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Smart to focus on smaller businesses but foolish albeit expected to only include Apple products in the solution. I'd put money on the overwhelming majority of businesses that have any Apple devices also have non Apple devices. Very few will be purely Apple environments and those that are would hardly qualify as enterprise environments. The reason is simple, Apple has failed to provide the needed suite of enterprise solutions to allow a company to build themselves around their ecosystem. You can do it in the home but Apple doesn't sell servers anymore or allow anyone to develop server products for them.

> Smart to focus on smaller businesses but foolish albeit expected to only include Apple products in the solution.

Eh, it depends why you think they are doing it.

If you think they are offering this because they want to get into selling MDM software, then yeah, it's foolish.

If, on the other hand, you imagine that they are offering this because they want to encourage small businesses to go 'wall-to-wall' Apple, and for a benefit of this to be that if you go 'Apple' you effectively have some level of a technical support contract too with on-site hardware repairs (not really offered in a compelling way by any other hardware vendor), then it might not be so foolish from a commercial perspective.

I suspect it's the latter - make going 'all in' on Apple a super appealing proposition for small businesses.

The second thing is, Windows is very appealing for small businesses because, amongst other things, configuration and management of users, sign ins, security policies e.t.c. through AAD / Office 365 is brilliant, so this seems to close the gap a bit.

> Apple doesn't sell servers anymore or allow anyone to develop server products for them.

This seems to be more like an MDM/device management and user management/onboarding solution, not something you would install or use to manage servers.

It also seems like a progression for this product would go from "All Apple" to "Mixed Use". No need to lose the "All Apple" money while you're working on the "Mixed Use" software if you're going to take that road.

> Smart to focus on smaller businesses but foolish albeit expected to only include Apple products in the solution.

Apple isn't here to be end-all-be-all for their customers. They are there to sell products and services that make sense for their customers.

If others undercut them or provide more comprehensive service, then that's a market Apple has decided not to compete in now. Good for their competitors.

> the shift to enterprise suggests they're out of ideas

Pretty sure its just the way to profit off of all types of users, keep cash flow coming and grow the business.

When their app store faces anti-trust, and everyone already has an iphone and the next igadget is 5 years away, how do you generate growth?

> When their app store faces anti-trust, and everyone already has an iphone and the next igadget is 5 years away, how do you generate growth?

I'd suggest this is the definition of being out of ideas, as the way they grew last time was they invented the iPhone, and then the iPod, and then the Airbook, Apple Watch, and AirPods. Then there was the mini tracking device to help you believe every other product wasn't already a tracking device.

Imo, the negative inflection point was the AppleTV launch where it was just a bunch of celebrities, and for Cook to stay at the helm, he needs to deliver a Jobs level win. Enterprise may be his "second envelope," as I think it's a safety play.

Reframing your question as, what can they re-invent next? That's hard to answer without being that level of design thinker. Cook's team is designing products for a very different world than the one Jobs did. The aesthetics, aspirations, and even power means different things now, as they say, what got us here doesn't get us where we need to go next. The enterprise product is going to be huge revenue wise, but innovation wise, I think it's treading water.

Maybe the smartest thing to do is to turn Apple into a company that doesn't need to run on genius anymore, and fork a design driven ventures division with a mission to get exposure to early stage brilliance instead. What Jobs did was bring artists to tech, but that whole play was predicated on a bohemian/creative class that doesn't matter the same way anymore because their rarity and scarcity was an artifact of geography that is no longer a factor. This bringing something from one place to another aspect of Jobs' vision (and cultural arbitrage) breaks down when that physical distance is no longer meaningful.

The distance to bridge with products now is intellectual, educational, cultural, political, etc, and maybe we don't want it bridged now, maybe what we desire is that distance again. The next iPhone level innovation won't be a signifier of joining the middle class of that time, it will be either a barrier to it, or an escape from it.

i largely agree with your points.

I think the ousting (quitting?) of Ives is a sign that apple as an aesthetic force is ending, and the return to "logical" macs instead is a sign that they're reverting going too far. Its an acknowledgement that they have to do more than make pretty devices.

I see a very similar path to luxury car brands for luxury electronics. A mix of status, comfort and performance. I wouldn't be surprised if the "pro"/"pro-sumer" line of devices diverges even more into the future so that we have $2k iPhones. Similar to how car companies have $200k+ cars, and $75k+ cars that effectively don't compete with each other and let them invest in more expensive efforts, that serve as flagships. Alternatively, go the racing-car route, and invest in high-end engineering efforts that way. This could be similar to your "forking" idea in that they get exposure without subjecting it to mass scale.

Smart. This raises an interesting question. Cars do one thing well, and we've turned them into extended rooms of our homes, so a $200k car can make sense. What is the thing personal computers/mobile devices do well for us as users that we can just dial it up and charge 10x for it?

I don't know. Mine cryptocurrency? A fancier and more flattering filter bubble? An AI named Cyrano that identifies people and gives us tips for manipulating and blackmailing them? Spitballing here.

> that we can just dial it up and charge 10x for it?

Maybe you don't get 10x but like cars we can use more expensive materials, more expensive parts (cameras, cpu cores, screen quality).

Materials:

Apple's base model apple watch is aluminum, while the higher tier is stainless steel. They also lock the neutral colors behind the higher price (which i think is annoying because color is not price dependent to make).

Performance: Think about Apple's $5k monitor - the "Pro display XDR" from a few years ago. Today, apple sells the $1k iPad pro with a "XDR display" based on the same tech. They figured out how to build it, then later figured out how to scale down the price and scale up the process.

> they invented the iPhone, and then the iPod

Did you mean the iPad? Because the iPod came years before the iPhone.

