I think what they've announced is the best fit for small businesses, not large enterprises. They can still treat it as a B2C-style service - many tiny customers with similar needs. Mom and Pop can now get a domain name through Apple, with email accounts - for a lot of people that might be the only way they'd know how to do something like that.
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.
Who will Apple serve? Users, Apple or their partners?
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
I wonder if this was timed to lineup with the MacBook Neo launch, which makes the idea of equipping your entire company with Mac laptops a lot more compelling from a cost perspective.
It's kinda crazy it took Apple this long to make this.
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.
How does this differ from the existing "Business Essentials" tool? The landing page for each looks like much the same product, at least the MDM stuff does?
I occasionally trial complete switches to Apple services to see if they're viable as Google alternatives. This weekend was Apple maps and it's finally met my standard of "usable", though not quite "good". One of the places it beat Google maps was the lack of integrated advertising places, which have enshittified the latter.
I'm glad Apple announced their own plans to enshittify before I got my hopes up.
Live gas prices on GMaps is the only feature yet to make it over to Apple Maps, as far as I can tell. Once Apple integrates that one, my phone will finally be free of Google services.
I would say that most SMBs don't need Jamf because they provide overlapping features. The most important thing you want is remote erasure of company data (for compliance purposes), app assignment, and ensuring your devices have screen lock. This basically makes the most important parts of MDM for Apple devices totally free.
Will we be able to change our company details? A couple of years ago we changed the business name, so let's change it in the account for billing and such.
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.
> Starting April 14, Apple Business will be available as a free service in the U.S. and 200+ countries and regions to new and existing users of Apple Business Connect, Apple Business Essentials, and Apple Business Manager.
Does this mean — Always Free or Introductory Free for now?
A non-terrible MDM that actually works would be really nice. The rest I doubt they get much traction on. Gmail is too easy, Google docs and sheets if you don't need Microsoft is also way better than Apple's free apps.
This is annoying, but that they use user-agent solely to check irritates me even more; even (alternative) Chromium based browser like Vivaldi don't work out of the box. I usually use Vivaldi as an alternative when Firefox doesn't work.
It's 2026. I think we can expect more from Apple. It's not a small indie company after all.
Wow, Apple's finally competing with Google and Microsoft, I can see businesses adopting this everywhere lol, then again Idk as a lot of companies are already in Google and Microsoft's ecosystem.
When Apple vertically integrates it works for them. All the way from the cloud to the OS to the hardware. Pretty sure this will beat out tools like JAMF on user privacy alone by running trusted MDM adjacent tools in kernel space.
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.
I recently tried setting Apple Business Manager for our ≈20 people SME.
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.
I also organised this process at work, and it went rather well, (300ppl 10 year old), but of course no one had health data connected under the company domain, thats a crazy idea and it’s probably good apple enforces that to be deleted / moved / disentangled.
It is also clearly described how to move an account that is used privately to a different domain / mail.
some years ago i tried this setup for a german company with a special char in its name („ä“) and failed because Apple was not able to match it against DUNS. It took months of support to get it done.
It's completely impossible for a 60k employee shop too yeah. They also want you to rearrange the azure ad the way Apple wants. Also impossible for us.
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.
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.
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.
Ohh we had a similar experience with Google Cloud. Added our organization and Domain into their Auth system and suddenly all users were migrated into a (invisible / transparent) workspace and could no longer use their calendar or google drive as the workspace had no free usage like you have on a normal free tier.
Our recent (ongoing) experience with Apple Business Manager is just as bad. With no reason or contact they've sent "we can't verify so we've disabled your account because you don't meet the requirements". We ring support and they tell us to try again with no additional information. We then get "we can't verify so we've deleted your accounts" with no information. "Amazing" "experience".
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!
116 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 84.3 ms ] threadThe 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.
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
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.
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.
They're basically planning to enter the market where Microsoft has dominant position.
> https://business.apple.com/preview
> https://www.apple.com/business/essentials/
I'm glad Apple announced their own plans to enshittify before I got my hopes up.
[1]: https://www.jamf.com/
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.
Does this mean — Always Free or Introductory Free for now?
I remember this!
Fuck you Apple.
It's 2026. I think we can expect more from Apple. It's not a small indie company after all.
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.
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.
It is also clearly described how to move an account that is used privately to a different domain / mail.
This sort of thing should probably be illegal.
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.
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.
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 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!