipeline, but they will only surpass Jamf in the B2B department if they play dirty.
I have managed multiple relationships with Apple business and the only thing I can think you could possibly be talking about is having a local store reserve devices for you to buy.
As far as identifying a bug in the software and getting it fixed, or requesting a feature, you run into a brick wall. Taking that feedback from customers is not the Apple way. This is why there is a market for third party MDM companies in the first place.
It's not apparent that this apple mdm will do internal distribution or just provide for encouraging a set of installed apps already on the app store. If it does, that would be the biggest reason for me to jump to the free product.
I wonder if this was timed to lineup with the MacBook Neo launch, which makes the idea of equipping your entire company with Mac laptops a lot more compelling from a cost perspective.
How does this differ from the existing "Business Essentials" tool? The landing page for each looks like much the same product, at least the MDM stuff does?
Email, Calendar and company directory built in, custom domains in emails I think... It's more like a MS365 basic version. Which for most small teams is more than enough
One of the footnotes at the bottom of the page says:
> 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.
It's kinda crazy it took Apple this long to make this.
I've worked with two agencies now that used only Macs across the business and had a really fun time signing in to and integrating 58 Google services every time they hired someone new.
It's possible people may continue to use Google Workspaces in these places, however, the fact that there was never even an Apple option was always wild to me.
Who will Apple serve? Users, Apple or their partners?
It has always been Apple > Users > Partners.
There's a reason why Microsoft is still the king of enterprises. Anybody getting involved with this with Apple will deserve everything thats coming their way
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.
It’s not clear to me if the MDM is included for free as well or if that will continue to be charged separately (or on top). I looked into their MDM, but ended up going with Mosyle instead because the costs were significantly lower for me.
This sucks. This page makes it clear this is the motivation for "Ads on Maps", as they talk about it prominently here - they are now directly selling the attention of their device consumers to their business customers.
I guess they were doing that before in the App Store, which is of course also awful.
Apple's entire success story is their vertical integration. They can't do that and OEM.
As for the PC makers: they don't innovate. Microsoft doesn't care who sells PCs, Intel doesn't care who sells PCs. Every PC maker is essentially an assembly company. If you appreciate Apple's innovation in the laptop space over the past x years, then you don't want Apple to be an OEM.
Who has successfully managed this kind of transition? The obvious case is IBM which is now essentially a consulting company and doesn’t sell PCs anymore.
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.
> they've priced the consumer/pro-sumer out of the market prettymuch
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)
None of that refutes anything that was said. macOS is a third-class citizen measured by market share, and the total sum of annual Mac profits is lower than what the iPad ecosystem makes in a year.
Consumers do not want the Mac. Datacenters don't want Apple Silicon. People want the iPhone, they want Airpods, but the M-series Macs have spent 5 years changing absolutely nothing.
> and the total sum of annual Mac profits is lower than what the iPad ecosystem makes in a year.
So the company that makes between 50-60% of all profits in personal computers has created a market where it makes 100% of the profits, but albeit smaller than the whole PC market. That's terrrrible, what was Apple thinking!
Market share is far from everything when people live in poverty and do not have money to spend on good hardware and software. Apple makes stuff for affluent people, and then makes a ton of money from those rich folks. Making Apple the most valuable company in the history of humanity. Boy, that's a terrible place to be in!
I shouldn't have to repeat myself; this still doesn't refute the claim that Apple has ceded the consumer compute market. Cheap Macs have flooded the used market for years, and people still gravitate towards plastic Wintel boxes and Chromebooks.
> Apple makes stuff for affluent people
is just repeating the original claim upthread:
>> they've priced the consumer/pro-sumer out of the market prettymuch and so B2B is the more sustainable paying population.
It would be great if you could get correct invoice and pay price without VAT in EU as a VAT registered business. It is incredible they can get around without providing such a basic thing for so long.
no, but many apps can independently use a different Apple (nee iCloud) Account specifically for that app.
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.
> Starting April 14, Apple Business will be available as a free service in the U.S. and 200+ countries and regions to new and existing users of Apple Business Connect, Apple Business Essentials, and Apple Business Manager.
Does this mean — Always Free or Introductory Free for now?
I understand it's free to set up the business but iCloud, AppleCare and Email/Calendar storage past the free (I suppose tiny) allowance are paid. As Apple loves, freemium with in-app purchases!
When Apple vertically integrates it works for them. All the way from the cloud to the OS to the hardware. Pretty sure this will beat out tools like JAMF on user privacy alone by running trusted MDM adjacent tools in kernel space.
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.
