$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.

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.

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

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.

*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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Haha ah of course. It’s not like you ever actually owned them in the first place.

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

Totally agree on the hidden costs. We've seen some great value in going with Mosyle for this. Lots cheaper, and it "just works."

https://mosyle.com/

Maybe also 200 countries included, instead of just the USA?

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.

There’s a grey one. So obviously, it was timed.

> 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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The next neo might have the SSDs of the current pros, making swapping less problematic.

Less stuff to go wrong.

One point of contact for support.

Microsoft isn't going to get it together anytime soon, it's a new dawn.

Plus Pages, Numbers and Keynote are free on Macs, minus the new paid features. I think it's a no brainer for new businesses

Crazy how different people experience this.

For me it’s completely inverted; Google is top place, then Libreoffice, then MSOffice, then anything by Apple last place.

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.

That's my exact ranking as well.

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.

By business relationship I meant B2B. They're excellent.

Yes, the phone company that is known for taking home a bronze medal in personal computing for the past 30 years running.

Apple knows the score internally, this won't change the world any more than the 12" Retina Macbook did.

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…

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

Dominating the market??

A costly gamble for tech they really wanted that wasn't mature yet.

They were still late, just not late enough.

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.

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.

(I don't have a side in this discussion)

Vision Pro failed

Apple fails at every novel thing they try and crushes it at every thing they copy

They took extreme risks on EUV lithography and accumulated market share by being the first to shrink nodes.

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.

The iPhone was revolutionary. There really was nothing like it at the time. The closest thing (the PDA) was _nothing_ like it.

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.

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.

Apple Watch.

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 literally thousands of smart watches that were launched prior to the Apple Watch

Garmin anyone?

I think Timex and Casio even had ones in the 90s