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.
There are several cheap MDM solutions for Apple devices that I would rather pay for than be dependent on this. (We've used SimpleMDM and love them.)
I wanted to evaluate it for MDM purposes so I applied for an ABM account for a company I work for, got soft-approved, created an entirely new Apple ID (as required by the ABM), used it to log on a test device I intended to manage, then sort of forgot about it while awaiting for Apple to conclude their hard-approval for the ABM account creation.
Apple was supposed to contact the business owner to verify company details and finalize the process over the next few days, but they never did.
30 days later they canceled the ABM company account and deleted all the associated users along with the Apple ID which I used to log into a testing device, which now became a fairly expensive paperweight.
I had very little expectations about the experience and I was still disappointed.
This is exactly what I would have expected from an Apple "business" offering. Apple's whole shtick is to take away most of your choices so that they can focus on the limited number of things they still allow you to do. Businesses need the opposite of that.
Businesses will show up needing integrations with multiple existing third party (often legacy) systems with inherent complexity and then want something that allows them to manage that complexity since it can't be eliminated. It's not really possible in that context to have the experience people otherwise expect Apple to provide, and the thing Apple normally does will often make it worse by removing choices you may have needed in order to make interaction with a third party system less of a pain.
We had to do it as ppl had made personal Apple accounts using our domain, meaning if they logged in with such an account and left, their iPhone magically transformed into an expensive, elegant paperweight. Due to a setting in our previous MDM we were unable to migrate data cleanly using Apple Biz Manager without committing to use ABM as our MDM (we couldn't) so we told people to "move it yourself following these detailed instructions, otherwise it can't be migrated." Regarding personal data like health on company-managed devices, I certainly don't share that type of info with my employer, and make it clear to staff that it's not our responsibility to migrate such data.
And we have like 20k or so users with manually created Apple IDs on their company email and every one of them has to be manually resolved. It's a joke.
I'm in a family iCloud group with my parents... one day I just woke up and had all my podcasts and music replaced with my Mum's :/
Would not want this anywhere near a "business" experience
I'll try again next month see how far I get with this. This needs to be way simpler than it currently is. Hopefully they fixed a few things there.
It is also clearly described how to move an account that is used privately to a different domain / mail.
This is also after they've verified us (and our DUNS number) for app signing and distribution. We already have a verified account in another service of theirs!
This sort of thing should probably be illegal.
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.
Not knowing about the exiting solutions to provision/manage Macs is one thing. Not knowing about them and claiming they're inferior because of what you didn't know is just bizarre.
I don't know what it is about the type of people who end up doing pc support, but an irrational dislike of Macs seems to be systemic. I worked in an IT department when Novell was still a thing, an a senior guy with years of Unix experience would make jokes about "toy operating system" while also alternating between screaming at and practically fellating windows XP.
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.
I'm wrestling with something similar to this right now in Linux. The only real player that charges "enough" to have a "absolutely zero tolerance for base OS breakage" approach to OS development is Red Hat. Ubuntu LTS is more widespread but only really because it's $0 even for large businesses, and that's honestly reflected in it sometimes having hardware breakage during a version's initial two year mainstream support run. Having Windows's business backed level of "doesn't break" on hardware is rare on Linux.
Apple can already easily afford those developers. They’re not exactly running at a loss ;)
Plus given how each new iteration of macOS and iOS is a steady step backwards for usability, I don’t have a huge amount of trust in their abilities to fix Business if it had become a strategic product tomorrow.
They don’t want to compete with those partners, and wouldn’t be effective if they did. But, there’s a gap of smaller companies and institutions where they benefit from MDM capabilities but don’t have the budget or wherewithal to even know how to shop for MDM.
So they spend a bit of money, give Apple Store reps something to do and add an incentive to buy another iPhone.
And I’d be very skeptical any business user anywhere can skate by on the iCloud Free Tier. Of all the stingy free tiers, it’s that one.
If they cared, they would make a Teams/Slack equivalent, a Zoom Killer, maybe a Confluence Killer, and charge per head, and offer storage tiers comparable to what MS and GOOG do.
(And no, don’t even joke that Messages and FaceTime are Slack and Zoom killers.)
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.
Intune and Windows are 'nice to have' but are not the business-business. The business is 365 (which runs on Macs and is worlds better than Apple's office suite + Apple's hosted email is god awful) and Azure.
The real competition is going to come from companies using the $599 Neo + Google Workgroups or whatever they're calling it - now Microsoft is cut out entirely.
scared of what? microsoft doesnt need to care about new businesses with under 50 employees at all. they have governments, banks, universities, colleges, and large non-tech enterprises completely locked down. small business with 10-50 devices are a drop in the ocean.
>New businesses under 50 employees are going to eat this up like there's no tomorrow.
i seriously doubt people outside of the tech or design spheres (i.e. most people) are going to go with apple for their businesses. when you are starting a business, you dont want to also have to teach all of your employees (and possibly yourself) how to use a new operating system.
you are going to look up "local IT company" or "local MSP", ask them to set you up, and they will integrate you into their existing microsoft ecosystem and send over some thinkpads, while you focus on your business.
25m Macs in calendar year 2025. Lenovo manufactured 19m PCs in Q4 2025.
Apple simply lacks volume.
Since the early 2000's, I've been bad mouthing Outlook, for a whole lot of reasons.
Let's just say: I miss Outlook. And it's still terrible.
There's 0 way they have competent, reliable, working group calendaring.