I think it's hard to know where to draw the line between derivative product and something unique. If we follow your logic that TSMC hasn't done anything new, then aren't all computer manufacturers just rehashing the ENIAC or whatever? Is a Tesla just a better model T? No, arguably we would say that these products are new to market because they've integrated new technologies in unique ways and often expended massive capital on R&D to do so. TSMC is no different.
Absolutely not TSMC was and has always been a pure play “execution” of chip foundry, based on the government of Taiwan taking financial bets on a growing chip market.
In no way was TSMC the first to market for chips or chip production or even any major chip fab product at its outset.
In fact they did exactly the Apple model and took what TI was doing and used government money to scale it. I don’t know a single unique product from TSMC
If anything Texas Instruments (which is I grew up around in Houston) could be considered actually building a good product from scratch, look at them now…
Honestly seems like a supportive argument. Yea, your amendment clearly shows Apple isn't always right/late, but Vision Pro is an example of them being early and how far they miss when they're early hah.
And I’d add that like AI, there was clearly a conflict inside Apple between people who wanted to be in the game and the people who correctly recognized that it wasn’t yet where most consumers wanted.
Like AI, the Vision Pro would have been a better product if Apple told the detractors to shut up and ship out. NPUs and AR are not going to sway consumers or compete for market share.
Nevermind the godawful Liquid Glass UX they cooked up and imposed on everyone else...
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 nicer web browser. not a different world of functionality at all, just a bit nicer overall but also with some big trade offs.
That doesn’t fit: Apple’s been experimenting with VR since the 90s and Vision Pro was hardly novel–well executed, but not novel. I think it’s more complex where you have to think about the products executives and Wall Street analysts want to exist providing pressure against the “is it good enough to buy?” response.
I occasionally trial complete switches to Apple services to see if they're viable as Google alternatives. This weekend was Apple maps and it's finally met my standard of "usable", though not quite "good". One of the places it beat Google maps was the lack of integrated advertising places, which have enshittified the latter.
I'm glad Apple announced their own plans to enshittify before I got my hopes up.
Wow, Apple's finally competing with Google and Microsoft, I can see businesses adopting this everywhere lol, then again Idk as a lot of companies are already in Google and Microsoft's ecosystem.
Feels like yet another distraction. I personally believe Apple would benefit from a renewed focus. Product lines are growing, software too, software qualify is not doing well... this is the same pattern that got Apple into a mess before Jobs returned. Sure, things are not exactly the same but it feels like time is echoing here.
I am sure "BUT BUSINESS AND MONEY" is the answer but that feels like a cop out in this case.
The nice thing about many of the native apps compared to their Google pendants is the absence of ads, with the glaring exception of the app store, which looks like a dumpster-fire. It is so disheartening to see the trend of shoving ads everywhere continue with Apple as well. I guess the profits are just too tempting to stick with idealistic UX decisions, if there was any of that left in the first place.
>Company data remains secure while employee data remains private, with cryptographic separation of work and personal data on devices.
Does this mean that I'm able to enroll two Apple Accounts on an iPhone at once? Or does Apple actually think that I'm gonna be storing personal data, such as my health data, on a company device with a company-managed Apple Account?
At the moment I just have two iPhones: my personal iPhone that has my data and is connected to my Apple Watch, and my work iPhone, which sits on a desk and does nothing. The separate Apple Account on the work one means that I can't connect it to an Apple Watch and I can't download my apps on it, so you either can't accumulate any personal data on the device, or you need to submit all of your personal data to your employer's Apple Account. Including whatever health data your Apple Watch produces.
A non-terrible MDM that actually works would be really nice. The rest I doubt they get much traction on. Gmail is too easy, Google docs and sheets if you don't need Microsoft is also way better than Apple's free apps.
They’ve had a MDM solution for a number of years now, i’ve not used it because the price was higher than I could afford so I can’t speak to if it actually works or how it is compared to their competitors.
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).
That's because it is a complex and messy problem. Especially MDMs that try to unify the experience for fundamentally different platforms like Apple's and Google's, and even Microsoft's. I think if it's a platform-dedicated solution it actually does have the chance to be much easier to operate. So this thing by Apple looks interesting.
I would expect Apple to actually simplify the problem and not overreach and just do activation / provisioning / deactivation / lock and none of the other stuff MDMs try to do that introduces the complexity.
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.
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.)
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".
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.
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.
Google and Apple require it for lots of mobile apps targeting certain consumer segments because some countries (eg: Brazil, IIRC? don't quote me on that) have chosen to use D&B as a qualified unique identifier of business legitimacy and it requires exposing personal information of your company's leadership to them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For me it’s completely inverted; Google is top place, then Libreoffice, then MSOffice, then anything by Apple last place.
