Apple in the Enterprise: The complete 2026 commentary

Every year we ask the Apple IT/Mac admin community for their opinions about how Apple fared in past 12 months. You can read our 2026 Enterprise Report Card for the average scores and some juicy quotes. But if you want to read all the comments from the panelists who were willing to share in public—all 27,000 words of it—who are we to stand in your way? They wrote it, you read it. That’s how this works.

(The text below has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.)

Enterprise Programs

Andrew Laurence: A banner year for the Enterprise programs: AxM APIs, AxM-managed MDM migrations, and a first-party MDM solution. Is Hades wearing ski gear?

Charles Misson: ABM is finally moving again, with some interesting new features, but nothing really groundbreaking!

Guillaume Gète: There have been very nice improvements on the Apple Business Manager side, i.e., management of Activation lock, APIs (!), and the incredible improvement of being able to move from one MDM to another very easily straight from Apple Business Manager—definitely a game changer. However, there is still some effort much needed on the Volume Purchase Program side, as it is still not possible to purchase subscriptions for VPP. Which is really weird and annoying, as Apple pushes subscriptions from its own Creation Studio suite… and admins can’t purchase them for their company’s employees!

Christopher Cook: Apple has made improvements to Apple School/Business Manager over the past year, adding the ability to better manage password resets, activation lock, and making the transition to managed Apple accounts more visible. However, App Store application management continues to stagnate with no meaningful changes or improvements for many years. The rollout of Creator Studio was a mess. It coincided with the start of the spring semester, and Apple released a version of Logic that was incompatible with VPP licensing. The App Store auto-updates the apps but provides no way of rolling back to a previous version. This resulted in an entire course going offline until a new version of Logic could be released to deal with the error. While the VPP issue itself was unfortunate, it put a spotlight on the shortcomings of using the App Store for deploying and managing applications.

Michael Jon: There’s genuine progress to acknowledge here, but we also have to talk about the parts that are still a mess. Apple Business Manager continues to improve. The API additions are a welcome move, particularly for asset inventory tooling that needs accurate device data from ABM and ASM. That’s the right direction. What isn’t the right direction is still relying on SMS-based two-factor authentication for administrator accounts in 2026, and the continued cap of five administrators per ABM and ASM instance, regardless of organization size. For a company managing tens of thousands of devices across multiple countries, five admin seats isn’t a policy that reflects reality. Apps and Books haven’t seen meaningful movement, and the volume purchase program model, while functional, still feels like it could do with some modernization in how it surfaces and manages licenses at scale. Managed Apple IDs are still doing the right thing overall. Domain capture was a smart addition in prior years and has genuinely helped administrators pre-capture accounts at scale. The frustrating gaps are around continuity features like Sidecar, which require both devices to be signed into the same Apple ID at the system level before the feature is even available. Being able to add a Managed Apple ID as a secondary account on a personal iPad so users could actually use Sidecar at work would be a meaningful improvement. On storage, I’m not going to pile on about the five-gigabyte limit. Your productivity suite should be carrying that load anyway. Then there’s the Developer Program, which remains one of the most infuriating enrollment processes I’ve encountered on any platform. Six months of being kicked around trying to secure a single developer account for a 2,400-person organization is not acceptable, and this isn’t an isolated story. I’ve heard it from administrators across multiple organizations. Google Workspace lets you sign up for a Play developer account directly from Workspace and use it organization-wide. Microsoft has a comparable model. Why Apple, a company with registered business customers and a mature enterprise program, can’t offer the same is genuinely beyond me.

Erik Kramer: Apple School Manager has maintained a heavy-handed user interface, but at least it hasn’t gone all Liquid Glass! The additional functionality of API access has been a good start for asset management purposes, but not much else. Federating Apple Accounts with Google Workspace was a nasty implementation—reading email logs to see who it affects!?!—, but after everything settled, it is seamless. Despite shortcomings in functionality, these tools have remained stable and working.

John Wetter: I would characterize the overall performance as uneven. Some parts of the Apple Enterprise program have been and continue to be solid, like Apple School Manager, while things like Managed Apple Accounts continue to be a mystery in what works, how they work, and what value they bring to the organization, given both the positive impacts and seemingly arbitrary restrictions.

Tom Bridge: Apple took a major step forward this past year by adding an API to Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager (collectively after AxM). Giving Admins the ability to query AxM for device information, as well as move devices between device management systems, is a welcome improvement. In addition, the ability to enforce device management system migration for the 26 series of operating systems on macOS and iOS is a game-changer for organizations that want the freedom to choose new solutions without having to maintain multiple solutions for years. While Managed Apple Accounts continue to benefit from improvement, there are still major impediments to the adoption of Account-driven User Enrollment, mostly due to inflexible application delivery systems that don’t support side-by-side versions of applications. Apple needs to take major steps to keep up with what have become table-stakes approaches to app management on Android. There still isn’t a great experience for orgs that want to do light-touch management or mobile app management on iOS.

Jeremy Leland: The addition of new access controls for device management, MAC addresses visibility, and API accounts is all helpful. ABM account holders still need the ability to check non-ABM devices in bulk for coverage information.

Justin McMahan: We use Jamf Pro as our MDM, and its integration with Apple’s platform is great.

Andrew B: It’s really nice to see new features in ABM, including the MDM migration API. But the development of features seems to take a very long time. New features arrived just in time for Apple to transition away from ABM to Apple Business mid-cycle, so who knows what the future holds.

John Cleary: Many of the past concerns have been addressed; however, I knocked 1 point off as I still can’t buy extra storage for a managed iCloud account. This makes it much harder than it needs to be to adopt iCloud in the enterprise.

Jeff Anderson: Apple is clearly working to make macOS more prevalent in the enterprise. Recent additions such as the ability to remove activation lock in ABM, and the recent changes to Apple Business, show their common to Enterprise.

Michal Moravec: This year, we got two features Mac Admins wanted for a long time: Apple Business Manager public API and automated migration between MDMs via ABM with Automated Device Enrollment. Apple also added missing hardware identifiers (e.g., MAC addresses) to ABM, so we can now use it as a source of truth for our inventory system. I am writing this one day after ABM became Apple Business. While I understand why Apple wanted to merge ABM, Apple Business Essentials, and other business-oriented services, the result is a giant mess. Apple Business’s web interface feels more like an early prototype than a production-level system. The launch was most likely rushed and not very well coordinated between various teams at Apple.

Armin Briegel: Many ongoing issues, challenges, and works in progress here. On the one hand, Apple introduced a management service migration workflow, which is great, and an API for ABM/ASM. On the other hand, Apple still does not provide managed volume purchases and deployment for App Store subscriptions and in-App purchases. Apple has announced it will expand Apple Business Essentials, now named just “Apple Business” and ABM functionality worldwide this week, which is promising, but long overdue. However, expanded iCloud storage for Managed Apple Accounts and warranty is still only available in the US.

