Hacker News Reader

Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

So just to make sure I'm reading this correctly (this is not my area of speciality so bear with me):

This is Apple-hosted MDM, yes?

I took a brief spin through this world on a consulting project a few years ago and I found it SUPER weird that Apple didn't do this already. You had to do this weird dance between Apple Business Manager and the MDM solution (we ended up with SimpleMDM but looked at a bunch). I kept saying "Am I missing something? Why doesn't this service come directly from Apple?" and everyone was as puzzled about this as I was. So I guess they're finally closing the loop here.

View on HN

Agree I manage 500+ Apple devices and have been in disbelief that Apple recommends using JAMF to manage their own devices.

I use profile manager included with the Server App of MacOS and it is functional but limited in scope. I have expressed for years frustration that Apple recommends using MDM/ profiles to manage their devices … and then doesn’t even really offer an enterprise version of the software.

Google by contrast offers a great admin console to manage chromebook and google devices. Surprised apple has dragged their feet here for so long.

For me this "offer" sounds like that the Sever app with the includes Profile Manager now basically becomes obsolete and will not anymore supported.

That will become an expansive solution for small business like the one I manage with 15 employees.

This gives some services an opportunity to offer an even lower cost offering.

The thing I worry about though is that this first-party solution will have "special" features that are not possible via MDM using private APIs or some special entitlements.

We used JAMF at my last place of business, and it would occasionally kill apps with a 15 minute warning. Normally this was fine, but it really sucked to get JAMFed (as it came to be called) in the middle of a presentation.

At my current company, we use something that destroys CPU and battery (unused 2019 high end MBP hangs sporadically for tens of seconds on any file system syscall, computer gets uncomfortably hot, battery lasts ~1hour on a full charge—happens to everyone I’ve talked to). Not sure what it’s called, but this falcond process always seems to be the culprit. I know nothing about MDM, but I would love it if Apple Business Essentials would be a viable alternative (hard to imagine Apple shipping such miserable software, anyway).

falcond is CrowdStrike’s endpoint antivirus thingy, not device management.

As usual, antivirus is an exercise in trading performance for increased attack surface (and compliance).

As history shows, antivirus is an exercise in trading performance and increased attack surface for checking a box.

The issues you experienced are squarely on the shoulders of your Jamf admins.

It doesn't have to suck, but it usually does because the people put in charge of it are incompetent, or at best, semi-competent. Most self-respecting engineers run fast from this sort of thing.

Having worked with JAMF's API... I don't like it, but yeah, this is not normal and something as to how your company is using JAMF.

The people in charge of this are usually more of the IT than 'self respecting engineers'

Some piece of company malware on my MBP causes it to panic every two or three days. Before that it got mad fan disease and had to be wiped to get it back to 'normal'.

I have eight icons in the menu bar for installed malware/spyware/whatever on my company owned laptop. That's just the stuff that has an icon, I bet there's more (including JAMF, for sure). It's ridiculous.

> use something that destroys CPU and battery

Before you even mentioned falcond, I immediately knew that it was clownstrike

I moved from a company that gave us fresh off the store MacBooks to one that managed them using jamf and a host of other antiviruses and compliance software, and I tell this to all of my colleagues: the experience you're having with your MacBooks - the poor performance, stuttering and random beachballs aren't representative of what MacBooks are actually like.

JAMF is the leader here, but I found it to be too expensive and unfriendly. I eventually settled on mosyle. When I originally learned about MDM I was quite surprised they had this third-party architecture.

For 500+ devices i would NEVER use a solution like JAMF and go with something like InTune or better MobileIron (MI). MI just works and is an absolute no brainer.

Apple gives every option possible for managing their devices via a third party software. They don't need to offer such a software themselves. And you really dont wanna deal with the Android clusterfuck in a BYOD enviroment. Android is such a pain in the ass when it comes to MDM. Even if the admin console is better, the amount of complaints and support tickets with Android is so high that we are just not support this anymore.

Yes. But this is nothing new for even Apple.

Just go an look at WWDCs for the last 10-15 years. There have been regular MDM sessions to talk about featured added to iOS and MacOS for this.

This is also related to agreements made years ago between Apple and IBM to provide exactly this primarily because Apple has never wanted to compromise their customer connection (which in business is IT and NOT the end user), and IBM has needed the opportunity (despite IBM transitioning from Fail they are still not to a level of revenue expected for their stock price and heritage - so they are "hungry").

Business use is a collateral win for apple.

There’s a lot of effort that goes in to support and partner channels for enterprise offerings. Making servers seemed easy enough? Look where that ended up. It’s a completely different business.

Is it? Apple is the go to solution for all media types (photography, film making, design, architecture). The alignment with Adobe products has existed longer than either was cool.

Yes, but that is a completely different setting than an enterprise one.

Having supported large enterprises and pieces of the movie production industry I can tell you there’s a vast difference in how end-user IT is treated.

The users you are referring to are power users that get to select their own tools, more akin to developers (at decent places at least).

Currently a dev manager, about half of my dev team want to use mac. They can, with zero support from central IT.

That’s not a choice our sales org have, for example.

They already have Fleetsmith. This is their response to Jumpcloud and what not who are offering lower per user plans, as fleetsmith was around $8/device/mo.

> This is their response to Jumpcloud and what not who are offering lower per user plans

They couldn't care less about a few dollars. This is about heading off business adoption of Chromebooks, and "winning" small-medium businesses as primarily Mac shops before they become big-enterprise.

I don't see how they really compete. Google has an array of business apps that far surpass anything Apple is offering here. They would need to partner with Microsoft in order to compete against Google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com