Six Colors 2025 Enterprise Report Card: Strong Hardware, Weak Software
At Six Colors, Jason Snell has published his fifth annual Apple Enterprise Report Card. The report surveys 124 Apple IT administrators, with approximately half managing over 1000 devices. The results reveal a stark contrast between Apple’s hardware and software efforts from an enterprise perspective.
Just as in the past two years, Apple’s strongest scores came in hardware and in the company’s commitment to security and privacy. But as hardware scores continue to soar, Apple’s performance on the software side has dropped precipitously.
The survey gives Apple’s hardware reliability and innovation a rating of 4.4 out of 5, praising the M4 MacBook Air as an “enterprise workhorse” and noting that overall reliability issues primarily stem from physical damage, such as from dropped devices. However, software reliability and innovation earned only 3.0 out of 5, the lowest score in the survey, with administrators describing a “continued downward spiral” in software quality and specifically criticizing iPadOS, Apple Intelligence, and System Settings.
Yup… Now I haven’t used a Mac in a corporate context for 10 years, but that generally aligns with my understanding from friends who are still working (or the one guy who just retired.)
Over at PED30.com, there’s been a lot of pessimistic discussion on the state of Apple, with one guy offering well-reasoned very negative views. It’s been hard to argue otherwise.
And today (as I picked up a new MB Air to replace the '14 MB Pro I’ve been using as my 2nd laptop), we talked about how disappointing it was when Apple dropped its networking hardware. As someone who worked at a home office, I was really sorry to see that decision. Mac OS X Server had finally gotten to the point where it was easy to administer, and Airport Extreme “just worked” until it started to suffer from ‘buffer bloat’. I think Apple missed a significant opportunity when it dropped products that worked well for small office/home office. Those were the days…