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Comment by BowBun | Hacker News Reader

Businesses are not their target market, never has been. They dominated the mobile phone market with their iPhone, and the iPad is still a gold standard product for tablets compared to the dozens of shoddy Android versions out there (coming from someone who leans more Android than Apple with their tech). I can see GP's point regardless of the rollout. Before the VR app stores become such critical masses, Apple will have plenty of time to delight users and capture market share. They have tons of cash and great execution.

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> the iPad is still a gold standard product for tablets compared to the dozens of shoddy Android versions out there

iPad are the best versions of "tablets", if we see tablets as a frozen in time "large iphone" version of the concept. Android tablets perfectly fit the category and Samsung is the only distant competion (yet Samsung has Dex, which is increasingly showing its teeth)

But they're way behind in term of tablets as touch enabled computers. Chromebooks have seen more adoption as schools and orgs couldn't justify iPad's price, the top of the line is above what the iPad has to offer, and the Surface Pro took the spot of the North Star of the category, to use the article's metaphor.

So yes, I'd agree with parent, Apple could have made the "what is a computer?" marketing campaign a reality, but didn't have the courage to canibalize their mac line.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/20/apples-enterprise-evolutio... (2018)

I think both are right in different ways. Apple isn't a big enterprise player as far as (except for development), I give all my employees macs to do their daily work on. You don't walk into a bank and see iMacs sitting there usually. So from the desktop computer side, they are not that deep into enterprise. HOWEVER, iPhones, yes. Tons of companies issue iPhones as their company phone. Walk into a store, its getting more and more common that the cashier is using an iPad hooked up to some sort of payment processing device. That is where Apple has their business adoption. Or I take my kids to the trampoline park and the clerk hands me an iPad to fill out the waiver. Their enterprise isn't really that deep in desktops, but it for damn sure is in portable device (iPhone and iPad).

I think it's important to add color to this part:

> Apple isn't a big enterprise player as far as (except for development)

They never really went after the tech companies themselves. The way Macs dominate certain development fields is a result of their popularity with consumers that drove companies to adopt the tech to attract talent. Me and many colleagues 5 years ago weren't interested in web startups using a Windows dev environment. Not saying there's merit to that, but my main point is that Apple focused on the end user(which happened to be a burgeoning web dev class during the last 15 years) rather than enterprise.

I think it's further evidenced by how relatively slow Apple has been to deploy some management tools that are more common in Windows-land. Anecodtally it feels like 3rd parties filled the gap on that side for Apple for quite a while. MDM, other IT tools, repair networks, and more recently self-repair kits were all much slower to deploy than how Microsoft (think Dell) went after their corporate customers.

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