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.
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 with just a keyboard on Excel or LibreOffice Calc.
BTW, I hate all the MS Office applications (and find them quite buggy and annoying) except for Excel. Maybe I’m just a lot more used to using Excel.
And you hit the nail on the head with the whole 'Office = the document always opens/looks right' thing.
(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 used.)
I also like Apple's office suite, the problem is network effects. I'd even argue most people don't actually need MS Office. The amount of people using PowerQuery, VBA, etc. is probably less than 2% of users.
The problem is, because everyone else (in business) already has and uses office, if you want to collaborate, that's what you have to use. Open file formats didn't win out in the end.
This is absolutely the problem - with the added issue of platform support.
I’m the only Mac user in our company of 15, which means I’m also the only person that can open a .pages file. Anyone can read a .docx, and if authored in word it will actually look the same on both computers.
This line right he is where I will always stop reading any reply, and block any YouTube channel that uses it in a title. Mind numbingly overused. It's literally verbal clickbait.
The market may not yet be 365-sized but as GP mentioned: it's there.
And there are young people arriving at an age to open a business who have never used a Windows computer in their entire life. To them Microsoft is the company that make the virus-infested, slow, computers full of ads they see at their grandparents' house. That cohort ain't buying Windows / buying Office / using Azure.
Nobody at Microsoft is saying, "we don't care if Apple chips away at SMB because we have Call of Duty"
For example, if you want to use "data model" in Excel, it is only available in the windows version.
25m Macs in calendar year 2025. Lenovo manufactured 19m PCs in Q4 2025.
Apple simply lacks volume.
Had plenty of issues getting specific specification Thinkpads: because they are largely sold through resellers and they don’t stock all SKUs I suppose.
The x86 market is massive and dwarfs Apple’s Mac manufacturing.
I could make 20M units of something and leave my resellers as bagholders who then have to sell years old hardware at a discount- and by the internal consistency of your logic: I would have the volumes.
Yes, apple shipped fewer laptops than dell in 2025. That's because Apple laptops started at $1100 in 2025.
They won't have a problem securing the chips for Mac Neo's, they're the same SOC as the iPhone. What, Apple is going to have an issue manufacturing a few million motherboards?
87m
https://www.semiconductor-today.com/news_items/2026/mar/tern...
do you think lenovo would rather manufacture 19m PCs or 87m phones? i don't know, you raise an interesting point that is wrong.
The NEO is a masterclass in how integrated these systems actually are.
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.
The companies doing that are cut in two groups. The one that don't fully plan it and they need to do with complex excel or whatever files here and there and they're still in microsoft's grasp, or those that fully do and move to disposable chromebook.
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.
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.
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...
One point of contact for support.
Microsoft isn't going to get it together anytime soon, it's a new dawn.
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.
And the best thing is that you can format the drive, install Linux, and be completely free of Microsoft and Apple.
Yes, it's a little bit better than the alternatives, but, critically, not by much. Not by enough to sway a purchase decision.
It's not better than diving board mechanical trackpads by enough of a margin for most consumers to notice.
Also, macOS over-relies on trackpad gestures. You don't really need them anywhere near as much in Windows or Linux. This is Apple's intention: to try and sell more proprietary trackpads, because they know if their OS was optimized for normal mice consumers would just buy the cheap $20 mice that are better than their $100+ accessories.
The PC industry barely has to adapt to compete with the Neo. I think we'll start seeing that in late 2026 and 2027 when competitors arrive on Apple's doorstep.
I have used countless modern PC devices, including some from Acer. Few PCs have a trackpad of the level of the Neo and none from Acer.
Your logic with "Apple's intentions" reveals a person who is incapable of decent analysis; macOS relies on gestures a lot because the vast majority of macOS devices are laptops. The desktop market is an after thought because the people keep buying laptops. That's it. There's no conspiracy, just a focus on the devices that the users choose to buy.
The PC industry has almost no shot of competing with the Neo. You have to spend much more than $1000 to get a nice object that looks and feels nice. Right now, the PC industry is selling Old Navy products when Hermès is the same price. That is a real problem.
Microsoft is going to be fine. Companies that rely on selling low end devices to consumers are going to suffer.
Yes, in many ways they’re bringing a very polished product to the space. But in many other ways, look closely and you’ll see the cut corners.
Again, I’ve felt the Neo in person. The chassis feels nice, sure. It’s not built to the same level as Apple’s other products, though.
The bottom plate is not CNCed, it’s a stamped aluminum plate. That means there is variation in the gap along the bottom of the laptop between the man case and the bottom plate that doesn’t exist on the Air or Pro.
