6 ms·

Apple Business Essentials now available for small businesses

106 points by feross 5y ago

dexterdog 5y ago
I hope they have fixed the bugs in this because I tried it out and we had problems on at least half of the enrollments. This whole thing smells like an aqui-hire with an aggressive rollout schedule.
sahaskatta 5y ago
"with Google Workspace identity services, allowing employees to log in to their device with a single business username and password" This is huge, especially if it will work easily without the need for intermediary identity services to make it all work.
- synicalx 5y ago
  AFAIK, this has been possible with Azure AD for a while. I think the service on Apple's end was called something like Apple for Business and you could cut a cert from it to link to Intune (an MDM) and get pre-enrolled devices directly from Apple with single sign on. I might also be mis-remembering this, it's been a hot minute since I've dealt with this stuff.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dumpsterdiver 5y ago
  > "Managed Apple IDs can be created by federating with Microsoft Azure Active Directory and, coming later this spring, with Google Workspace identity services, allowing employees to log in to their device with a single business username and password. Apple Business Essentials works with company-provided and personally owned devices" Just to temper your expectations, I don't believe they're talking about signing into Apple devices using Google identity services directly. Google identity services (and other identity providers) can be used to provision managed Apple ID's that can be used to log into the devices. It's basically just pulling the username from LDAP and creating a <username@yourcompany.appleid.com> account that can be used in place of your normal Apple ID. All of the accounts created this way will still reside in Apple Business Manager / on Apple's servers, so if you disconnected the IdP connection Google would have no power there.
travisgriggs 5y ago
> Apple has a deep and decades-long commitment to helping small businesses thrive. I realize this is basic PR messaging, but it's a weird/ironic take from a company that regularly competes as "the richest company in the world". Usually, Big loves Big. Big companies usually telegraph how Enterprisey they are, how the biggest of the big use their bigly products. But Apple continually messages this inverse relationship. We are the biggest, and we serve the hordes of the little. It's a weird/unusual message. (and I'm making zero claims as to the credibility of this messaging, just noticing that it's different)
- reaperducer 5y ago
  I've had some limited experience with Apple as a small business. My observation is that Apple's commitment varies a lot from year to year, and especially from city to city. Chicago was great. Seattle (well, Bellevue) not at all.
- pram 5y ago
  I don’t think it’s unusual considering 99% of their business is B2C
- buildbot 5y ago
  When you provide the platform, a win for small businesses is just more individual consumers really. Now people have double the iCloud accounts, Apple gets more money per account, more in app purchase revenue, etc. Apple is good at making individuals want to use their products for work, where as Microsoft is good at making workplaces use their products, so consumers know their OS and choose it for home. Different ideologies.
- pdpi 5y ago
  Music, cinema, photography, design — all the businesses that have historically represented the stereotypical core Apple markets are composed of smaller businesses. I expect the vast majority of those to be SMEs (at least in headcount if not turnover), and even very large players like ILM and Weta fall under 1500ish employees.
- cactus2093 5y ago
Aaronstotle 5y ago
I wonder how this will affect MDMs like Jamf. So far it seems that Jamf is what most Mac-centric organizations use.
- pknomad 5y ago
  Probably some? I used to work in client platform engineering. Most teams recognized that this was going to happen back when Apple acquired Fleetsmith in 2020. It will most likely compete with non-enterprise MDM space (think Jamf Now) at first.
  - Aaronstotle 5y ago
    Yeah, one issue with Jamf is that they were at the whim of Apple's OS updates (certain features would become deprecated). This has huge potential considering how many tech companies have fleets of Apple products
- candiddevmike 5y ago
  I think jamf is trying to be multi platform. Unfortunately for them MDM is a pretty crowded market, so they're probably going to struggle as Apple commoditizes their niche.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  It might clobber Jamf... however, compared to Fleetsmith or Small Business Essentials, Jamf is a Massive PITA to use and configure. If they had a better product, honestly, we might not see Apple making moves to replace a messy supplier that does plenty to embarrass Mac in the enterprise.
  - astral303 5y ago
    Jamf is onerous to use. Are they still requiring two days of training with a purchase? Last time I tried to purchase the product, they would not let me skip two days of training. As a fast growing <10-engineer startup at the the time, I had negative time to spare — spending two working days in training for a glorified CPanel-like mishmash of obtuse software was a non-starter. We ended up going with a small MDM vendor, which was just barely passable enough to compliantly manage a fleet of Macs with somewhat minimal time investment. Still, it came with fully employee spy mode turned on (website monitoring on by default) and had promised features, such as FDE key escrow, that barely ever worked in practice. So thank god for Apple Business Essentials, this is a blessing for every startup that runs a fleet of Macs.
tailspin2019 5y ago
I tried signing up to the Beta for this and it requires two named company contacts, both with verifiable contact details. As a one man band, this basically means I cannot use Apple Business Essentials unless I lie/make up details during the application process (which includes phone verification with a real Apple human - so this is not a trivial thing to bypass). Utterly baffling, as I could really use some of the features of this program, but I can’t. This doesn’t just affect me. I work with larger companies on IT projects so am in a position to advocate (or not) for products and services, and so this is one I will obviously not be recommending if I can’t get into it myself! Edit: one of the things I was trying to achieve was to setup some way to buy apps on the App Store under my company (different card and billing address etc), which presumably needs a separate Apple ID. At the moment I normally have to buy apps outside of the App Store (where possible) in order to be able to pay with my company rather than personal details (important for tax/accounting etc for business expenses). Does anyone have a solution (as a sole trader) for running two Apple IDs, one for personal and one for business?
- jldugger 5y ago
  I'm guessing this is for those "our key contact went on vacation / died / quit years ago" scenarios. Unfortunate that you can't bypass it by acknowledging that risk.
- barake 5y ago
  There is probably a market for being a trusted second contact for systems like this. Wonder if that would pass muster for Apple.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dylan604 5y ago
    If you can have one of those colo business addresses or colo mailbox/po box type of places, why not this? There's also several board members that are on several boards. Seems like it might be better served in having a trusted attorney with instructions on how to handle cases when sole proprieter is no longer able to propriet.
wolverine876 5y ago
I've read that Apple allows certain types of users, I think corporate users and some developers, to have a root of trust (cryptographic security root) other than Apple. Essentially it gives the customer full control of their own devices, at least from a security perspective. Do I have that right and is it available with Business Essentials, does anyone know?
beaudin 5y ago
Ironically, I receive a “browser not supported” message when attempting to sign up via Safari on iOS. May be due to the fact that I’m on public beta.
exabrial 5y ago
Thats great, but what if my employees don't have iPhones?

