Apple has come a long way in the workplace. A decade ago, you were more likely to find a Mac on the CEO’s desk or in the marketing department than anywhere else. Today, businesses are rolling out Apple devices across entire teams, and many are discovering that choosing Apple is only the first decision they need to make.
According to Clayton Campbell, founder of Onsite IT, a Jamf Elite Partner which supports more than 400 customers across 33 countries, businesses spend months choosing devices but far less time deciding how they’ll be managed. That’s where many Apple investments begin to lose value.
Apple has changed, but has the thinking around it changed too?
For a long time Apple lived on the edges of the business and IT simply supported it because there weren’t many devices to support.
“What changed is that people started choosing the tools they work best on, and businesses realised that fighting that choice was costing them good people,” says Campbell.
Today, Apple is often the standard rather than the exception, with Macs, iPhones and iPads becoming everyday business tools. As Apple adoption has grown, so has the need for management platforms built specifically for Apple’s ecosystem, such as Jamf, rather than tools designed to support every operating system.
People do their best work on tools they trust, and for a growing share of the workforce that’s Apple, he believes. Businesses are also starting to look beyond the purchase price. They’re weighing up the lifetime cost of the device, how much support it requires and what it means for security over the long term.
The conversation around the brand has changed too. Five years ago, many IT leaders were still asking whether they should allow Apple into the business. Today, Apple is already there and the appetite is growing. The question now is how to manage it as a first-class platform rather than an exception.
That’s where many businesses start to lose value. They’ve chosen Apple, but default to the tools they already own to manage it. It makes sense at first glance, until Apple becomes a much bigger part of the business.
“We already own the licences”
It’s one of the most common reasons businesses give for managing Apple devices with Microsoft tools. On paper, it’s difficult to argue with. The licences have already been paid for and the platform says it supports Apple.
“If you already own a management platform and it can enrol a Mac, ‘we’ll just use what we have’ is a hard argument to lose on a spreadsheet,” elaborates Campbell.
That works while Apple remains a small part of the business, but once it becomes business critical, the gap between enrolling a Mac and managing it properly becomes obvious.
“The assumption is reasonable. It just expires sooner than people expect.”
Supporting Apple isn’t the same as being built for Apple
Campbell describes the difference as breadth versus depth.
A broad platform is designed to manage multiple operating systems from one place. For businesses where Windows remains the dominant platform, that’s a perfectly valid approach.
“‘Supports Apple’ and ‘built for Apple’ are not the same sentence,” he explains. “Depth means the day Apple ships a new operating system, your management keeps pace immediately. It means the security controls, the configuration options and the setup experience were designed for how Apple actually works, not approximated afterwards.”
As Campbell sees it, breadth wins when Apple is a small part of the estate. Once Apple becomes important, depth is what protects both the user experience and the IT team’s time. “That’s exactly why platforms like Jamf exist. It’s purpose-built for Apple, so it evolves alongside Apple’s ecosystem rather than trying to adapt to it afterwards, which means it keeps pace with Apple’s operating systems, security model and user experience in a way that general management platforms can’t. We’ve invested heavily in it over the past decade because our goal is to support managed devices throughout their lifecycle without compromising the Apple experience.”
The costs don’t show up straight away
The clearest trend Campbell sees is what he calls the second attempt. Businesses fold Apple into their existing Windows-first tooling, live with it for a year or two, then redesign everything once support requests and user complaints start adding up. A setup that works well at twenty Macs becomes difficult to manage at two hundred because manual processes and custom scripts simply don’t scale.
Users feel it first when the Mac they were excited about starts behaving like the Windows machine they were hoping to leave behind, and productivity suffers as small compromises begin to add up. Before long, the IT team is spending its time maintaining fixes instead of improving the environment.
“The unfair part is that the platform usually gets the blame. Leadership concludes that Apple is hard to manage, when the real problem was managing Apple with the wrong tool.”
So, what’s the alternative
For Campbell, the answer isn’t replacing every Microsoft tool or rebuilding an IT strategy from scratch. It’s recognising that Apple deserves its own strategy once it becomes an important part of the business.
It begins with making sure a device is ready before someone opens the lid for the first time. That’s exactly what Apple-first management platforms such as Jamf are designed to do. They automate deployment, configuration, security and ongoing management, allowing IT teams to manage Apple devices throughout their lifecycle without compromising the Apple experience. From there, it’s about connecting the right people to the right applications securely and simply, while protecting both the user and the business from onboarding through to offboarding.
“Every part of the experience is a decision, not an accident,” he adds.
The shift to Apple has already happened. The real opportunity lies in making sure the way those devices are managed matches the investment that’s been made in them.
As Campbell puts it: “The device decision and the management decision are not the same decision. Choosing Apple is easy and increasingly obvious. Getting the value out of that choice depends entirely on managing it with the depth and intention Apple deserves.”