Revenge of the Mac. Theirs simply no reason for any normal person to buy anything else. The year of Linux is deferred yet again.
So many people are going to get burned by the hypnotism of these Neos. They're going to be gateways into being traded in within 2-3 years to get something with more RAM and storage when their owners find out how much they struggle with basic tasks due to insufficient RAM and storage.
If you actually go on Best Buy or Micro Center websites and look at street prices you'll realize that the Neo isn't actually that disruptive.
The trackpad is mid. I've tried it. It's mid enough that basically any PC can compete with the trackpad experience. There are multiple $500-800 PCs that are easy recommendations as alternatives, all with 16GB of RAM, all with modular storage.
The battery in the Neo is so small that even with the extremely efficient iPhone processor inside, basic Windows laptops can beat the Neo in battery life. Grab a Yoga 7 and you've got double the RAM, 2-in-1 convertible touch screen, and better battery life. Oh yeah, and you get a better OLED panel, too.
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.
It's also impossible to delegate this authority to anyone other than the account owner, and there's no concept of shared or service accounts, so nobody other than the account owner, with access to their 2FA method is able to do this.
Heaven forbid if the account owner was ever to put their 2FA method as a personal device / phone and then leave the company.
I was essentially told that I could update the mailing address but going through the steps for that process would result in the name on my account being changed to the legal name. And so today, it still has my parents' mailing address. Thankfully they haven't moved.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/francisco-partners-completes-...
That said, who knows where this will go in the coming years.
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!
There are basically two cases. If you use Microsoft, you are often already paying for Entra ID and Intune, then still adding the Apple-side pieces for Mac support: Apple Business Manager and often Jamf or Kandji. If you do not use Microsoft, you are buying the full stack yourself: Okta or JumpCloud for identity, Jamf or Kandji for device management, and Apple Business Manager for enrollment. Apple Business Manager is free, but the rest is not, and the cost adds up fast.
This means that, in practice, a managed Mac can easily end up costing close to twice as much to support as a Windows device.
Jamf will do that. Apple will not.
Since I have no employees and my devices are under control, I guess it's not for me, whatever it is.
> Apple Business Essentials, Apple Business Manager, and Apple Business Connect will no longer be available once Apple Business launches.
So it's a consolidation. They call out Business Connect data as "including claimed locations, place card information, photos, organization information, account details, and more," so that's some of what differs from 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.
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.
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
The business needs here aren't so different to family manangement features, say.
Throwing in Entra ID / Google Workspace authentication and multiple Apple IDs per device is probably the most "interesting" part as to where that ends up in the distant future.
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'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).
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.
> 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.
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.
It's happening. The end is near !!!
However, for iOS and iPadOS, the answer is “Sort of”.
As taken from https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep4d9e9cd2...:
> If a user is signed in with a personal Apple Account and Managed Apple Account, Sign in with Apple automatically uses the Managed Apple Account for managed apps and the personal Apple Account for unmanaged apps.
that said, you can create multiple users per macOS device, and each can have a different Apple Account. that's a nightmare, because some significant areas of device management assume a single Apple Account. So for example you can use a 2nd account to get around Activation Lock in some cases.
It's like Microsoft now - put everything under one massive convoluted control panel.
Being early is the same as being wrong and there’s no business value in costly exploration of new territory at least in the 21st century
Name me a single company that is still in business and dominating a market based on being first to market with a new product.
My first thought from that heading was “my company will know where I am at all times”. Though that was not the point thankfully.
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.
Fuck you Apple.
It's 2026. I think we can expect more from Apple. It's not a small indie company after all.
Supported browser:
Safari (14.1 or later)
Chrome (87 or later)
Microsoft Edge (87 or later)
We live in fantastic times
I remember this!
I am sure "BUT BUSINESS AND MONEY" is the answer but that feels like a cop out in this case.
It's 2026 and you have to delete contacts one at a time, or press and slide to select a group of them until you reach one you don't want to delete, delete that group, then start over again.
Other basic functionality I'd like includes being able to remote control an iPhone from a device which isn't a modern Mac, and being able to plug in an iPhone and use it as a removable storage device.
You may, and probably will, call me a fanboy or argue that reminiscing the good old times when Apple had 4 products are long gone and we live in a different world now. That is true, we live in a different world and focusing on 4 products wouldn't suffice for Apple to survive.
And now again, you may, and probably will, think that I'm burying my head in sand and ignoring many aspects a business needs to consider in order to survive, just to focus on the ones I like or am nostalgic about.
But there is something very special in this simplicity communicated by Steve in the speech. There is something that makes me want to buy a product when I see clearly what it is I'm buying.
On the other hand, there is something very repulsive when I read phrases like: seamless, streamline, gain valuable insights, build trust, in a product announcement.
Don't get me wrong, I am indifferent about Apple Business, probably won't use it and it won't harm me either. My observation is just a coincidence having heard the speech and having read the announcement here. Link to video: https://youtu.be/EoM2Y2KO6kU?si=0DybhDUiqKsWG_Nz
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.
The enshittification knows no bounds.
I can say that the MDM solution I went with leaves a lot to be desired, but it works and it’s cheap. Since I’m only managing iPads, I really wanted to go with Apple for the simplicity, but, like I said, the price was too high (at the time at least).
Not a particular area of expertise for me, but the times I've had to deal with it just seemed like an inherently complex and messy problem.
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.
Absolutely do not touch this product with a ten-foot pole.
if they can also monetize - location api - via Apple Maps + business messaging that's easily 3+ Billion of revenue yearly.