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Apple has made huge inroads into corporate IT. How many corporate employees carry iPhones and iPads today? How many companies let employees request Mac laptops

Apple has made huge inroads into corporate IT. How many corporate employees carry iPhones and iPads today? How many companies let employees request Mac laptops instead of Dell? The answer is: a lot more than in the mid-2000s! And even a lot more than 2010. And corporate IT changed along the way too. The idea of buying and running a “Mac server” makes as much sense as buying and running any server: not much. Corporations are migrating to cloud platforms and application-level authentication. And away from hardware servers running on a LAN.

TimTheTinker 5y ago
> How many corporate employees carry iPhones and iPads today? I was referring to IT management of macOS - that was ambiguous in my post, apologies. iPhone only came in 2008, and its deployment in corporate environments is entirely dependent on iCloud (launched in 2011) and related services, which didn't really come into their own until the mid 2010s. Before the mobile revolution, it seemed (or at least some of us hoped) Apple was poising itself to capture the IT low-to-mid-market for corporate Apple desktop computers and potentially move upwards/outwards from there. Alas.
- closeparen 5y ago
  Some of the largest and most valuable corporations in America (the big names in Silicon Valley) have IT issued and managed Macs, at least for their engineering and product groups.
  - TimTheTinker 5y ago
    Right, but the identity/directory/device management solutions being used are still 3rd-party -- things like Jamf, Azure AD, Mosyle, JumpCloud
    - oneplane 5y ago
      But that's not really a problem, is it? If it works and the contracts cover everything all the same, does it really matter which party is responsible for it? Better yet, if it's not the core business of the company (a Bank for example), would they even care at all how far removed from the ODM a service vendor is?
      - TimTheTinker 5y ago
        No, it's not a problem. But Apple could have covered those bases themselves, like Microsoft did with Windows (via Active Directory, Azure AD, etc.)
        prmoustache 5y ago
        Yes but AD is king and has been for many years and is virtually undethronable. You can authenticate linux and macos X users to AD, this is the only thing they needed. To compete with MS they would have had to build infra tools that are also compatible with MS product. This would have been a high risk low reward task.
        TimTheTinker 5y ago
        > This would have been a high risk low reward task. Not if they had already captured the market on the Mac OS X-only side and were expanding outwards. Remember, this was the mid 2000s, when Apple had already released Safari for Windows, in addition to iTunes for Windows (which they had announced during a keynote with the quip "Hell just froze over"). A lot of things were possible, and the future was looking bright again for Apple. Microsoft also had just released Vista, which was flopping. Microsoft had been abusive for years to honest competitors and the open-source world, and was still spreading FUD about Linux. So there was some hope (and a strong wish) among Apple devotees that Apple could and would finally make inroads into historically Microsoft-held ground. We had no idea what was ahead with the introduction of smart phones and cloud-based infrastructure/computing.
        vetinari 5y ago
        They used to have Open Directory, but that went nowhere. Mac users never really appreciated directory services.
    - snowwrestler 5y ago
      Device management is 3rd party even for PCs at my employer. Mac machine accounts are local, not joined the AD domain, but it doesn’t matter because we’re on MS365 so it’s all done over the Internet anyway. We don’t have network file shares anymore, we have One Drive and SharePoint, which both work fine on Macs.
- prmoustache 5y ago
  They didn't have much to gain entering this market, especially as other were willing to do it for them already.
lotsofpulp 5y ago
I went into Bank of America last week to get a cashier’s check. An employee greeted me in the lobby of the bank with an iPad, took me to their desk, had me tap my debit card on the back of the iPad, put my PIN in, typed out the cashier’s check details on the iPad, had me review it, and then printed it. I was in and out in probably 3 minutes max. I am assume iPads are simply much cheaper to operate and troubleshoot and replace than desktops.
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  They don't need to worry as much about 'locking them down' cause they're basically there already by default.
  - oneplane 5y ago
    They are essentially application kiosks, which is exactly what a user needs in most cases. We tend to forget that most computing in the world really has nothing to do with OS management, hardware management or installing/removing applications. In a way, they also have the RIM/BlackBerry "peace of mind" in that they can delegate some blame if something were to go wrong with something only the vendor controls. The same goes for desktop operating system, and hardware components, but due to the huge amount of possible configurations, a vendor can easily wash their hands of responsibility because it was always the client's fault for having a bad configuration.