Jeffrey Hoover: They are certainly trying harder than they did 10-15 years ago

Shane Thompson: As always, Apple’s enterprise and education programs are a mixed bag. On the positive side of things, migrating MDM providers using School/Business Manager is a great new feature and allows organizations to more easily change MDM providers if required. Purchasing apps and books from the App Store is still a painful process of searching for the app, purchasing licenses, assigning it to an MDM Server and then pushing the app via MDM. I feel that this is something that can be simplified. The introduction of the School/Business Manager API does feel like an exciting new feature that I have started experimenting with to sync warranty information with devices within my MDM, and I am hoping to explore it more over the next year.

David McMonnies: While reasonably static from a feature perspective, AxM remains a reliable platform, and Managed AppleIDs are similarly reliable. Feature improvement is coming with the April 14 update to ABM, so potentially more to report on in this space soon.

Alex Meretten: No news is good news here, and basically everything works the way it did a year ago. I can even finally move devices between ABM accounts, and that’s just lovely. Curious how the changes to business work out – at first blush, I’m not impressed – but we’ll see.

TJ Draper: I don’t think there’s much change from their performance last year

John Delfino: They exist, which is something — but there are huge quantities of headaches. Enabling enterprise functionality disables a disproportionate quantity of features users desire on the endpoints (can’t use wallet on any managed devices?); VPP is a headache, and in-app purchases don’t exist; Shared iPad functionality is only supported by some MDM software; the list goes on and on. It’s inconsistent and inconvenient— but again, the features exist.

Bob McGillicuddy: The basics like DEP and app push are fine, but domain capture for managed accounts is messy and filled with gotchas. WEIRD gaps chronically remain, like the inability to buy IAPs and subscriptions, even to Apple’s own software like Creator Studio.

Chris Carr: The Apple Business Manager APIs have been utilized by folks to make some nice open source projects

W. Andrew Robinson: The first that comes to mind is the recent ‘Apple Business’ rebranding/ combining of services that enterprises need (ABM/ASM) and that other, smaller SMBs might use like Connect and the Maps integration (US only) as well as device management, etc…I like that that Apple is working on this though really it’s not very ‘enterprise-y’. Another item that is polarizing is moving to a subscription model for their ‘new’ Creator Studio… some enterprises might see this as a win for an alternative to Adobe, though I dislike the inclusion of the ‘iWork’ apps there, as it might not bode well for those apps to remain free in the near future, especially (for me) Keynote. Improvements to Managed Apple Accounts over the last year were mostly positive, but still, pain points remain. I’m glad to get more features that MAAs have like purchasing business apps, TestFlight and Developer logins helping to eliminate the need for personal Apple Accounts there, platform restrictions to company-owned device logins and some good stuff in bulk-domain ‘unmanaged account’ management, but all these still point out things that are missing – Not all ‘Apple Account’ features are available with MAAs still, and I think this still prevents enterprise adoption. MAAs are not ‘easy’ as I would hope they would be, and I’m thinking here of iCloud Keychain and Universal Control, among others. After so many years since we got MAAs, we see these ‘incremental’ improvements show up, and it makes me feel like they are not as much of a priority as I’d hoped. Very ‘second-class citizen.’ Still, not gonna complain about the things we DO get! Sometimes, slow and methodical is how we get stuff.

Joel Housman: Overall, they’ve made improvements across the board to the MDM framework. I’ve seen small but noticeable improvements that have made managing our fleet of Macs easier and better.

Allister Banks: The black box of Apple Account domain capture reared its head on a timed release, as obviously most end users just ignored it and are slowly dealing with @temporaryappleaccount.apple.com username resets, which is only mentioned in passing, practically undocumented since it’s apparently not written with the intention of being end-user facing. Issues have cropped up if you were logged in with that account. I can’t imagine how disruptive it was for places that were more accepting of having end users create the Apple Account they log in to their work Macs with, and use the work domain. The MDM migration path for Tahoe Macs worked great to the point we migrated over 1k computers a day at its peak, but the flakiness of the interface and inability to reliably know why a device isn’t ‘deadline eligible’ among other API and interface gaps was unfortunate – I know people who had to web GUI script with selenium-ish tools and got their account flagged but with no API option and worse DISCREPANCIES between what bulk-actions what supposed to perform and what the GUI showed for an individual device what did they expect us to do?

Brian LaShomb: Privileges and roles remain a vulnerable spot in Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager. There’s no way to scope read-only access for third-party integrations with the API, and built-in roles like Device Manager lack meaningful guardrails against bulk device changes.

Marian Albers: Many great improvements overall, but unfortunately, the launch of Apple Business Manager on April 14th introduced many controls (Brands/Ads) which shouldn’t be mixed with Device/User controls in my opinion.

Kevin: MDM’s, Configuration profiles and their management on Apple platforms are still way too complex in 2026, no matter which device management frameworks you use.

Craig Cohen: The ongoing and rapid additions to Apple eBusiness Programs have accelerated our offerings to customers.

Emilio Garcia: We’re in a large federated environment, and managing Apple School Manager leaves a lot to be desired (all users can see all devices, or all MDM servers, or can change the default MDM server for the whole environment, etc.). But for its intended use-case, and how Apple wants us to use it, it does its job reasonably well.

Luca Accomazzi: We are a mostly Windows-based reality, but still, when I contacted the online Apple Store representative for a leasing of four MacBooks, I would have expected something more than that lukewarm, slow answer.

Gabriel Marcelino: Apple Business was a huge upgrade, and we see that they are making Enterprise more important. I hope the improvement continues next year.

Cameron Kay: OS and Device Management are getting better, but their enterprise services still need a lot of work. Apple Business Manager/Apple School Manager still has incorrect MAC Address info for devices, and the API for looking up warranty information is so show it makes it almost impossible to populate warranty info for my entire fleet. AppleCare Enterprise Support also doesn’t hold enough stock of spare parts, especially for high-end systems like Studio Displays and Mac Studios, where you can wait up to a month before they can do the repair. Apple also needs to add PassKey authentication support to Apple Business Manager/Apple School Manager, AppleCare Enterprise portal, GSX, and allow us to use the same Apple Account on all of these services.

Marcus Rowell: The new consolidated Apple Business is a great progress and appears to be a good foundation for the future. API access was very nice to have last year; in our AI-driven future, it will be essential.

