I recently tried setting Apple Business Manager for our ≈20 people SME.

The first step was "Domain Lock/Capture" which takes over all Apple accounts for a specific domain.

I've never had a worse experience from Apple.

The process is buggy, filled with foot-guns and dead ends. It expects huge amounts of work from users who have had their account for more than a few weeks and are expected to remove a lot of their personal data before their account can be migrated (e.g. do you know how to delete all your Health data?). The process is also impossible to cancel.

Phone support was par for the course, e.g. tickets escalated to the abyss, suggestions to restore workstations to factory settings, etc.

Be warned.

This announcement is pretty sad. If you're wondering why Apple is an IT department nightmare, this announcement is more of a confession. Today your corporate MacBook can have ... preinstalled software! And user groups (for the Apple store and iCloud).

Wait, there's more!

> In addition, customers can now set up business email, calendar, and directory services with their own domain name for seamless and elevated communication and collaboration.

Wow, a custom domain name!

> Apple Business enables automated Managed Apple Account creation for new employees through integration with an identity service provider, including Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra ID, and more.

In the year 2026, I can finally start logging into my corporate laptop with my corporate ID. Wow!

Them stapling on the announcement of advertisements for Apple Maps is especially hilarious. I don't think the people managing fleet devices at a corporation are the same people who are interested in setting their location ad strategy. But Apple saw they had two vaguely business-y things at the same time and thought they would really hit it off together.

I have to imagine that the Apple Neo is heavily aimed at volume sales - low level white collar workers and education. These features seem to be hastily assembled to meet the needs of these potential buyers.

Strategically, Apple's not setting themselves up for success here by giving Apple Business away for free (with paid per-user storage bumps).

As a lot of people on this thread have pointed out, Apple's Business Manager needs a lot of improvements. ("Bring your own device" support is terrible, for example. Changing business names requires a perilous migration step. Support reps don't have the tools to fix serious issues.)

If Apple Business were a real revenue source, if they charged luxury prices for a luxurious business support experience, they could pay for developers to fix their stuff.

Instead, Apple Business is a free side hustle for Apple, a hobby. But they're proposing to control your entire domain, to Domain Lock all Apple accounts for your domain, to put your businesses's life in their hands, for "free."

Don't fall for it.

599$ serviceable MacBooks, easy to use MDM, Cloud, Email and Calendar and flat-fee AppleCare all baked in?

New businesses under 50 employees are going to eat this up like there's no tomorrow.

I'd be scared if I was certain Redmond corporation who makes their money on 365 and Intune.

Will we be able to change our company details? A couple of years ago we changed the business name, so let's change it in the account for billing and such.

Not possible.

Ok, let's ask support what to do: the only thing we can do is create a new account, get the approval, etc. and then ask for a migration that may or may not be approved and may or may not end succesfully.

In the end we keep receiving the bills in the old name, then change it manually or append a note.

Jamf shareholders got very lucky. The acquisition closed less than 2 months ago. Tough day for the new PE owners, though.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/francisco-partners-completes-...

Apple future strategy seems to be to sell ad placements throughout their ecosystem. Very sad about that. :( I especially chose Apple because of the clean experience.

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!

I read the first page of text of Apple's announcement, and still have absolutely zero idea what "Apple Business" is, apart from the fact that it will "manage devices" and "configure employee groups".

Since I have no employees and my devices are under control, I guess it's not for me, whatever it is.

So do enterprises still need Jamf [1]? For context, Jamf is one of the most common MDM tools for organizations.

[1]: https://www.jamf.com/

This is just Apple saying "We own all user compute now". Yeah you guys can fight over data centres. But every device that a user physically has will be an Apple device. They've now got the full range of price points from low cost to prosumer, and they've got the software stack to back it up so you can have your sales staff running neos logging in to their CRM, engineers running their Mabcook Pros.

It's kind of insane the advantage Apple Silicon has brought along with the brutal price competition PC sales. The only question I have is whether this touches the sides. That is to say - they sell a billion iPhones, is the consumer laptop and low end business sales enough to bump the numbers. They're thinner margins, and that market has to some extent been on a downward trend (which is why the stock market is running to data centres where the compute actually happens).

I wonder if this was timed to lineup with the MacBook Neo launch, which makes the idea of equipping your entire company with Mac laptops a lot more compelling from a cost perspective.

How does this differ from the existing "Business Essentials" tool? The landing page for each looks like much the same product, at least the MDM stuff does?

> https://business.apple.com/preview

> https://www.apple.com/business/essentials/

It's kinda crazy it took Apple this long to make this.

I've worked with two agencies now that used only Macs across the business and had a really fun time signing in to and integrating 58 Google services every time they hired someone new.

It's possible people may continue to use Google Workspaces in these places, however, the fact that there was never even an Apple option was always wild to me.

This is interesting to me as the IT support for my family. I have been considering using MDM to provision Wi-Fi credentials and other device configurations. 3rd party solutions are a little bit too much for what I need.

Apple Business Essentials with AppleCare+ for 3 devices and 200GB iCloud storage is $19.99 per user/mo. That's the same price as AppleCare One alone.

