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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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).
Would be nice if you could buy a Macbook with a proper on-site warranty.
Dell, Lenovo, HP will gladly send a technician to your house, and their NBD warranties cost about the same as Applecare. And they don't care if you're an enterprise or an individual buying one measly laptop.
> 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.
> 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.
> And Apple Business can help millions of companies grow their reach and connect with local customers across Apple Maps, Mail, Wallet, Siri, and more, 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. Apple Business will be available starting Tuesday, April 14, in more than 200 countries and regions
Burying the lede about ADs coming to everything in this announcement. Seems like the contract most people implicitly signed when choosing Apple just broke.
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.
> 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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
437 comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/francisco-partners-completes-...
[1]: https://www.jamf.com/
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!
Since I have no employees and my devices are under control, I guess it's not for me, whatever it is.
> https://business.apple.com/preview
> https://www.apple.com/business/essentials/
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.
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.
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
>
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.
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.
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).
Dell, Lenovo, HP will gladly send a technician to your house, and their NBD warranties cost about the same as Applecare. And they don't care if you're an enterprise or an individual buying one measly laptop.
> 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.
> 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'm glad Apple announced their own plans to enshittify before I got my hopes up.
> And Apple Business can help millions of companies grow their reach and connect with local customers across Apple Maps, Mail, Wallet, Siri, and more, 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. Apple Business will be available starting Tuesday, April 14, in more than 200 countries and regions
Burying the lede about ADs coming to everything in this announcement. Seems like the contract most people implicitly signed when choosing Apple just broke.
> 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 !!!
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.
I’m happy to be corrected if I missed anything, or entertain alternate conclusions. I’m no expert.
They're basically planning to enter the market where Microsoft has dominant position.
> 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.