Apple Business is aimed at small businesses coalesced around Macs, iPhones, and iPads. If that’s you, and all your systems are made by Apple, the service is likely to be all you need to run a small operation of up to a few dozen seats. 

But Apple Business isn’t really designed to handle the advanced needs of larger enterprises. And while it can provide a starting point for Mac deployments in mixed-platform environments, it probably shouldn’t be where you end up.

It doesn’t handle cross-platform device deployments, for which you’ll need full-strength MDM solutions (such as those from up-and-coming vendor Fleet). Another thing Apple Business doesn’t do is cover the full extent of compliance targets you might need to meet at your company. So, if you need to ensure compliance with standards/benchmarks such as HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, or CIS, you’ll need to choose something else.

This is also true if you need to ensure your endpoints are secured, or you require automated vulnerability scanning. 

A gift to small enterprise

That’s not to say Apple Business doesn’t have its uses. It clearly does. If you run a small business with up to, say, 50 staffers and you use Apple kit across the company, you’ll be able to manage your devices and app deployments yourself, no admin required.

That makes it a great tool for high-growth startups, many of which use Apple right from the start. Those businesses will be able to manage devices across their teams for free using Apple Business. They can always scale up once business is booming, making the service a gateway to tech success for many startups or small enterprises. The ability to streamline device management company-wide at no charge is a gift.

Setting the stage

Many might feel that with the international introduction of Apple Business, the company has torn a chunk out of the MDM industry. That’s less true than it sounds; many in the space already support small deployments for free, so what Apple is doing is winnowing away some of the smaller businesses who might use the resources provided by MDM firms but never become paying customers. 

Those customers are also an excellent market for the AppleCare support the company offers alongside Apple Business. It gives people the experience of device management, so that by the time they shift to a more advanced plan to support growth, they have a better understanding of what that involves.

Apple has drawn a line in the sand with the business. It’s basically saying that on the SMB side of that strip, it has you covered — and it has effectively defined its rapidly maturing MDM partners as focused on the needs of large customer deployments.

Market opportunity knocks

The good news there is that those large deployments do actually exist. In the last three years, Apple has confirmed huge Mac deployments (thousands of Macs) at SAP, Snowflake, Capital One, Coppel, Nubank, and elsewhere. Just last year, Apple CFO Kevan Parekh confirmed the best ever June quarter for Mac in the enterprise, and with the MacBook Neo, the company seems to be seeing dramatic growth in every one of the 200 markets in which you can now sign up for Apple Business.

So, while Apple nurtures tomorrow’s big businesses, its MDM partners can continue to meet the more diverse and demanding needs of larger enterprise entities. 

With the low-cost Neo arguably emerging to be the company’s iPhone moment for the Mac, Apple is also building business fast in emerging markets. Since use of Apple Business remains an integral component of working with any third-party device management partner (if only to assign the devices to an MDM system), the opportunity exits to scale up for business growth and scale down if that market contracts. It’s a world-class, ecosystem-based set of functionalities to support small business and enable corporations, all in one place.

You just need to know which problems it solves. Deployment? Yes. Compliance, edge security, and cross-platform support? No.

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