Luke Charters: Free MDM, a proper API, detailed hardware information and centralized brand management. This is a huge leap from where we’ve come in just the last few years and points to a renewed focus from Apple on the SMB and enterprise market segments. If there’s anything to criticize here, it’s Managed Apple Accounts. No access to subscriptions or in-app purchases is becoming a bigger pain point, particularly with the introduction of Apple Creator Studio. The sign-in, identity verification, and subscription renewal experience with Apple Developer accounts that are also Managed Apple Accounts needs significant improvement.

Kale Kingdon: Overall, Apple has shown good progress and direction in the last year with changes to Apple Business, AxM API’s and other minor additions. Top marks are held back due to underdeveloped and inconsistent Managed Apple Account features globally, as well as regional storage limitations, errors, logs and remediation tools. Limiting MAA Sign-in on Supervised Devices as a Global AxM Setting is also a feature that falls ever so slightly short. The feature is good, but the limitations on scoping make it unusable.

Peter Loobuyck: It is surely improving, but the enterprise program may need speed improvements. For instance, ABM is still not snappy to work with.

Martin Piron: The Apple Business Manager improvements have been very welcome, especially the API, MDM migration and device metadata, which have made it so much easier to manage the fleet of devices. You could say these were long overdue, but I’m still very happy to finally have those capabilities.

N Clarke: Apple Business is an interesting introduction. Currently waiting to see what is offered for Education, and how it might compare to current established and functional MDM providers such as Jamf, Iru, and Mosyle.

Matthias Choules: The release of Apple Business marks a very important milestone in opening up for a whole new customer category. This will be really great for the whole ecosystem.

Jered Benoit: Apple’s enterprise programs are functional, but stagnant. There isn’t much that changes, which is both good and bad. The reliance on third-party providers for mobile device management is a double-edged sword, as there are always edge cases and differences between the documentation of both parties that lead to lots of trial and error.

Chris Pommer: Given our relatively stale needs after a big upgrade cycle a couple of years ago, our use of Apple’s services has remained static. The launch of Apple Business is encouraging, but the main interesting features aren’t launching in Canada yet.

Bart Reardon: They could only improve on the functionality in the Business/School Manager API, and improve they did. Access to device purchase records and warranty information is super easy (and critical for effective lifecycle management), so this is a huge plus. Being able to set other properties like MDM assignment or even release devices just makes things easier. More API’s, I say.

Morgan Schönberger: Allowing admins and IT professionals to use Apple Business (Manager) through its new API is a welcomed change. It makes glances at the data much easier, especially in larger environments.

Enterprise Service and Support

Chris Pommer: Our business rep is fine, but not outstanding.

Michael Jon: I’ll be upfront that my direct engagement with Apple’s enterprise support at my current organization is limited, but my experience at a prior role has permanently coloured my view of this space, and not in a good way. In 2024, I was working at a non-profit news organization that had engaged Apple for enterprise coverage on their existing Mac fleet. What Apple neglected to mention was that doing so would effectively cancel their existing AppleCare Consumer coverage, which had covered full device failures, and replace it with a tokenized model where you needed to order 50 units to earn a single replacement credit, for an international non-profit, which was a complete non-starter. The organization lost tens of thousands of dollars in AppleCare credits that had already been paid for. That’s not a miscommunication; that’s Apple essentially conning a previous IT manager, and the organization paid for it. Beyond that, AppleCare for Enterprise has a broader reputation problem in the administrator community. Being allocated a small number of support ticket credits per year, only to be told you’ve run out when you raise an issue, is a terrible experience. Raising a critical issue and hearing nothing back for months isn’t an edge case; it’s a common story. The whole system feels designed to minimize Apple’s support obligations rather than actually help customers. Getting one ticket credit per year and then being told that’s not enough when something goes wrong is not real enterprise support. For contrast, say what you will about Microsoft, their Premier and Unified support models at least give you a named Technical Account Manager and a clear escalation path. You know who to call, you know what you’re paying for, and you know what the response commitment is. Apple’s model feels like it was designed by a company that doesn’t really want enterprise customers but tolerates them because the hardware margins are too good to walk away from. This is a 2 until Apple seriously overhauls both the transparency and the structure of how they engage with enterprise customers on support.

Gabriel Marcelino: Getting better, but some beta releases still do not have all the information when they are released. 26.4 was a good example where the beta they fixed the keychain issue on the 3rd party login api and then when GM was release it broke again. Or where release patches things that were not released during a beta.

Jeff Anderson: ACE has been very solid in providing hardware support. My team always has a good experience when needing to contact Apple Support. Also, our Apple rep is very responsive when we need to purchase equipment, and he keeps us informed of upcoming changes to Apple that could affect our business.

Jason Hedrick: Feedback assistant has improved for my issues

Kale Kingdon: While AppleSeed, Beta Program Documentation & Feedback Assistant improve the overall confidence in the enterprise frameworks as a whole, direct support models such as The Disappointingly Underdeveloped AppleCare for Enterprise Portal, Non-Scalable Support Agreements and Reduction in Regional System Engineers & Apple Staffing leave SMB & EDU without clear lines of support. Considering the potential impact of the MacBook Neo on the EDU & Enterprise market, I’m concerned by the current (potentially regional) underdeveloped repair network and how this might negatively impact uptake long-term. Speaking as someone who manages 10,000+ devices 1300km’s away from the nearest Apple Store and Apple Authorized Repair Agent with limited onsite options, accidental damage repair is the only area that gives me considerable pause when discussing rollouts.

John Wetter: Documentation has been the standout positive in the last couple of years, while the feedback program continues to too often feel like you are tossing comments and feedback into a black hole. At the same time, betas have felt stable with what seems like better regression testing for enterprise services.

Armin Briegel: Communication between Apple and the Apple management community is improving. One can tell that the feedback from AppleSeed for IT and other channels is being considered. New features will often have management options from the start, or they will be added quickly after feedback. The release notes for Enterprise are generally good, but admins still often have to gather information from various sources (AppleShare for IT notes, developer release notes, normal release notes (which often just say “improvements”, security notes and enterprise notes. It would be nice for all if they were available in one spot.

Martin Piron: Having clear instructions on how to leverage our AppleCare Enterprise support to get our deployment blockers looked at during the beta season made a big difference. Seeing those bugs fixed from one beta to the other is amazing.

Christopher Cook: The Apple employees I get to directly work with provide more knowledge and support than any other vendor in any field I’ve ever worked in. They’re fantastic. I bring this up because Apple has created a support structure that allows its staff to work directly with customers like me. It’s invaluable. Despite us working for different employers, we share a common goal: to do whatever we can to make these platforms as great as possible. Apple is a massive, enigmatic machine, but it’s made primarily of people who genuinely care. This structure allows for a direct line of feedback for Apple to see how its technology is used and adopted in the enterprise and to provide guidance on best practices. While their feedback structure is imperfect (cough Feedback Assistant cough), I have been around long enough to see feedback alchemized into meaningful change and improvements. I want my users to have the best possible experience with their managed devices, and Apple has provided both things deserving of feedback and people who can help me navigate it.