Again, the trackpad is good but is worse than many haptic trackpads offered by PC manufacturers like Lenovo.
Again, if you think the PC industry has no chance of competing, go to your retailer website and look at street prices. Look at laptop reviews from places like Just Josh Tech on YouTube. PC manufacturers aren’t making trash.
Acer is actually a great example of a really solid PC. I felt the $530 model Micro Center is selling and it seemed to do the job: thin and light enough, felt sturdy, similar trackpad to the Neo, better specs and I/O. I’d say I only wanted the display to be a little better, though on the plus side it was bigger than the Neo’s cramped 13”.
This isn’t 2005. There is a misguided assumption to assume that PCs are still trash like they were 10 years ago. They just aren’t.
One little random bit to point out: there are 100 million Mac users globally as of 2024. There are more than 900 million PC gamers globally.
So, if I’m a high school student or college student who has money for one computer and I am a member of that group of 900 million PC gamers, I might just go get a last gen Lenovo LOQ with the RTX 4050 or something similar in the current gen from someone like MSI with an RTX 5050.
I would deal with a chunkier plastickier laptop but it would get similar battery life to the Neo for office tasks and I could actually play games. 16GB RAM. Modular storage. Price is around $700.
And I’ll be honest, that trackpad ain’t gonna be much worse than the Neo. And I’ll get to keep my backlit keyboard and have some I/O.
Back in the normal world people don't use Linux. If you have the funds you can get an M4 Air with 16GB for 800$.
I still have a 8GB M1 air, it's fine for filling out paper work and watching YouTube, which is the extent of what most people do
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 pretty plain to see that the Neo eats any competitors lunch at that price point. It isn't close.
I am not sure why it’s eating competitors lunch when many very well-regarded competitors are in the price range available at stores.
What’s better about a Neo than a Yoga 7? Same price range.
https://www.bestbuy.com/product/lenovo-yoga-7-2-in-1-copilot...
This is $40 more than the Neo’s top model and you get double the RAM and an OLED convertible touch screen.
But I don't know why you cannot see it as terrible for the PC makers that Apple finally has entered the sub-1000$ market. Since Apple has existed they've been in the high-end of the market, and now they're not. The Lenovo I'm sure is fine, but what it doesn't have is clarity of purpose. The Neo is a laptop and nothing else. Which leads me to question whether that very complicated Lenovo hinge will survive the 7 years my Mac laptops give me.
Computing tasks related to real world scenarios don't need giant RAM repositories, as evident in that people could do these tasks just fine when 32 megabytes of RAM was enough.
You know what people who outgrow their applebooks are going to do? Buy a macbook air or pro. They aren't going to buy a windows machine. Some might buy a linux machine.
Wait, there's more!
> In addition, customers can now set up business email, calendar, and directory services with their own domain name for seamless and elevated communication and collaboration.
Wow, a custom domain name!
> Apple Business enables automated Managed Apple Account creation for new employees through integration with an identity service provider, including Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra ID, and more.
In the year 2026, I can finally start logging into my corporate laptop with my corporate ID. Wow!
Them stapling on the announcement of advertisements for Apple Maps is especially hilarious. I don't think the people managing fleet devices at a corporation are the same people who are interested in setting their location ad strategy. But Apple saw they had two vaguely business-y things at the same time and thought they would really hit it off together.
I have to imagine that the Apple Neo is heavily aimed at volume sales - low level white collar workers and education. These features seem to be hastily assembled to meet the needs of these potential buyers.
I lamented how Apple hardware is now the same price as the other vendors, yet best in class for quality and how Dell and HP are hiking their laptop pricing lately due to supply shortages. Especially on their pro lines, which have been quoted to me as twice the price of equivalent MacBooks.
I mentioned Apple would be silly not to make a further global move into MDM and email hosting territory. Particularly for small business owners: 1-10 person shops and retail who use mostly cloud based POS applications.
Others responded at the time, and I agreed with it, that it seems unlikely Apple would make a business move. After all, they don’t have much history with business, or perhaps they did but they didn’t like the market and wrapped it up.
Well, with this announcement, and with the confirmation that *Apple native email hosting is coming* I am very excited to trial it when it lands in April. Over the last few months, our small business has already cracked it and downgraded most of our email hosting to Exchange Plan 1 and dropped the desktop Office suite in favour of Pages and Numbers, which are both free and absolutely working fine. In fact, I’ve found Pages to be less laggy and more stable than Word in very large documents such as 300+ pages. The logical next step for us is to fully drop our third-party MDM and review whether Apple’s native MDM, email and identity systems are adequate for transition. We have saved thousands of $$ so far and stand to save a lot more!
