| ▲ | aetherspawn 18 hours ago |
| Just waiting for macOS to get their act together in the Business space so that Windows can become a gaming only OS. I know people always say that macOS purposely don’t target business, and things like this, but at this point.. why not? Honestly? They have the best hardware in the world right now. Catering just to personal use (and these lines are getting blurrier each day with WFH) is just inconvenient. |
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| ▲ | gpm 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I don't think Windows keeps gaming if it loses corporate. Valve's very successfully created a PC-like linux based console, has been gently pushing linux PCs, and it has a huge amount of power over the gaming industry. Dedicated gaming computers probably mostly follow Valve to linux. Non-dedicated gaming computers are whatever people have - i.e. in your hypothetical macs. |
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| ▲ | TheCleric 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As someone who doesn’t touch Windows anymore without hazard pay, part of the problem is a lot of the ancillary business apps are Microsoft as well. For example Outlook, which technically exists on Macs, but is missing half the features. |
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| ▲ | orev 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | Don’t worry. New Outlook on Windows is rapidly reaching feature parity with the Mac version, and as soon as they remove Classic Outlook from support, all versions will be equal(ly missing half the features). |
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| ▲ | ankurdhama 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There are many MDM solutions for macOS that business use. |
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| ▲ | SoftTalker 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Apple isn’t interested in the corporate desktop. Margins aren’t there. |
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| ▲ | thewebguyd 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Outside of margins, Apple also famously said (under Jobs) they had no interest in the enterprise because the users don’t choose the products there. They want to sell direct to their customers, and the way the OS works and behaves shows that. There’s MDMs, yeah, but you just don’t get the level of control you can with Windows at scale and it’s very much on purpose. With enterprise, the users aren’t the ones choosing or even configuring their computers. | | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Which is a bit strange because at NeXT, Jobs initially focused only on institutional (mostly .edu) customers and not end users. They included services like NetInfo for centralized configuration management. I guess because NeXT ultimately failed as a business, he didn't repeat that approach upon returning to Apple? Apple was also quite dominant in K-12 sales in the pre-internet era. | | |
| ▲ | thewebguyd 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The quote I'm remembering from Jobs I thought was much earlier, but it came post-iPhone: > "What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves. They go 'yes' or 'no,' and if enough of them say 'yes,' we get to come to work tomorrow. That's how it works. It's really simple. With the enterprise market, it's not so simple. The people that use the products don't decide for themselves, and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for people and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we're on track or not." I'm wondering if the success of the iPhone kind of led to that line of thinking since it was primarily a consumer product anyway, it was Apple doubling down on it. Also makes sense though. "Enterprise" comes with a lot of baggage and support requirements that can really slow your product down and turn into a bloated mess of one-off features for one specific customer's use case. You're no longer making product decisions for what you want the product to be but instead your roadmap is driven by whatever the enterprise customers want. |
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| ▲ | aetherspawn 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | But the margins are in the cloud stuff (email, iCloud, etc) right? They just need to make an Apple version of SharePoint and Exchange, and wala. Now you have a suitable stack for small and medium businesses with simple requirements, like most retail, small lawyers, small accountants, etc I setup a small business recently and I was able to use a full Apple stack except for Exchange Online Plan 1 (email) and Mosyle (MDM). These are both tech that Apple has (iCloud Mail and Apple Business Manager), it’s just lacking a few critical features. | | |
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| ▲ | mopsi 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Windows itself is only a small part of the business ecosystem. The real behemoth is Active Directory and everything that integrates with it. Creating something that powerful, complex and user-configurable is not in Apple's DNA. |
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| ▲ | aetherspawn 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | If Apple can pull off a workflow where they give you a free online user directory and natively allow people to “login with iCloud for business” on managed devices, they’ve nailed it. That’s 99% of the way there and fully within their capability. | | |
| ▲ | mopsi 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | The idea that Active Directory is merely a user directory is one of the great misconceptions. Windows Server with AD offers incredible amount of things out of the box, from Windows Deployment Services to capture, manage and deploy PC images over PXE, to Certificate Authority to manage and issue and auto-deploy certificates, to print server, file server, web server, hypervisor, virtual desktops, and a huge number of other features and services, all centrally managed and linked with each other, with a well-established track record of providing backward compatibility for decades. Whatever I set up today, I can expect to still be using in 2045. | | |
| ▲ | aetherspawn 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes and that’s why Windows is a behemoth, but honestly how much do users actually need that stuff? Most 365 cloud deployments are incredibly simple, and now Apple has an opportunity to make a solution that leaves all that cruft behind and focuses on roaming/zero trust/cloud native. | |
| ▲ | Hizonner 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Whatever you set up today, your users can fear they'll still be using in 2045. |
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