interesting, wonder what will come out of it
I don't know if Apple has it in their DNA to provide systems suitable to large established enterprises. Or even commercial users in general, barring creatives and developers. It may work better with newer companies that rely a lot on cloudy stuff for their back office.
And let's not forget the $$$$. CAD$3.5K for a, not extremely tricked-out, MBP?
But at the same time they do have:
- a reason to be motivated - that's a big untapped market for them and they're running out of consumer opportunities. Less of a potential return than say smart cars, but also less competitive - the smart/EV car field which has major established players. They need something to move the needle on their market valuation basically.
- lack of competition in the enterprise desktop OS. It's basically Windows, with a smattering of Linuxes for some. Anyone who's fed up with Windows/MS might consider macos favorably. Or not. But it's not like they have many other choices, Linux desktops aside.
- Windows 8 and 10. Different enough from 7 (esp 8) that it's not that much more of a jump to train end users to macos. Not exactly stellar perception either. Many people will already know macos from their home use and Office runs on it. And there's a fair bit of dev goodwill towards macos, if not necessarily towards Apple.
- security. Though Apple is sometimes quite sloppy in the details, macos is a BSD/Mach derivative and is generally fairly secure out of the box. Viruses and malware do happen, despite Apple's claims, but they happen at much less frequency in practice.
- Has Apple abandoned their software in the past? Definitely, as other commentards have pointed out. And I recall shabby LDAP implementation glitches. But, again, MS has softened that particular argument with their inability to stick to their own products and dev stacks. The Apple development stack is actually pretty stable - I don't much like ObjectiveC, but it's been around for ages and plays well with newbie Swift. Macos supports a lot of Unix software too - anything that's not GUI is usually good to go.
Methink service, ability to listen and availability of suitable 3rd party service and software offerings will decide, but only if they're ready to commit for the long term. Add to it something to support group policies and IAM.
Yeah, really deep insights here, but they do have some opportunities. Which, to be honest, I doubt they'll pull off - I really don't think it's in their corporate DNA.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