Tom Bridge: Feedback remains an area of concern for Mac Admins. Unless you have an expensive support contract, you might as well write your concerns down on a piece of paper, fold it into a paper airplane, and sail it south of Salesforce Tower toward Apple Park. While Admins will still file feedback, because it’s the right thing to do, Apple could do a lot more to respond to Admins’ concerns and acknowledge where fixes are available.

Joel Housman: For what little I use these programs, I haven’t seen a huge improvement, but I haven’t seen any degradation of their previous service either.

Jeffrey Hoover: Still want a portal like TechDirect. Calling for all the things is not needed.

Jered Benoit: The few times I have had to reach out to support, it has been convoluted to get to the enterprise support team. I have spent plenty of time in the non-enterprise support queue to only be handed off when we get through the laborious basic troubleshooting. The documentation, as mentioned previously, is thin at best. Reddit provides better documentation than Apple. There is no ‘known bugs’ list that I can refer to, and I can only figure out if an issue is resolved by recreating it and seeing if the problem has been fixed.

Peter Loobuyck: Support is good, but we always need to go through all the obvious questions

Marcus Rowell: The feedback loops with Apple and Enterprise customers via the AppleSeed for IT program are still improving every year, especially those associated with the Appleseed community in the Mac Admins Slack. Nearly all Mac Admins, and most 3rd party developers, are now on board with testing early during the betas and filing feedback as soon as they can. The Enterprise Release Notes are extremely valuable.

Guillaume Gète: Globally, support was OK. But I find it really terrible that Apple sometimes pushes changes in management without any warning in the betas, and the final release has some unseen “new feature” or “bug fix” that breaks something else. And I still have Feedbacks I wrote ages ago that are not fixed, or things that have been fixed for which I got no notification of the fix in Feedback Assistant!

N Clarke: Why is it impossible in the year 2026 to have an email ticket chain with Apple Support and instead have to find a time where you and they can have a phone call together? That said, support has always been very friendly and has worked hard on trying to find fixes to the presented issues.

W. Andrew Robinson: Apple’s documentation web resources look better than ever, and I think they are a ‘gold standard’ when compared to others. Well done! Sure, there are gaps, but we know Apple does not document everything we wish it would. Still big improvements this year! Appleseed for IT improvements is welcome, and the expansion of functions in Apple Business (née Manager) is really good – I count at least twelve feature announcements for it, including warranty & hardware status info like battery health and MAC addresses for some devices, API and admin role improvements… the list is long. But the biggest in my mind is the support for migration between device management services (i.e., MDM…more about that later) – this is huge, and addresses a massive pain point that directly benefits enterprise customers, allowing us to choose device management solutions based on need and features, and not remain with a vendor out of ‘migration pain avoidance.’ Also, I want to point out professional training improvements from Apple, including language localization and accessibility features of fully online courses. It’s nice when tech companies remember the world is not North American and is diverse in training needs. Well done, Apple! That said, Feedback and feedback responses, and their bug bounty programs have fundamental issues that could see some attention… but let’s focus on successes rather than lack of improvements.

Bob McGillicuddy: Fine. Programs like Appleseed could be more proactive ahead of major O.S. updates because so many small features change and aren’t well documented AT ALL

Allister Banks: Return to service workflow documentation could use an overhaul so our warehouse can more easily just-in-time update devices before shipping and refresh returned devices, with hints about using a hub and properly supporting multiple devices. Apple Configurator and DFU reliability have been a sore spot that I think makes moving off USB sticks a non-starter.

Andrew B: Apple Feedback remains a black box. Enterprise AppleCare, if you’re lucky enough to have it, has become useful, particularly during testing. I’ve never filed more bugs for a major release before, but I’ve also never had as much vigorous engagement from AppleCare, who in turn appear to be engaging the Product teams (?) behind Feedback. Thanks to this, as well as judiciously invoking the “Deployment Blocker” incantation, a lot of bad bugs got squashed in Tahoe betas and minor versions before they were released. The test burden that comes back on tickets is often high, but when this testing yields results, or feature or implementation improvements, it feels less odious.

Emilio Garcia: I really wish there were more acknowledgment when submitting feedback. It’s difficult to convince colleagues to submit feedback when it feels like yelling into the void. I have one feedback still open for an issue that was resolved several releases ago, never marked complete — it gives the impression that it was never read.

Chris Carr: AppleSeed is useful

Michal Moravec: I am still very much demotivated to write feedback about mundane things. I will rather take a walk and shout at the sea. Feels much better and productive. The best interaction from Apple’s side is the unofficial one. We really appreciate certain members of the Mac Admin Slack.

Justin McMahan: Any time I need to contact them, they’re very helpful. One of the best support teams I work with regularly in my role.

Bart Reardon: Generally speaking, I find enterprise support to be excellent.

John Welch: Apple’s problems aren’t things like the programs or support themselves. Those are solid. The problems are the “little” things, like documentation. The deployment docs are fantastic, but god help you if you need documentation of things like logging, because god will literally help you before Apple will. I’ve spent countless hours repeating the same thing over and over while watching the log file scroll so that I can find the sender. I can get docs on connecting to the log system, but nothing on the log system itself. This is a problem Apple has had for decades, and I see no sign of it being fixed. Documenting stuff well is not sexy, it’s tedious, and necessary. If you want to really see how bad Apple’s docs are, compare Microsoft’s developer and scripting documentation to what Apple passes off as documentation. It’s not even close. It’s taken until macOS 2026 for Apple to properly support PIV login. Prior to 2026, if your first login used a PIV card, you didn’t get a filevault token so that you couldn’t reboot your computer. Even worse, you couldn’t have an admin with a “high” user number fix that; it had to basically be an admin account created locally. 2026 fixes that, but the fact that it lasted that long is not good. Still no proper PIV card support for iPadOS.

Erik Kramer: In this corner of the US, we have great access to support from SE as well as standard AppleCare. I’d like to especially give a shoutout to the free ClarisConnect instance that is available and fully supported for ASM schools. It is a gem.

Shane Thompson: There are some nice changes in how you can manage enrolling devices in the AppleSeed for IT program via DDM, which allows us to invite more people into the beta testing program. The documentation is still of decent quality, but the release schedule of betas seems extra chaotic this past year, so you’re just kind of left wondering when Apple is going to be releasing a different build of a beta.

Luke Charters: Apple laid off most of the system engineers who supported our region, which has significantly degraded our ability to get tailored advice about how new features and technologies will impact our environment. We also no longer have a line of communication for simple questions and clarifications that don’t justify creating an AppleCare Enterprise support ticket. With all the new features in Apple Business and the popularity of MacBook Neo, reducing your boots on the ground staff helping IT departments migrate to Apple feels like a major strategic blunder.