Agreed. They have been leaving a mountain of money on the table by not offering this, or a competitor for Google Workspace.

It could actually be a play for far bigger, the mountain of money that is now largely dominated by Microsoft in ALL establishment corporations and governments. Think of being able to run your whole network and equipment with a mere fraction of the IT and network personnel that it now takes to run a Windows based environment.

Well, yes and no. Some innovation in this space will be much welcomed and may well lead to the "mere fraction".

But right now in almost every IT office, if you could get rid of the right 50% of people, the remaining 50% would keep things running without missing a beat.

The trick is doing that.

Also, right now in the corporate space, virtual machines are popular for server and workstation environments. Apple hasn't dipped a toe in that space yet.

Maybe as more business software go towards web and BYODevice becomes a thing Apple could gain traction.

> a competitor for Google Workspace.

I think this is their obvious next move. They just launched iCloud email with custom domains for end users. That seems like an early battle-test for enterprise use cases.

They already have alternative software to google docs too, so it could be an easy business to set up.

Completely agree. I think they have been slowly making moves into this space over the last 4-5 years (probably longer, but slowly gaining momentum in that time).

I think my read on the new custom domain support is the same as yours. It's clearly a limited beta without the label.

They are moving at a snails pace, but a lot of the pieces are there.

Numbers is just garbage, though. If they want to seriously play in the docs space, they need to fix it. They also need a simple database solution. They've got Claris, and could bring that to the table if they wanted.

Apple also has a serious reputation problem when it comes to reliability in this space. Personally, as excited as I am about all this, I'm hesitant based on their track record.

> they need to fix it. They also need a simple database solution

I actually disagree. (improvements are always welcome though). There are so many different products in this space from MSFT to Google Docs, Quip, Confluence, Notion, etc. They're never going to actually make stuff for everyone.

Their move should just be to handle the licenses. My work buys all MSFT products, yet most people use quip docs instead. But we also pay for google docs, and confluence. Most places probs use more than one redundant tool, so you just need a "good enough" bundled-in tool.

If they can handle licenses and sales of the software, they can continue to collect their apple tax even if their app store gets trust-busted in the future. This can be a way to preserve app store revenue. Especially since businesses are whales compared to regular consumers.

> When their app store faces anti-trust

They have already faced the courts over the App Store. They won.

> how do you generate growth?

Through new devices eg. Watch, AirPods, AR/VR Headset. And most importantly through Services eg. AppleTV+, News+, Music+

You should look at Apples balance sheet. Far more diversified than most people realise.

> They won.

They won, in america... for now. They have (a) a global business with other nations less inclined to side with them and (b) a likely chance of legislature targeted at them. The odds of a future decline in margins of the app store seem high. New laws in Korea and Japan are going to slowly erode the edges, and allow businesses to tests alternatives. The Epic trial may now allow link-out to payments with latest court docs. And EU is a big market that could easily turn against them with new laws.

> Through new devices

The best new devices can do now is replace existing ones people own, most people who want and can afford apple devices own them. New product catagories are a few years away.

> And most importantly through Services

Like the service they just launched, targeted at enterprise?

> You should look at Apples balance sheet. Far more diversified than most people realise.

I do financial analysis, and attend their earnings calls. You're right, it is very diverse, but the non-services revenues don't seem poised to see strong growth in next few years unless they launch a new (and successful) product category.

Once Apple stops doing 22 percent year over year growth is when there is a problem. This is just Tim Cook’s personal plan to move Apple into more of a service oriented company and this product should have existed a long time ago.

Didnt they already try this and it was a huge failure

Who remembers xserve?

I cried a tear or two when they deprecated it. Apple can do enterprise hardware... just because Linux and x86 hardware became commoditized doesn't mean there isn't room for further innovation.

I think Apple should come out with an M1 Enterprise chip and a line of data center/server hardware to compete with Oxide. As for an OS, why not hire Hector Martin and adopt a particular flavor of Linux (maybe partner with Red Hat)?

An LDAP offering that competes with AD and integrates with OSX would be gigantic. I work in VFX where 95% of our hardware runs Linux, our laptops all Apple, and the only Windows machines being the accounting department, yet we still use AD for directory services because there's simply nobody else that offers a product even half as good, and OSX doesn't even like working with AD anyway.

A product that could even compete with half of what AD offers and could manage OSX devices would be pretty incredible.

Well, they won’t use Samba (which has a very well featured domain controller implementation), because of the GPL. The only other one going around is the one I wrote, but Novell bought that, not Apple. (Apple wasn’t so interested in the enterprise space circa 2006.)

But anyway, AD will become much less relevant in the future as everything moves to the cloud, a la Azure AD.

and XSAN <shudder/>

What was wrong with XSAN?

Apple has had success in certain sectors of industry: the creative space being a large focus where they had success often in spite of being Apple

I’ve been backing up and restoring my personal phone, and managing family gadgets that way for a while.

This is a reskin of an existing Apple iCloud infrastructure project.

> the shift to enterprise suggests they're out of ideas

I would not say that. This is a long time coming for apple to finally acknowledge with actions that apple devices are used in an enterprise context for many, many companies and to start thinking about proper first class support for that use case. "Innovation" wise it's independent of their other efforts IMO.

> Current one is having to reboot the machine to reset a VPN driver just to check client site email.

These aren't Microsoft specific issues but vendor specific. My partner's last two employers have used Dell machines and they've each had serious problems with audio drivers. I've seen Dell bios updates completely mess up full disk encryption by losing keys and more recently switching SSDs from ACHI to ATA mode.

At the same time I've had comparatively few issues using my work issued Lenovo laptop. However I completely re-imaged my work issued Macbook because the Trend Micro software installed on it made it $3000 brick.

I'm calling BS on this entire pile of nonsense.