Who will Apple serve? Users, Apple or their partners?

It has always been Apple > Users > Partners.

There's a reason why Microsoft is still the king of enterprises. Anybody getting involved with this with Apple will deserve everything thats coming their way

One of the last great consumer companies is going B2B

Incidentally, today I saw this video of Steve giving a speech in 1999, published just a week ago. I hadn't seen it before and wouldn't be commenting weren't it for the video.

You may, and probably will, call me a fanboy or argue that reminiscing the good old times when Apple had 4 products are long gone and we live in a different world now. That is true, we live in a different world and focusing on 4 products wouldn't suffice for Apple to survive.

And now again, you may, and probably will, think that I'm burying my head in sand and ignoring many aspects a business needs to consider in order to survive, just to focus on the ones I like or am nostalgic about.

But there is something very special in this simplicity communicated by Steve in the speech. There is something that makes me want to buy a product when I see clearly what it is I'm buying.

On the other hand, there is something very repulsive when I read phrases like: seamless, streamline, gain valuable insights, build trust, in a product announcement.

Don't get me wrong, I am indifferent about Apple Business, probably won't use it and it won't harm me either. My observation is just a coincidence having heard the speech and having read the announcement here. Link to video: https://youtu.be/EoM2Y2KO6kU?si=0DybhDUiqKsWG_Nz

Considering the discussion here, i am still looking forward to, since it's the best solution apple provided so far with comprehensive management and in the end, after enrollment, what do you really need? the management looks very simple and flawless, all necessary things are covered (mail, calendar, icloud, backup, management). Excited!

Out of curiosity, why would any business with an IT department choose this over an in-house solution built from standard open source components. Think email server on premises or in the cloud using postfix/dovecot/LDAP, maybe Nextcloud with OnlyOffice, Jitsi as a Zoom substitute, etc. These are all mature solutions that are free of vendor lock-in, and can be easily managed by any competent IT team.

When Apple vertically integrates it works for them. All the way from the cloud to the OS to the hardware. Pretty sure this will beat out tools like JAMF on user privacy alone by running trusted MDM adjacent tools in kernel space.

Yes sure you can use a different tool for any of these, defaults dominate for the same reason Google pays ~15 billion to be the default search engine on iPhones.

> Enhanced Discoverability in Apple Maps

My first thought from that heading was “my company will know where I am at all times”. Though that was not the point thankfully.

> including a new option coming this summer that will enable businesses in the U.S. and Canada to place local ads in Maps during key search and discovery moments.

It's happening. The end is near !!!

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> Starting April 14, Apple Business will be available as a free service in the U.S. and 200+ countries and regions to new and existing users of Apple Business Connect, Apple Business Essentials, and Apple Business Manager.

Does this mean — Always Free or Introductory Free for now?

I occasionally trial complete switches to Apple services to see if they're viable as Google alternatives. This weekend was Apple maps and it's finally met my standard of "usable", though not quite "good". One of the places it beat Google maps was the lack of integrated advertising places, which have enshittified the latter.

I'm glad Apple announced their own plans to enshittify before I got my hopes up.

It would be great if you could get correct invoice and pay price without VAT in EU as a VAT registered business. It is incredible they can get around without providing such a basic thing for so long.

Worth repeating: Never tie your personal phone to your work stuff.

Does Apple support multiple iCloud accounts on a device yet?

> Starting April 14, Apple Business will be available as a free service in the U.S. and 200+ countries and regions to new and existing users of Apple Business Connect, Apple Business Essentials, and Apple Business Manager.

> Apple Business Essentials, Apple Business Manager, and Apple Business Connect will no longer be available once Apple Business launches. Business Essentials customers will no longer be charged their monthly service fee for device management after April 14. Existing Business Connect data — including claimed locations, place card information, photos, organization information, account details, and more — will automatically migrate to Apple Business at launch.

I don't get it. Is this free? If so this is insane value compared to everything else.

Apple's really late to this.

We use Jamf Pro for a small company. I'm not a big fan of the minimum 20 seat pricing model. I hope this will be something small companies can move to easily and have enough coverage to satisfy security reviews.

Given previous Apple adventures on the server room, not sure if I would bet on this staying around.

If I’m understanding this correctly it’s a one stop shop for an entire out of the box it department.

This is probably an attempt to retarget the education space more with the launch of the neo. Of course targeting a bigger enterprise space is not a bad idea

It’s not clear to me if the MDM is included for free as well or if that will continue to be charged separately (or on top). I looked into their MDM, but ended up going with Mosyle instead because the costs were significantly lower for me.

Wow… I might be missing something, but not once did I see AI mentioned! Apple is no slouch in the marketing department— this is surely a deliberate omission. It looks like marketers are finally catching up with public sentiment. I’m sure a lot of people will say it was their abject failure to productize their AI initiatives driving this decision, but I doubt it: the people they’re trying to sell business services to probably don’t know, let alone care about that. I think this term and the industry hype around it is just too radioactive to be beneficial in copy.

I’m happy to be corrected if I missed anything, or entertain alternate conclusions. I’m no expert.

