Discussion
giobox: 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?> https://business.apple.com/preview> https://www.apple.com/business/essentials/
throwaw12: I assume this is a SaaS by Apple which covers some parts of Workday and Google suite for the beginningThey're basically planning to enter the market where Microsoft has dominant position.
martibravo: 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.
SunshineTheCat: 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.
alberth: Is this just Fleetsmith (that Apple acquired 6-years ago)?https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/24/apple-has-acquired-fleetsm...
simonw: 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.
dehrmann: Apple's really late to this.
AndrewKemendo: Apple is “late” to everything which is why it’s the leaderBeing early is the same as being wrong and there’s no business value in costly exploration of new territory at least in the 21st centuryName me a single company that is still in business and dominating a market based on being first to market with a new product.
bitpush: Vision Pro.
sosodev: TSMC. They dominate the semiconductor market because they're consistently first to market with the world's most advanced chip fabrication.
AndrewKemendo: 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 TSMCIf 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…
SamuelAdams: 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/
awakeasleep: Big yes. Enterprises need support and a relationship with their supplier where their needs can change product direction.Jamf will do that. Apple will not.
999900000999: *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.
ceejayoz: 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.
selectively: 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.
martibravo: 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.
martibravo: Plus Pages, Numbers and Keynote are free on Macs, minus the new paid features. I think it's a no brainer for new businesses
drcongo: 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.
wereHamster: business.apple.com doesn't work in Firefox, it redirects you to https://business.apple.com/abm_unsupported_browser?reason=Br...Fuck you Apple.
monegator: 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.
embedding-shape: 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.
radicaldreamer: 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.
valzam: Ok but "Business Email" wasn't exactly invented yesterday...
zb3: So will Apple users be able disable these ads in maps?
jwlake: 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.
AlotOfReading: 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.
Barbing: Such a huge bummer.Hey, Big Ad Tech, come try enshitify my Rand McNally.
georgeburdell: One of the last great consumer companies is going B2B
lvspiff: 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.
swiftcoder: > they've priced the consumer/pro-sumer out of the market prettymuchI'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)
RussianCow: > 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...
meego: 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.Be warned.
geoffharcourt: 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.)
bigyabai: 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.
drcongo: By business relationship I meant B2B. They're excellent.
cdrnsf: I would expect, much like the App Store, they will not. Their maps will give you directions to navigate the enshittification curve.
bombcar: $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.
AndrewKemendo: Which is my point. They did basically nothing new internally and will be able to capture what...10-20% of overall business suite market?That’s genius
alcidesfonseca: The next neo might have the SSDs of the current pros, making swapping less problematic.
ark4n: 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.
nolok: > 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.
genthree: 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.
selectively: 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.
codeulike: Exactly. So many people on hn have no idea how diversified Microsoft is, and have no inkling of what the enterprise market is like
rjrjrjrj: Is it possible to make a non-terrible MDM?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.
moduspol: 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.
amelius: They need to go OEM.
nhubbard: They did it in the 1990s and it failed so hard that it almost took down the company.
selectively: 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.
martibravo: I’m talking about the context I know which is Barcelona companies
dangus: 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: 10/10Best PC haptic trackpads available: 8/10MacBook Neo trackpad: 7/10Typical PC mechanical trackpads: 6 or 7/10Hell, 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.
selectively: 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.
dangus: 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.
selectively: 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.
dhosek: Intel or Apple Silicon? The latter manages memory much better.
AndrewKemendo: Vision Pro failedApple fails at every novel thing they try and crushes it at every thing they copy
JoelMcCracken: The iPhone was revolutionary. There really was nothing like it at the time. The closest thing (the PDA) was _nothing_ like it.
spogbiper: 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.
amelius: Why can others do it?
ireadmevs: And below everything else is the web version of MSOffice. How I hate whenever I’m forced to use that…
