Apple introduces new professional training to support growing IT workforce
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apple.com
There's a good quote in this 2010 article: https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-steve-jobs-hates-about-th...
>"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."
This professional training would help with that. It's not necessarily that things aren't available. Sometimes it's just not having someone that knows how to.
Due to near-dominance of iPhone/iPads, Apple doesn't have a problem getting mindshare these days, so brand familiarity (which could be an offsetting benefit of a stronger enterprise presence) is not much of a problem.
With enterprise software, the end user is almost never the actual paying customer, which when you are trying to make really end-user focused products that delight in the way Apple do, can lead to incentives that prioritise enterprise needs over consumer - look at the huge number of enterprise specific features Microsoft historically have built, that have affected consumers too. Jobs loved making consumer products so much, I can't imagine he ever would have been able to really chase enterprise customers.
The move to targeting services and enterprise more at Apple happened under Cook, because, well, he has to continue growing the company and Services + more engagement with enterprise markets have been critical to growth post Jobs under Cook. Perhaps Steve ultimately would have done the same as Cook, given iPhone can't grow forever etc, but it would have been a major shift in his opinions/outlook for Apple.
I'm talking about "Enterprise" in the traditional software industry sense, which is not the same industry apple target for creative professionals, even if tools like MDM etc can overlap. Jobs loved "professional" users in creative industries, not enterprise volume sales and fleet management tools etc etc.
Which is a shame NeXT (apple) had a world leading ORM and RPC system in 1990. It would still impress people today.
I also suspect people raised alongside ubiquitous web 2.0 technology would be a lot less impressed with the NeXT demos than all of us who saw them with pre-web eyes.
It’s equivalent to rails or similar orms. But it integrated with interface builder. See this [1] demo about 23 minutes in… just after he demos how great next step handles faces. He demos building a query crud app fully drag n drop.
Are you sure DO was available in OS X?
On a related note, once I took the tests for the SP and SA certifications (in 2009), my name was supposed to show up on Apple's site for certified professionals. This was important, as any employer would check that list to make sure your certifications were up to date. Apparently that process wasn't automatic, as I wasn't on the list after three months. One email to steve@apple.com later and I was on the site!
But yes many computer workers effectively use their systems like chromebooks. Hell I’m in an operations role and aside from my terminal and mail client, I use my system like a glorified chromebook hah
Depending on the organization, there are many non web-based programs that are run. Think about an engineering company. They'll probably have some sort of CAD like SolidWorks and something like Matlab etc.
Even if everything would be web based you still have to handle licensing/logins somehow. But yeah in theory the users need less hand holding because less stuff is actually installed.
If you have to list 'printers' to give an example then you know it might not be as relevant these days.
Don’t the OS and app prompt for their own updates these days?
But the incentive structure may prioritize getting their deliverables done over doing patching at least in the short term. The corporate hierarchies for IT and their main organization might only have a common manager at the very top of the company.
That being said, if the printer in the office has issues I may not even hear about it for a month...
Like VPNs, app store policies, user-creation, All of this needs a decent understanding of the OS and a config management system to implement it.
The problem with OSX is that most release change things, often in undocumented ways. Like breaking how AD integrates (thanks 10.6)
>One complete subscription...
Oh, so Apple just discontinued the one that comes free with the purchase of the hardware[1] and wants people to move to a subscription. I guess my confusion should have rather been frustration.
I understand there are non-free and non-native alternatives, but the discontinuing of free software is still frustrating. It would be like Apple suddenly deciding to make Safari a monthly subscription. Sure, I could pay for it or I could start using Firefox, but it is still functionality that used to be native and free that no longer is.
...is this actually a thing? I would have assumed you need some special Apple approval.
It's expected to do things maximizing their revenue.
If you expect businesses to do differently, you've set your self up for a life of frustrations.
EDIT: there's nothing wrong with this either; they have real people working there, maintaining this stuff, and real capital invested; if you find their services valuable, you better pay or else they won't last long...
Companies don’t care about customers’ feelings, and customers don’t care about companies’ revenue. Both sides should be able to acknowledge this and act appropriately.
Yeah, if a company pisses me off and gives me the impression they’re getting greedy, I’m going to stop paying them and raise hell. That’s the trade-off. There’s nothing wrong with me or any other customer getting frustrated: that’s how the dynamic is meant to work.
It also was never free, it was part of server
Yes - just walk into any store.
Fix it Apple, I beg you.
People are lazy. It's much easier to use social media than it is to share feedback or submit pull requests.
It's about as effective to write the report on paper and light it on fire - the chance of it getting actually addressed is about the same.
E.g. if I were to share the link to TFA in WhatsApp, my screen time tomorrow would say “21 hours on apple.com”
Only clearing browser data fixes this. It’s absurd.
if so, that would be grand.