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Hopefully some actual competition against GSuite (or whatever it's called these days)

As long as I don't have to buy/pay for software to manage devices I provide to employees I am satisfied.

This is cute but it's missing programmable documents (Microsoft) or hooks to use AI (Google) to really challenge either competitor.

Wow, Apple's finally competing with Google and Microsoft, I can see businesses adopting this everywhere lol, then again Idk as a lot of companies are already in Google and Microsoft's ecosystem.

Apple should compete with Google workplace or at the very least at least offer custom domain e-mail inboxes.

I assume this is a SaaS by Apple which covers some parts of Workday and Google suite for the beginning

They're basically planning to enter the market where Microsoft has dominant position.

It is very funny that a business-oriented product does not highlight Apple's business productivity software in iWork (Pages/Numbers/Keynote).

So will Apple users be able disable these ads in maps?

Hard pass on ads in apple maps. Their navigation was already pretty terrible, this was the reminder I needed to download something else

business.apple.com doesn't work in Firefox, it redirects you to https://business.apple.com/abm_unsupported_browser?reason=Br...

Fuck you Apple.

I previously tried buying Apple for Business and it was an endless runaround with terrible signup nterfaces and having to call dumb flunkies. The whole process sucked and was disrespectful to their business customers, who do not have the time to deal with such nonsense.

Will this allow iPad profiles? I think that’s a feature in edu? Would be a game changer.

Yeah that's great and all, but can I get something which will let me delete iPhone contacts in bulk?

It's 2026 and you have to delete contacts one at a time, or press and slide to select a group of them until you reach one you don't want to delete, delete that group, then start over again.

Other basic functionality I'd like includes being able to remote control an iPhone from a device which isn't a modern Mac, and being able to plug in an iPhone and use it as a removable storage device.

The statement that Apple has been supporting businesses for decades is just the most self-serving bunch of crap. You can tell how thin this is by the way they push local ads on Maps as some kind of headline feature. What a joke.

Machines spec’d and priced for education? Support for businesses?

I remember this!

between the neo and now this, apple is setting itself to eat a lot of google's lunch

Hey Siri, should I use Apple Business?

Feels like yet another distraction. I personally believe Apple would benefit from a renewed focus. Product lines are growing, software too, software qualify is not doing well... this is the same pattern that got Apple into a mess before Jobs returned. Sure, things are not exactly the same but it feels like time is echoing here.

I am sure "BUT BUSINESS AND MONEY" is the answer but that feels like a cop out in this case.

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I had to look at my calendar to be sure it wasn’t 2001

After bricking a 2 year old phone after a software update, I'm reluctant with handling my entire business with them.

>Company data remains secure while employee data remains private, with cryptographic separation of work and personal data on devices.

Does this mean that I'm able to enroll two Apple Accounts on an iPhone at once? Or does Apple actually think that I'm gonna be storing personal data, such as my health data, on a company device with a company-managed Apple Account?

At the moment I just have two iPhones: my personal iPhone that has my data and is connected to my Apple Watch, and my work iPhone, which sits on a desk and does nothing. The separate Apple Account on the work one means that I can't connect it to an Apple Watch and I can't download my apps on it, so you either can't accumulate any personal data on the device, or you need to submit all of your personal data to your employer's Apple Account. Including whatever health data your Apple Watch produces.

Apple is terrible for business. Every portal and product require a new apple id. apple store and apple business can't be same apple id. your device id can't be the same as either. Its madness. Last count i have 4 apple ids that I have to shuffle around.

It would be nice to kick google to the curb. I hope this product matures.

> including a new option coming this summer that will enable businesses in the U.S. and Canada to place local ads in Maps during key search and discovery moments.

The enshittification knows no bounds.

The big news here is the MDM, for free!

It used to be necessary to use a slew of dodgy providers like Jama, with is 2000 website (and why would I trust any small company with all my enterprise data). ABM didn’t provide the MDM part and that was most annoying. It seems normal to integrate account management and MDM, so I’d love to use it.

That ABM is full of bugs, the Apple team incompetent, and D&B being Dumb and Dunber is another question.

If Apple can turn it into a replacement for 365, they could kill microslop altogether. They rinse basically every organisation in the country, even though their products suck.

Are they taking 30% of the payments?

A non-terrible MDM that actually works would be really nice. The rest I doubt they get much traction on. Gmail is too easy, Google docs and sheets if you don't need Microsoft is also way better than Apple's free apps.

do they demand 30% of turnover?

So they try to pull a Microsoft?

Nothing like account termination with all your corporate email with no recourse and support because fuck you that's why.

Absolutely do not touch this product with a ten-foot pole.

Incredible. What is this? Actual competition? I don't believe my eyes. Is Apple search next?

now Apple is going for the jagular.

if they can also monetize - location api - via Apple Maps + business messaging that's easily 3+ Billion of revenue yearly.

I detest Apple for constantly bothering me at the store for small business sales pitch. Apple Store experience has really gone down the hill.

Capitalism works, it may work slowly enough for HN to complain but it works. When MSFT fails their customers, Apple picks up the tab...

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