A few months ago, on a price hike announcement for Office365 posted here to YC HN, I made a comment that MDM is expensive, had high MOQs (Mosyle, Jamf) and fund

A few months ago, on a price hike announcement for Office365 posted here to YC HN, I made a comment that MDM is expensive, had high MOQs (Mosyle, Jamf) and fundamentally still doesn’t work as well as Windows and Intune. I also lamented that Microsoft keeps hiking prices and that it’s silly we’re normalising $20+ per user per month when we used to pay once for these things. I lamented how Apple hardware is now the same price as the other vendors, yet best in class for quality and how Dell and HP are hiking their laptop pricing lately due to supply shortages. Especially on their pro lines, which have been quoted to me as twice the price of equivalent MacBooks. I mentioned Apple would be silly not to make a further global move into MDM and email hosting territory. Particularly for small business owners: 1-10 person shops and retail who use mostly cloud based POS applications. Others responded at the time, and I agreed with it, that it seems unlikely Apple would make a business move. After all, they don’t have much history with business, or perhaps they did but they didn’t like the market and wrapped it up. Well, with this announcement, and with the confirmation that *Apple native email hosting is coming* I am very excited to trial it when it lands in April. Over the last few months, our small business has already cracked it and downgraded most of our email hosting to Exchange Plan 1 and dropped the desktop Office suite in favour of Pages and Numbers, which are both free and absolutely working fine. In fact, I’ve found Pages to be less laggy and more stable than Word in very large documents such as 300+ pages. The logical next step for us is to fully drop our third-party MDM and review whether Apple’s native MDM, email and identity systems are adequate for transition. We have saved thousands of $$ so far and stand to save a lot more!