David McMonnies: Enterprise support has been fairly static, representing neither significant improvement nor degradation. Documentation is reasonable, but often poorly communicated.

Craig Cohen: The beta programs are always helpful, but any response to real feedback is nonexistent. It feels like a placebo.

Cameron Kay: Hardware support needs work, especially for high-end systems. Feedback Assistant still seems like a black hole, and you don’t see any response unless you log an AppleCare Enterprise Support case referencing the Feedback Assistant case number. Appleseed beta release notes are getting better. Unfortunately, there is still a gap between new features being released and Apple adding controls to manage them. It’s sometimes taking a year or more for those management controls to be added.

John Delfino: Documentation is barely existent and rarely helpful. Often, I figure out the problem, and then I have no way to even let Apple know the solution to the issue.

Hardware Reliability and Innovation

Charles Misson: Pretty solid year in terms of hardware!

Bart Reardon: Hardware team is just killing it: wizards, all of them.

Chris Carr: MacBooks continue to be nice products

Cameron Kay: Hardware is generally very reliable. The one exception is the external iMac power supplies. We’ve had a lot of those die in the past 12 months. The Ethernet port has stopped working until the power supply is unplugged and replugged.

Erik Kramer: Reliability remains top-notch. Innovation has not been quite as impressive, but the Neo turned up to impress just in the nick of time.

N Clarke: M5 is the biggest improvement. As for reliability, MagSafe cables are showing better longevity in EDU environments than the past USB-C cables. Pity they can’t charge an iPad!

Martin Piron: Reliability remains high, innovation was a bit flat until the Neo came out. Everything else felt like an incremental upgrade, because they were.

Shane Thompson: If there is one area where someone can have no complaints about Apple, it’s with their hardware. We are a mixed environment, and we are seeing a steady uptick in our Mac numbers, and our Windows numbers are staying flat or decreasing. Our end users love the hardware, our desk-side tech teams deal with way fewer tickets from our Mac users, and we expect this to be an ongoing trend.

John Welch: Apple still makes some of the best hardware out there.

Kale Kingdon: I can unequivocally and wholeheartedly give top marks to Hardware Reliability and Innovation. The inexorable march towards more performant and battery-efficient lower-cost models is now consistent and extremely well-received. Capping the already stellar line of Macs off with the MacBook Neo as the latest release, during the time of such market instability, is a Tour de Force for Tim Cook’s Supply Chain-focused Apple. Not long ago, I never would have expected to hear fleet management peers, even the most committed Apple skeptics, openly praising a Mac as the most performant, best-built, fastest to procure, and most cost-effective option on the market. Add the Neo’s impressive repairability and improved resilience against accidental damage, and this year gets a 5/5 easily.

Dennis Logue: Working in an organization that supports end users on both Apple devices and Windows devices from various manufacturers, the superiority of Apple’s hardware is on display on a daily basis

TJ Draper: Hardware continues to be best-in-class. There just isn’t any better hardware in any category that Apple is in. I’m still on a 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro. It’s so good, I have no thoughts of upgrading yet. This is the longest I’ve had any Computer where I haven’t wanted to upgrade at least a little.

Chris Pommer: Everything we have purchased since the Apple Silicon launch has been rock solid.

David Rizzo: The MacBook NEO is finally an affordable option for education. Hopefully, it reverses the trend towards Chromebooks.

Gabriel Marcelino: Hardware has been getting better and better, faster and more reliable. There is no beating it in the PC market. With the new Neo, we see that the PC will not be the value machine anymore.

Alex Meretten: My only problem with the state of Apple hardware is that channel inventory dries up after a new chip is announced – and especially now, getting new machines is nigh on impossible. With how things are, we need Apple to keep production going until it can match existing volumes. We’re going to be very short on laptops very soon.

Marcus Rowell: Apple Silicon-based hardware is amazing. We have solid, great value options for all users. With the MacBook Neo, MacBook Air, through to the MacBook Pro’s range of CPU/GPU/Display and storage options, coupled with the Mac Mini and Studio, we are covered from extremely cost-effective (yet still great) to extremely powerful, where we need it.

John Delfino: Devices are extremely reliable. The pace of innovation has slowed, but it’s still happening.

Michal Moravec: MacBooks and iPhones are still great! Very high reliability and good value for the company.

Emilio Garcia: We’ve really only had to bring one or two devices to a repair shop in the past year for hardware-related failures, and those devices were in tough environments where power loss was frequent. I can’t recall a single issue for devices operating under good conditions.

Craig Cohen: Although Apple silicon impresses, Apple QA has dipped. We have had more issues this year than in previous years.

Tom Bridge: There isn’t anyone making the same caliber hardware as Apple anywhere in the market today, and it’s not even close.

Jeffrey Hoover: In general, the hardware shines. It is mostly user-caused issues.

Andrew B: It’s the best compute hardware on the planet. Fast, cool, power-efficient, a joy to use…until you start grappling with the software that makes it go, and the wheels fall off.

Jeff Richardson: Apple hardware is dependable and works incredibly well. No other company really compares to Apple in this area.

Peter Loobuyck: The Apple hardware is best, even better than before, in terms of repairs

Jered Benoit: Apple’s hardware is unrivaled in reliability. I don’t look for innovation in the enterprise; I need proven solutions, and Apple’s hardware is just that.

Michael Jon: Apple continues to knock it out of the park with the M-series lineup. The contrast with the Intel era is stark. A decade ago, you were paying a premium and feeling genuinely underwhelmed by what you got for it. The M-series is so far above and beyond what the rest of the industry is offering right now that it’s not really a close comparison. My M1 Pro in a 14-inch MacBook Pro is still running strong, and I use it almost daily. Battery health has held up exceptionally well, too, which isn’t something you could say about Intel-era MacBooks a few years in. The MacBook Neo’s use of unused A19 cores from the iPhone line was a genius move. It meaningfully elevates what would otherwise be a fairly unremarkable entry-level machine, and keeping the RAM and storage options modest correctly signals that these are not supposed to be your high-end business workhorses. They’re for students and everyday users, and Apple has positioned them correctly. The rumored touchscreen MacBook doesn’t excite me. It’s not something the MacBook needs, and it feels like a feature in search of a justification. The persistent issue is repairability, and it’s getting harder to ignore as we head into what’s looking like a rocky economic period. Apple’s insistence on soldered storage and the ongoing resistance to consumer-accessible repair is a standout compared to their peers. I understand the argument around serialization and paired components, and I’ll give them some credit on RAM specifically since their unified memory architecture is probably part of why they’ve been able to absorb the memory price increases we’ve seen heading into 2026. But storage is a different story. The cost difference between Apple replacing your storage and a consumer doing it themselves is significant, and as recession signals build, that’s going to matter more and more. The broader economic picture makes this worse. The tariff environment in 2025 and 2026 has been chaotic. On the component side, DDR5 module prices surged 120 to 200% compared to early 2025, and DRAM suppliers are pushing for another 50%+ increase on 2026 contracts. Apple’s scale gives it more room to absorb that than Lenovo or Dell, but the pressure is real. For enterprise procurement teams, the combination of rising hardware costs, soldered components that can’t be replaced, and stretched refresh cycles means the total cost of ownership conversation around Macs is getting harder to win internally. Repairability and the mounting cost pressure are holding this back from a 5.