Not possible.
Ok, let's ask support what to do: the only thing we can do is create a new account, get the approval, etc. and then ask for a migration that may or may not be approved and may or may not end succesfully.
In the end we keep receiving the bills in the old name, then change it manually or append a note.
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.
[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.
You think there’s a standard way to do that? Just install company portal? That worked in exactly 1/20 cases. It’s an exciting new error on every single device. Awful. Just awful.
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.
https://mosyle.com/
Jamf will do that. Apple will not.
As far as identifying a bug in the software and getting it fixed, or requesting a feature, you run into a brick wall. Taking that feedback from customers is not the Apple way. This is why there is a market for third party MDM companies in the first place.
> https://business.apple.com/preview
> https://www.apple.com/business/essentials/
> 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.
I've worked with two agencies now that used only Macs across the business and had a really fun time signing in to and integrating 58 Google services every time they hired someone new.
It's possible people may continue to use Google Workspaces in these places, however, the fact that there was never even an Apple option was always wild to me.
It has always been Apple > Users > Partners.
There's a reason why Microsoft is still the king of enterprises. Anybody getting involved with this with Apple will deserve everything thats coming their way
"Apple Business offers built-in mobile device management (MDM) [...]"
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 guess they were doing that before in the App Store, which is of course also awful.
https://i.ibb.co/zV8d9gbc/IMG-2177.jpg
They dynamically reveal 1-3 results and only show a “see more options in App Store” button when they feel like it.
As for the PC makers: they don't innovate. Microsoft doesn't care who sells PCs, Intel doesn't care who sells PCs. Every PC maker is essentially an assembly company. If you appreciate Apple's innovation in the laptop space over the past x years, then you don't want Apple to be an OEM.
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)
Apple knows the score internally, this won't change the world any more than the 12" Retina Macbook did.
The company that captures 60-70% of the global PC industry's profits. Definitely completely insignificant.
Apple has known the score internally for decades and is laughing that score all the way to the bank.
Consumers do not want the Mac. Datacenters don't want Apple Silicon. People want the iPhone, they want Airpods, but the M-series Macs have spent 5 years changing absolutely nothing.
So the company that makes between 50-60% of all profits in personal computers has created a market where it makes 100% of the profits, but albeit smaller than the whole PC market. That's terrrrible, what was Apple thinking!
Market share is far from everything when people live in poverty and do not have money to spend on good hardware and software. Apple makes stuff for affluent people, and then makes a ton of money from those rich folks. Making Apple the most valuable company in the history of humanity. Boy, that's a terrible place to be in!
> Apple makes stuff for affluent people
is just repeating the original claim upthread:
>> they've priced the consumer/pro-sumer out of the market prettymuch and so B2B is the more sustainable paying population.
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.
Does this mean — Always Free or Introductory Free for now?
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.
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.
In no way was TSMC the first to market for chips or chip production or even any major chip fab product at its outset.
In fact they did exactly the Apple model and took what TI was doing and used government money to scale it. I don’t know a single unique product from TSMC
If anything Texas Instruments (which is I grew up around in Houston) could be considered actually building a good product from scratch, look at them now…
(I don't have a side in this discussion)
Nevermind the godawful Liquid Glass UX they cooked up and imposed on everyone else...
Apple fails at every novel thing they try and crushes it at every thing they copy
Garmin anyone?
I think Timex and Casio even had ones in the 90s
That’s genius
I'm glad Apple announced their own plans to enshittify before I got my hopes up.
Hey, Big Ad Tech, come try enshitify my Rand McNally.
They're basically planning to enter the market where Microsoft has dominant position.
I am sure "BUT BUSINESS AND MONEY" is the answer but that feels like a cop out in this case.
Does this mean that I'm able to enroll two Apple Accounts on an iPhone at once? Or does Apple actually think that I'm gonna be storing personal data, such as my health data, on a company device with a company-managed Apple Account?
At the moment I just have two iPhones: my personal iPhone that has my data and is connected to my Apple Watch, and my work iPhone, which sits on a desk and does nothing. The separate Apple Account on the work one means that I can't connect it to an Apple Watch and I can't download my apps on it, so you either can't accumulate any personal data on the device, or you need to submit all of your personal data to your employer's Apple Account. Including whatever health data your Apple Watch produces.
I remember this!
Fuck you Apple.
We live in fantastic times
Absolutely do not touch this product with a ten-foot pole.
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.
if they can also monetize - location api - via Apple Maps + business messaging that's easily 3+ Billion of revenue yearly.