This is why Apple will continue to be a failure in any IT department larger than a startup. The only reason MacOS is supported in larger businesses is because the whiny graphics department would riot if they took their Macs away. And I don't want to hear "but I do all my software development on a Mac!!!1!" Yeah, in an unmanaged configuration on your rogue developer box, sure, whatever. No one is running thousands of Macs outside Apple and if they are they're not doing it without many third-party system management kludges and an army of people to support it. And the whole thing hangs on by a thread.
Apple's enterprise support is a joke and will continue to be unless there are major changes. Even Linux and FreeBSD (!) are better at this.
Looking back to see if you were ever right, I see a 2013 article[1] claiming
Google explained that it’s managing a fleet of over 43,000 Macs its employees use
as of now if you start at Google and want to use a platform other than Mac you have to make a business case
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/google-wants-employees-using-macs-not...
No need to simp so hard for Apple bro. The criticism levied by the OP is completely valid. Apple breaks stuff on the regular, without a care, in large-scale deployments with real desktop applications it can be a total shitshow.
https://www.techradar.com/news/ibm-exec-says-macs-are-way-mo...
I worked a role like this within an IT department many years ago and while it's not super complicated, it still required knowledge and understanding that this new Professional training is set up to provide.
apple is severely lacking in the enterprise world
If I worked at Apple, I'd vote to invest more resources in fixing longstanding bugs. They make great stuff, but I've noticed a trend lately where nearly every Apple solution has a poison pill somewhere that makes it painful for a small minority of users and edge cases. For example:
* Apple Time Machine does a 2-phase backup where the first phase is a "preparing backup" step that has no progress indicator, making it impossible to predict how long a backup will take. I've seen it take anywhere from a few minutes to days, meaning that if I forget to back up at the end of my workday, I simply have to skip it and swallow the anxiety unless I want to hang around for half an hour to back up 300 MB of changes.
* iOS Safari added a search bar at the top for finding common tabs like "gmail". Which works great unless you have hundreds of tabs open, which requires scrolling pages and pages of tabs, and I've inadvertently thrown tabs away sideways as I was scrolling. A real solution here would be to make the search field available at any scroll height and/or provide a way to manage large numbers of tabs (which in fairness is an open problem, just like email).
* iOS has an issue where Wi-Fi degrades after a few minutes/hours of use with various wireless routers, requiring the user to acquire a new DHCP lease (basically turn Wi-Fi off and back on again). I notice this especially with browsing social apps like TikTok or if the router's networking stack has gotten fragmented with UDP packets with P2P software like BitTorrent or video streaming. Apple needs to detect this and acquire a new DHCP lease automatically, rather than pretending that they don't have a problem.
* External display support is hopelessly broken, especially with DisplayPort/HDMI dongles. I have a 50/50 chance of the left and right displays being swapped, regardless of which ports I plug the cables into. There's no debounce period between the time I connect a display and when Safari starts rearranging windows, so I literally have to remember to force-quit Safari before I pack up my work computer or it will lock up for many minutes when I connect it to displays again. I'd vote to scrap the code completely and start again from first principles, approaching it from a no-code perspective, and think about managing the display IDs as simple sets, falling back to heuristics in pathological cases like two or more displays having the same ID (which should never happen, but display protocols are hopelessly convoluted due to DRM and other concerns).
* The on-off switch on Apple's wireless keyboard is atrociously unergonomic because it can't be used one-handed without sliding the keyboard into something (like a cup of coffee that then spills onto the computer). Also the anodized edge of the keyboard is so sharp that I accidentally cut through my front door screen as I was leaving for work one day.
I could go on forever because like I said, so many of Apple's solutions have these poison pills. This is a tiny sampling of the things that cause me pain on a daily basis that I don't think will ever be addressed. I simply can't get into the myriad of issues with tons of other apps like Xcode, because that would fill volumes. Which is why I feel that Apple going the IT route will lead to further passing of the buck and stagnation, similarly to how Microsoft has struggled.
Unfortunately, I can't use the new Macbooks. Looking at the screen for more than a few minutes gives me a headache. (Even with adjusting many different settings.)
I'm hoping to find a decent laptop as an alternative; the new Macbook Pros have excellent keyboards, touchpads, speakers, microphone, webcam, processing power, etc. I'm not sure which alternative has nearly as "complete" of a package.
Apple consistently scores at or near the top of the industry for its support and service.
Anecdotally, they have gone above and beyond what was required or expected, for me, many times, including helping out when products were out of warranty.
100%
Absolutely, from replacing an entire water-damaged MacBook (with a minor spec boost on the upgrade, even!) - to simply handing me a new identical iPhone when I went in for a screen repair - etc, etc...I can honestly say that Apple's incredible customer service is a huge part of the reason I still use their products nearly 20 years after I bought my first one.
1. How to roll out certain security policies integrated with your IM to the group of devices X?
2. How to test OS update on group of devices Y, before releasing it to all devices in your company?
If you are an ordinary iPad or Mac user, I doubt that you know the answers.