106 points by feross 5y ago

I hope they have fixed the bugs in this because I tried it out and we had problems on at least half of the enrollments. This whole thing smells like an aqui-hire with an aggressive rollout schedule.

sahaskatta 5y ago

"with Google Workspace identity services, allowing employees to log in to their device with a single business username and password" This is huge, especially if it will work easily without the need for intermediary identity services to make it all work.

synicalx 5y ago
AFAIK, this has been possible with Azure AD for a while. I think the service on Apple's end was called something like Apple for Business and you could cut a cert from it to link to Intune (an MDM) and get pre-enrolled devices directly from Apple with single sign on. I might also be mis-remembering this, it's been a hot minute since I've dealt with this stuff.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dumpsterdiver 5y ago
> "Managed Apple IDs can be created by federating with Microsoft Azure Active Directory and, coming later this spring, with Google Workspace identity services, allowing employees to log in to their device with a single business username and password. Apple Business Essentials works with company-provided and personally owned devices" Just to temper your expectations, I don't believe they're talking about signing into Apple devices using Google identity services directly. Google identity services (and other identity providers) can be used to provision managed Apple ID's that can be used to log into the devices. It's basically just pulling the username from LDAP and creating a <username@yourcompany.appleid.com> account that can be used in place of your normal Apple ID. All of the accounts created this way will still reside in Apple Business Manager / on Apple's servers, so if you disconnected the IdP connection Google would have no power there.

travisgriggs 5y ago

> Apple has a deep and decades-long commitment to helping small businesses thrive. I realize this is basic PR messaging, but it's a weird/ironic take from a company that regularly competes as "the richest company in the world". Usually, Big loves Big. Big companies usually telegraph how Enterprisey they are, how the biggest of the big use their bigly products. But Apple continually messages this inverse relationship. We are the biggest, and we serve the hordes of the little. It's a weird/unusual message. (and I'm making zero claims as to the credibility of this messaging, just noticing that it's different)