Jeremy Leland: Our fleet has been impervious to all but user-induced accidental damage this year. Device changes and improvements seem to be well thought out. Apple still needs to fix the charging port placement on the mouse.

Armin Briegel: Even with the demise of Mac Pro and the new displays being a bit disappointing, Apple’s hardware is Apple at its best. The MacBook Neo will change the market for education and enterprise.

W. Andrew Robinson: My first ‘top grade!’ This was a great year for hardware. MacBook Neo, the M5 chip lineup, iPhone 17 series and the ‘Air,’ iPads,… all make for great innovation for the enterprise and continue the Apple Silicon juggernaut at full-steam ahead! I think the MacBook Air and Neo are amazingly versatile devices for business use… Neo especially could be huge for struggling budgets if handled by enterprise IT deployments well – not everyone needs a top-spec MacBook Pro. Of course, those Pro-level devices are crazy good as they always seem to be in recent years. Pour one out for the Mac Pro, however – you never really got your chance in the Apple Silicon era, did you? There’s not a lot more to go into here, as the benefits and successes are pretty self-evident—all in all, a pretty great year for Apple’s hardware.

Morgan Schönberger: Our company had one computer failing on its own; every other incident is of no fault to the computer and rather the users.

David McMonnies: Hardware reliability on silicon devices remains top tier, and the introduction of the Neos is a nice market share play. Overall, innovation seems to be lacking and has dropped my score from a 5 to a 4.

Bob McGillicuddy: Hardware remains great. The laptops are just about the best you can buy

Justin McMahan: We have many Macs, iPads, Apple TVs, and other Apple devices throughout our organization. Their longevity and reliability are great.

John Wetter: Apple is definitely hitting on all cylinders when it comes to hardware. I am looking forward to seeing how the numbers work out over the long-term with the brand new Apple Neo, while we still try to figure out what the long term goal of the Apple Vision Pro platform is.

Marian Albers: MacBook Neo is probably the best improvement since the introduction of Silicon for enterprises, as it covers many low-level use cases.

Joel Housman: We mainly have been purchasing M4 and M5 MacBook Airs over the last year, and they’ve all been rock-solid reliable.

Christopher Cook: Only letting us rate Apple’s hardware lineup to a maximum of five seems unreasonable.

Jeff Anderson: We rarely have problems anymore with Apple hardware that isn’t caused by the fact me user, damaging a device.

Guillaume Gète: Nothing but praise here. Hardware is stellar, and the number of repairs for computers and devices is at an all-time low, I think. No bad issue, no huge repair program… Apple is playing above and beyond the other guys here.

Luke Charters: The hardware lineup, top to bottom, is just amazing right now. The biggest issue with it is the lead times on orders.

Software Reliability and Innovation

Luca Accomazzi: Worst OS upgrade since macOS 7.5, this year…

Luke Charters: When it’s easy for users to figure out where things are and how to get things done in an OS, it means they are more productive, and the organization as a whole is more productive. It also reduces support overhead on the IT department. macOS Tahoe is the first time I’ve seen Apple take a backward step in this area. Apple is very lucky that Tahoe’s competition is the abysmal current state of Windows.

Bart Reardon: You know, people are going to have a rant about liquid glass, but it’s fine. The OS’s are fine, the apps are fine. Everything is fine. My experience is the rough edges can be found in areas where an admin is trying to run $old_workflow on $new_os – this does require being on one’s toes, and new OS’s do break things, but usually there is a good reason for it. Point deducted for the weird placement and behavior of Background Security Improvements, though wth.

Kale Kingdon: Aggregating marks across Usability, Design, Innovation & Reliability across all platforms is difficult – But I appreciate the complexity of increasing the scope of the report card. Standard User UIX remains reasonably unchanged, outside of liquid glass design changes and subsequent, initially limited accessibility options across nearly all platforms. There’s a prevailing feeling of needing a Bug Fix / QOL release to resolve some of the core OS limitations that I believe have existed for so long that the developers and long-time users have since built up workflows or muscle memory to avoid them. Simple Mac UIX quirks like not surfacing a per-app volume mixer, not showing file transfer speeds, Scroll direction for Trackpad & Mice cannot be set separately, and the mess that is control center, notification center & menu bar come to mind. iOS/iPadOS redesign and multitasking are honestly appreciated to breathe vigor into the platform, but minimizing the UI now requires more taps for common quick actions like Saving To Files & Switching tabs, which have a larger impact on the younger and more inexperienced user. Shared iPad remains a niche use case considering overall platform adoption, but one critical to breaking into and increasing adoption in Education & Specific Multi-user device industries. It is criminally underdeveloped and undertested, with consistent bugs introduced by the Core OS. I’ve seen everything from failed OS Updates due to incorrect storage calculations, an issue I’ve not seen for years outside of SI, Account Login loops with no error to the user, BFU Passcode Unlock requests with zero device user accounts, Augmented Reality applications crashing upon using the Camera and much, much more. Apple Creator Suite is extremely appreciated for the Creative apps such as Logic, Final Cut & Pixelmator, but is baffling for the iWork Suite. I’m not inherently against Generative AI within these apps, but a mid-cycle redesign of the core UI of these applications is extremely disruptive to an Education environment that relies on the stability of these apps. MDM Controls do not go far enough to disable these features. Similarly, the fact that these features have not been made available at an organization / AxM level is a missed opportunity. Either let me buy in or remove it in its entirety. Not this. Apple’s consistently failed implementation of Siri and external AI models is an interesting showcase of how the Apple of 2026 can become horrendously myopic when it comes to certain areas of innovation. By rights, Apple should have a home-field advantage. The history of Performant ML Cores, Integrated Software & Robust Privacy Controls should enable a thoughtful implementation of world and personal-context-aware models. It’s curious to consider, with all the ancillary projects over the years that would benefit from such a thing, The Car Project & Home Devices especially, that they would allow Siri to lie Fallow for the better part of a decade.

