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.
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.
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.
They're basically planning to enter the market where Microsoft has dominant position.
I remember this!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Does this mean — Always Free or Introductory Free for now?
I'm glad Apple announced their own plans to enshittify before I got my hopes up.
Fuck you Apple.
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.
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.
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.
Hey, Big Ad Tech, come try enshitify my Rand McNally.
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https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-business-manager/progr...We live in fantastic times
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.
Revenge of the Mac. Theirs simply no reason for any normal person to buy anything else. The year of Linux is deferred yet again.
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.)
Jamf will do that. Apple will not.
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.
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 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.
> 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 guess they were doing that before in the App Store, which is of course also awful.
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)
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...
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 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.
One point of contact for support.
Microsoft isn't going to get it together anytime soon, it's a new dawn.
Absolutely do not touch this product with a ten-foot pole.
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.
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.
Apple knows the score internally, this won't change the world any more than the 12" Retina Macbook did.
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…
That’s genius
(I don't have a side in this discussion)
Apple fails at every novel thing they try and crushes it at every thing they copy
Nevermind the godawful Liquid Glass UX they cooked up and imposed on everyone else...
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UPDATE March 24, 2026
Apple today announced Apple Business, a new all-in-one platform that includes key services companies need to effortlessly manage devices, reach more customers, equip team members with essential apps and tools, and get support from experts to run and grow efficiently and securely. Apple Business features built-in mobile device management, helping businesses easily configure employee groups, device settings, security, and apps with Blueprints to quickly get started. 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. And Apple Business can help millions of companies grow their reach and connect with local customers across Apple Maps, Mail, Wallet, Siri, and more, including a new option coming this summer that will enable businesses in the U.S. and Canada to place local ads in Maps during key search and discovery moments. Apple Business will be available starting Tuesday, April 14, in more than 200 countries and regions.1
Managed Apple Accounts: Company data remains secure while employee data remains private, with cryptographic separation of work and personal data on devices. 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.
Employee management: Create user groups by function or team to assign apps and roles. Organizations can also create custom roles to manage access exactly the way they want.
App distribution: Easily acquire and distribute apps to employees and teams through the App Store.
Admin API: Simplify large deployments with API access to device, user, audit, and MDM service data.
The configurations screen is shown within Apple Business on Mac.
Brand profiles: Manage brand name, logo, and key details consistently across Apple Maps, Wallet, and other features and apps.
Rich place cards: Customize with photos, detailed location information, hours, and other useful details that display across Apple Maps, Safari, Spotlight, and more.
Showcases and custom actions: Highlight deals, special offers, new products, or seasonal items on place cards in Maps. Add custom actions like order or reserve to direct customers to a preferred website or app.
Location insights: Gain valuable insights into how customers discover and interact with businesses on Maps, including search, views, and taps on actions.
Branded communications: Display branding prominently in the Mail app and on iCloud Mail to increase awareness. Branding will display with tracked orders in Wallet for a more recognizable customer experience.
Tap to Pay on iPhone: Build trust by displaying a brand logo and name on the payment screen when accepting payments directly on iPhone.
In the Apple Business platform on Mac, a screen showing a business’s location info is shown.
In the Apple Business platform on Mac, a screen showing a business’s location insights are shown.
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. For more information, visit business.apple.com/preview.
Ads on Apple Maps will be available to businesses starting this summer in the U.S. and Canada. For more information, visit ads.apple.com/maps.
Apple Business Essentials, Apple Business Manager, and Apple Business Connect will no longer be available once Apple Business launches. Business Essentials customers will no longer be charged their monthly service fee for device management after April 14. Existing Business Connect data — including claimed locations, place card information, photos, organization information, account details, and more — will automatically migrate to Apple Business at launch.
The Apple Business companion app, along with email, calendar, and directory features, will require iOS 26, iPadOS 26, or macOS 26.
Customers in the U.S. can purchase additional iCloud storage up to 2TB per user, starting at $0.99 per user per month. AppleCare+ for Business coverage is available per device or per user, starting at $6.99 per month, or $13.99 per month per user for up to three devices.
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Garmin anyone?
I think Timex and Casio even had ones in the 90s