reaperducer 5y ago
I've had some limited experience with Apple as a small business. My observation is that Apple's commitment varies a lot from year to year, and especially from city to city. Chicago was great. Seattle (well, Bellevue) not at all.
pram 5y ago
I don’t think it’s unusual considering 99% of their business is B2C
buildbot 5y ago
When you provide the platform, a win for small businesses is just more individual consumers really. Now people have double the iCloud accounts, Apple gets more money per account, more in app purchase revenue, etc. Apple is good at making individuals want to use their products for work, where as Microsoft is good at making workplaces use their products, so consumers know their OS and choose it for home. Different ideologies.
pdpi 5y ago
Music, cinema, photography, design — all the businesses that have historically represented the stereotypical core Apple markets are composed of smaller businesses. I expect the vast majority of those to be SMEs (at least in headcount if not turnover), and even very large players like ILM and Weta fall under 1500ish employees.
cactus2093 5y ago

Aaronstotle 5y ago

I wonder how this will affect MDMs like Jamf. So far it seems that Jamf is what most Mac-centric organizations use.

pknomad 5y ago
Probably some? I used to work in client platform engineering. Most teams recognized that this was going to happen back when Apple acquired Fleetsmith in 2020. It will most likely compete with non-enterprise MDM space (think Jamf Now) at first.
- Aaronstotle 5y ago
  Yeah, one issue with Jamf is that they were at the whim of Apple's OS updates (certain features would become deprecated). This has huge potential considering how many tech companies have fleets of Apple products
candiddevmike 5y ago
I think jamf is trying to be multi platform. Unfortunately for them MDM is a pretty crowded market, so they're probably going to struggle as Apple commoditizes their niche.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
It might clobber Jamf... however, compared to Fleetsmith or Small Business Essentials, Jamf is a Massive PITA to use and configure. If they had a better product, honestly, we might not see Apple making moves to replace a messy supplier that does plenty to embarrass Mac in the enterprise.
- astral303 5y ago
  Jamf is onerous to use. Are they still requiring two days of training with a purchase? Last time I tried to purchase the product, they would not let me skip two days of training. As a fast growing <10-engineer startup at the the time, I had negative time to spare — spending two working days in training for a glorified CPanel-like mishmash of obtuse software was a non-starter. We ended up going with a small MDM vendor, which was just barely passable enough to compliantly manage a fleet of Macs with somewhat minimal time investment. Still, it came with fully employee spy mode turned on (website monitoring on by default) and had promised features, such as FDE key escrow, that barely ever worked in practice. So thank god for Apple Business Essentials, this is a blessing for every startup that runs a fleet of Macs.

tailspin2019 5y ago

I tried signing up to the Beta for this and it requires two named company contacts, both with verifiable contact details. As a one man band, this basically means I cannot use Apple Business Essentials unless I lie/make up details during the application process (which includes phone verification with a real Apple human - so this is not a trivial thing to bypass). Utterly baffling, as I could really use some of the features of this program, but I can’t. This doesn’t just affect me. I work with larger companies on IT projects so am in a position to advocate (or not) for products and services, and so this is one I will obviously not be recommending if I can’t get into it myself! Edit: one of the things I was trying to achieve was to setup some way to buy apps on the App Store under my company (different card and billing address etc), which presumably needs a separate Apple ID. At the moment I normally have to buy apps outside of the App Store (where possible) in order to be able to pay with my company rather than personal details (important for tax/accounting etc for business expenses). Does anyone have a solution (as a sole trader) for running two Apple IDs, one for personal and one for business?

jldugger 5y ago
I'm guessing this is for those "our key contact went on vacation / died / quit years ago" scenarios. Unfortunate that you can't bypass it by acknowledging that risk.
barake 5y ago
There is probably a market for being a trusted second contact for systems like this. Wonder if that would pass muster for Apple.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dylan604 5y ago
  If you can have one of those colo business addresses or colo mailbox/po box type of places, why not this? There's also several board members that are on several boards. Seems like it might be better served in having a trusted attorney with instructions on how to handle cases when sole proprieter is no longer able to propriet.

wolverine876 5y ago

I've read that Apple allows certain types of users, I think corporate users and some developers, to have a root of trust (cryptographic security root) other than Apple. Essentially it gives the customer full control of their own devices, at least from a security perspective. Do I have that right and is it available with Business Essentials, does anyone know?

beaudin 5y ago

Ironically, I receive a “browser not supported” message when attempting to sign up via Safari on iOS. May be due to the fact that I’m on public beta.

exabrial 5y ago

Thats great, but what if my employees don't have iPhones?