Michal Moravec: The software quality continues to slide downhill. This year’s releases fleshed out Apple’s inability to create good UI/UX anymore. Instead, they focus on flashy effects, which sometimes make the user experience downright hostile. A UI that is supposed to elevate the content distracts from the content or makes the content less readable because of a bad background color + glass translucency condition. The UI overhaul was extremely rushed. This was very visible on macOS, where users immediately discovered tons of glitches, inconsistencies, and broken things. macOS 26 really made me nostalgic for the late-2000 era of Mac OS X. The systems back then were not without issues, but the UI was simple, functional, and objectively very good-looking. Compare that to today’s UI, which is not simple, not functional, and the visual appeal is controversial.

Christopher Cook: “Innovation” is a funny word to use to describe all of the advertising/upselling Apple is pushing into their apps and operating systems. Apple’s marketing to personal customers has spilled over into the enterprise with nonsensical, embarrassing, and inappropriate results. Here are a few examples: Opens Pages (sorry, “Pages: Create Documents”) and creates a new document. The first thing you’ll see is an advertisement for all the templates and things you could do if only you were a CS subscriber. Scroll down, and you’ll immediately notice “premium” content mixed in with the included templates. It’s everywhere. When you start your blank document, the “Creator Hub” popover is there to show you more things you can’t use. The best part of seeing this everywhere? Creator Studio is unavailable for EDU enterprise customers to purchase even if they wanted to. Also new this year is getting marketing notifications about Apple services for your enterprise-managed device. One of Apple’s strengths has always been interoperability between devices, and this is made possible by having an Apple Account. If you use any of these features by signing into both a work and personal device, you’ll get System Settings badge notifications about AppleCare coverage for your managed devices on all of your personal devices. There is no way to programmatically suppress this behavior, because Apple has apparently never considered that someone might sign into their work device with a personal Apple Account to use features like Messages. I’ll leave Apple’s macOS innovations on corner radii, excessive and cluttered menu iconography, and broken scrollbars for others to comment on.

N Clarke: Liquid Glass shows an interesting new trajectory for the interface, but with some new issues, such as the misaligned corner grips and lack of contrast when content moves under controls. I have not encountered anything I would deride as ‘unusable’, I still think it’s early days, and I’m curious to see where this leads. The new ability for app developers to have items within the control center inspires hope that a notched laptop may have a usable menu bar without third-party tools, but the lack of developers making use of that means I’ll continue to run my MacBook at one custom resolution lower to shrink the menu bar below the notch. Come on, Apple, let us scroll the sides of the notch!

Alex Meretten: For all the bluster about 26, it’s no more buggy than any recent release. It’s fine. People needed some education on where their cheese moved, but it’s fine.

John Wetter: As strong as hardware is, software is not.

Armin Briegel: It is tough to admit, but software is turning into Apple’s weakness. They have a strong, solid foundation that they have been coasting on for a long time, but the cracks are widening and getting painful. Most choices in Apple’s software, whether it is the productivity apps, the App Store, Maps, etc., seem to be made with the goal of increasing services revenue, rather than actually improving the user experience and making software that “just works” and delights. This has hampered the iPad and Vision Pro forever. Apple software is so entrenched in its own walled garden that they seem to have forgotten how to compete on quality.

Joel Housman: While I subjectively do not like the UI changes they’ve made with macOS 26, specifically related to Liquid Glass, I haven’t seen a degradation in their software reliability.

Jeff Anderson: macOS still gives us problems at times with strange bugs that we have to work around. We always defer major OS upgrades for at least 90 days and up to 6 months. Tahoe has been OK overall, but I wish the software were as reliable as the hardware.

David McMonnies: Software reliability has taken a hit over the last year. A number of persistent and significant bugs are notably present in Tahoe more than in the last few years of releases, and mitigation/amelioration of these issues does seem to come more slowly.

TJ Draper: I’m not a Liquid Glass hater, I actually like it overall. I actually wish they’d do more Liquid Glass with macOS, which is the OS where they implemented it the least. But the core reliability problems remain, and needless bugs were introduced and shipped with Liquid Glass. In addition, it seems that macOS 26 wants to be restarted more often than its predecessor, as performance noticeably starts lagging over the course of a week or so. Restarting due to performance is incredibly disruptive to state and workflows (despite the setting, “Reopen windows when logging in”). In addition, iOS has taken to full phone lock up at random times (though it seems to happen most when the phone is in Sleep focus) when swiping up to unlock. It will sit on the partially swiped-up home screen for about 3-5 minutes, frozen, until it finally “re-springs.” This issue continues to be present in iOS 26.4. It feels like there are more bugs now than there were in previous OSes, so Apple is not getting a good grade from me here.

Marcus Rowell: Liquid Glass mostly feels like a change for change’s sake. With so many rough edges and inconsistencies, our users are unhappy with it. Hopefully, this year’s WWDC brings a focus on usability and consistency. Repeating myself: Notifications are still confusing, too small and easily ignored. PPPC needs a rethink. It needs to be a simple way for an App to ask for its required approvals in one dialog. Our users basically ignore notifications.

Martin Piron: The move to a unified version number across Apple’s OSes was a great change. I don’t personally mind Liquid Glass, but I can appreciate why some people do.

Jeffrey Hoover: better and better. Chasing down those bugs and CVEs

W. Andrew Robinson: I probably rewrote this section three times, trying to organize my thoughts, and that tells me something. This past year hasn’t been the best, but really, it hasn’t been the worst, either. Is Tahoe the best macOS we’ve had? Nope. Is it the worst? Also, no, I think. It is sloppy, and that makes me sad, but Apple excels in iteration, and I am sure they will course-correct as needed. The new UI changes of ‘Liquid Glass’ are not signs of the final downfall of Apple. I think we are in one of those cyclic times where Apple’s hardware excellence is in ascendancy, and its software is not. But we’ve been here before, and I haven’t lost confidence in Apple because of a rocky macOS rollout. Apple still has the best OS and software for my stakeholders in my business, so for that, I’m grateful. I will also say there are standouts – DDM, Platform SSO, Private Cloud Compute and the Gemini-Siri-whatever-it-will-be, plus a whole list of other things I do appreciate. Liquid Glass is in everyone’s face, all the time, so we might tend to focus on that, but in the end, it’s a UI that has greatness under it, powering the best OS for business.

Chris Carr: meh nothing great, but nothing horrible

David Rizzo: I feel like I’ve seen more problematic software (especially in iOS 26) than I have in previous years. I’m still not a fan of the annual OS cycle… take some time to get it right first.