TimTheTinker 5y ago

> How many corporate employees carry iPhones and iPads today? I was referring to IT management of macOS - that was ambiguous in my post, apologies. iPhone only came in 2008, and its deployment in corporate environments is entirely dependent on iCloud (launched in 2011) and related services, which didn't really come into their own until the mid 2010s. Before the mobile revolution, it seemed (or at least some of us hoped) Apple was poising itself to capture the IT low-to-mid-market for corporate Apple desktop computers and potentially move upwards/outwards from there. Alas.

closeparen 5y ago
Some of the largest and most valuable corporations in America (the big names in Silicon Valley) have IT issued and managed Macs, at least for their engineering and product groups.
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  Right, but the identity/directory/device management solutions being used are still 3rd-party -- things like Jamf, Azure AD, Mosyle, JumpCloud
  - oneplane 5y ago
    But that's not really a problem, is it? If it works and the contracts cover everything all the same, does it really matter which party is responsible for it? Better yet, if it's not the core business of the company (a Bank for example), would they even care at all how far removed from the ODM a service vendor is?
    - TimTheTinker 5y ago
      No, it's not a problem. But Apple could have covered those bases themselves, like Microsoft did with Windows (via Active Directory, Azure AD, etc.)
      - prmoustache 5y ago
        Yes but AD is king and has been for many years and is virtually undethronable. You can authenticate linux and macos X users to AD, this is the only thing they needed. To compete with MS they would have had to build infra tools that are also compatible with MS product. This would have been a high risk low reward task.
        TimTheTinker 5y ago
        > This would have been a high risk low reward task. Not if they had already captured the market on the Mac OS X-only side and were expanding outwards. Remember, this was the mid 2000s, when Apple had already released Safari for Windows, in addition to iTunes for Windows (which they had announced during a keynote with the quip "Hell just froze over"). A lot of things were possible, and the future was looking bright again for Apple. Microsoft also had just released Vista, which was flopping. Microsoft had been abusive for years to honest competitors and the open-source world, and was still spreading FUD about Linux. So there was some hope (and a strong wish) among Apple devotees that Apple could and would finally make inroads into historically Microsoft-held ground. We had no idea what was ahead with the introduction of smart phones and cloud-based infrastructure/computing.
      - vetinari 5y ago
        They used to have Open Directory, but that went nowhere. Mac users never really appreciated directory services.
  - snowwrestler 5y ago
    Device management is 3rd party even for PCs at my employer. Mac machine accounts are local, not joined the AD domain, but it doesn’t matter because we’re on MS365 so it’s all done over the Internet anyway. We don’t have network file shares anymore, we have One Drive and SharePoint, which both work fine on Macs.
prmoustache 5y ago
They didn't have much to gain entering this market, especially as other were willing to do it for them already.

lotsofpulp 5y ago

I went into Bank of America last week to get a cashier’s check. An employee greeted me in the lobby of the bank with an iPad, took me to their desk, had me tap my debit card on the back of the iPad, put my PIN in, typed out the cashier’s check details on the iPad, had me review it, and then printed it. I was in and out in probably 3 minutes max. I am assume iPads are simply much cheaper to operate and troubleshoot and replace than desktops.

breakfastduck 5y ago
They don't need to worry as much about 'locking them down' cause they're basically there already by default.
- oneplane 5y ago
  They are essentially application kiosks, which is exactly what a user needs in most cases. We tend to forget that most computing in the world really has nothing to do with OS management, hardware management or installing/removing applications. In a way, they also have the RIM/BlackBerry "peace of mind" in that they can delegate some blame if something were to go wrong with something only the vendor controls. The same goes for desktop operating system, and hardware components, but due to the huge amount of possible configurations, a vendor can easily wash their hands of responsibility because it was always the client's fault for having a bad configuration.