Apple in the Enterprise in 2022: The Six Colors Report Card
Jason Snell of Six Colors has been compiling an annual Apple report card for years now, and he has now entered his second year of polling professional Apple administrators to get their take on Apple’s performance in the enterprise. Overall, Apple’s scores increased over the past year, largely thanks to big improvements in macOS 12 Monterey over macOS 11 Big Sur.
The only negative mark comes in macOS identity management. Currently, administrators have to provision Managed Apple IDs by hand unless their organization uses Microsoft Azure Active Directory. Apple has announced that it intends to add support for Google Workspace identity services to add another option for enterprise customers, but it remains one area where Apple is lagging.
So, how do those who are using Macs at work feel about this? Back when I was working, a huge advantage of the Mac was that corporate IT didn’t know how to “manage” it. That meant no forced reboots in the middle of the day, no having to submit a Help Desk ticket to do some trivial administrative action, no mandated Anti-virus that never found anything, but that made the machine less stable, etc. And no dependence on enterprise services (like Active Directory), so no problems when those services failed…