Emilio Garcia: macOS Tahoe is not a total dumpster fire, but the experience is definitely worse. Liquid glass did not feel like a cohesive UI overhaul — just a skin. I used to download Windows themes from DeviantArt way back when, and now and then there’d be an icon or UI element the author forgot to skin, and that was acceptable because they were usually just one person trying to keep up with a massive organization. When Apple does it, and corner radii don’t match, or text is illegible, or context menu icons are reused, it’s much less acceptable, and concerning for a company that used to pride itself on attention to detail. One of my favorite recent additions to macOS was native window snapping, which took years to implement after every other OS under the sun already had it — those kinds of delays were acceptable because the impression was that Apple takes its time. After all, it’s crafting something to perfection. If we keep the slow feature rollout without attention to detail, it’s hard to find the upside.

Morgan Schönberger: While the core software remains reasonably stable and robust, I’d rather see less on the innovation side. While the OS updates were a mixed bag design-wise, the new Creator Studio updates were a complex task to manage. While we still cannot buy subscriptions on an enterprise level, it took quite some time to be able to suppress those subscriptions via a configuration profile, which made it even more of a task to communicate the change to our users.

Andrew Laurence: In terms of IT integration and underlying systems, the 26 OSes have been peaceful. Pity that it is coupled with the Liquid Glass upheaval.

Cameron Kay: Liquid glass is a disaster, especially for macOS, with the stupidly rounded windows where content is clipped, and they’re hard to resize. Safari UI has gotten worse, and it’s hard to read content. Hiding the menu bar background and providing no management control to re-enable it by default continues to be a support issue. DDM is still a work in progress, but it is usable for things like Software Update now. Still, it’s not a replacement for all config profiles and MDM commands yet. Some of that has to do with DMS vendor adoption. It will be interesting to see when DDM can be used to implement security baselines from the macOS Security Compliance Project. It’s also frustrating that Simplified Setup for Platform SSO is taking so long for vendors to implement, and not at all clear if they will implement enough to support Auto Advance in Setup Assistant for shared Macs. There continue to be issues with automatically upgrading the OS on devices at DMS enrolment. Macs are not compatible with macOS 26, trying to upgrade and then failing to enroll with the DMS. There are other enrolment issues with iOS/iPadOS devices if automatic OS upgrade is enabled as well. And the Apple management agent still breaks at times and stops executing commands until you reboot the device.

Dennis Logue: There’s been much angst this year over Liquid Glass in the 26 OS release cycle, but the overall reliability of Apple software continues to be better than its competitors in my experience

Jered Benoit: If there were an option to completely opt out of iOS 26 and the entire liquid glass paradigm, I would have for my entire organization. The bugs that have been introduced as part of the “upgrade” have confused users and made supporting them more difficult than it needed to be. That being said, I delayed adoption as long as I could, but by policy, I have to run the latest supported software, so now the mass upgrades have begun.

Peter Loobuyck: The Apple part is reliable, but 3rd party software often isn’t always so. Maybe Apple need nog address this issue, but it does not improve the brand name either.

John Welch: This is a hard category because everyone has their own view. Apple has a lot of legit innovation, but again, their documentation of it is completely random, so you never know if you’re going to get the information you need to properly use things. I mean, a command line utility without a man page, absolute amateur hour nonsense like that. And once again, I will point out that Apple still has no form of automation strategy (Shortcuts absolutely do not count here), and has not had an OS wide automation framework on the Mac since Mac OS 9. Meanwhile, on the Windows side, you can do almost everything you’d need with PowerShell, and it’s documented really well. Sigh.

John Delfino: Software is inconsistent, and doesn’t seem to be advancing in any straightforward way.

Justin McMahan: I typically have to fiddle with Apple’s major upgrades a bit to get them deployed to our end-users’ machines, but they have pretty good affordances for managing updates and upgrades through MDM.

Michael Jon: This year, we were blessed, slash cursed, with macOS Tahoe. The Liquid Glass visual overhaul looked great in the keynote, but had a real cost in production. The excess compute required to render all of that transparency and compositing is a measurable drain on battery life across the fleet, and for what? It’s not a productivity improvement. It’s not making the OS easier to use. It’s a visual spectacle that costs real power on every device in the organization, every day, for no functional gain. That’s a bad trade, and it was a stupid implementation to ship as a default with no way to dial it back. Platform SSO is still stuck in an awkward middle ground where it’s not quite delivering on its promise, and the vendor ecosystem hasn’t caught up. Our Tahoe rollout made that painfully obvious. When issues came up, Okta engineers told us to go to Apple. Apple’s response loop wasn’t much faster. Nobody owned the problem, and administrators were left stuck in the middle. Microsoft has had a functionally equivalent feature on Windows for years, and it works. The fact that Apple, a company famous for tightly controlled software integration, still can’t nail this is genuinely baffling. The screen recording permissions model is something I want to flag here, and I’ll cover it further under Security. The short version is that Apple’s first-party apps get a fundamentally different experience from third-party apps when requesting screen recording access, and that inconsistency is a software design failure before it’s anything else. DDM for macOS updates are a genuine bright spot. I’ve rolled it out to the fleet and had solid results. The forced restart requirement is the sticking point for a lot of administrators, and I get it; most enterprises aren’t fans. But I think there’s room to build better end-user education around it and make the whole experience feel less abrupt. As a mechanism, it’s working well. Apple Intelligence is the other topic I need to address here. I want Apple to do more with it, and I think the foundation is there, but the exclusive partnership with ChatGPT feels like it gimped them out of the gate. I’d love to see the option to bring in other providers; Gemini, Claude, whatever makes sense for the user or the organization. Google just shipped Gemma 4 as a fully open, Apache 2.0 licensed model family that runs on-device on both iOS and Android, with genuine multimodal capability including audio. The AI Edge Gallery app is already on the App Store. That’s the kind of ecosystem Apple should be embracing, not locking out in favor of a single vendor deal. Beyond the provider question, the geozone restrictions on Apple Intelligence features need to go. The capability should be available worldwide, not drip-fed by region. If Google can ship on-device models globally with no geo-lock, Apple has no excuse.

Guillaume Gète: Liquid Glass. Should I say more? Also, the lack of some controls for some apps through Privacy policies is baffling. I.e., it’s still not possible to force an app to accept local network connections.

Andrew B: This is all going to be about macOS Tahoe. As I said above, “I’ve never filed more bugs for a major release before”. And these weren’t “The radius on the corners of this window element doesn’t match the radii of the other elements”, they were “this is utterly broken”, and in some cases, “this blocks additional testing.” I suspect that teams inside Apple don’t use macOS in an Enterprise context. There’s simply no other explanation for how so many show-stopper bugs made it into betas and releases. Particular friction points: Network-related System Extensions, PPPC UI display, System Settings crashing and interactions with security products. The other thing that seemed to plague Tahoe was regressions; file a ticket about an issue, wait two or three betas, get an RC that fixes your issue, close the Feedback and AppleCare, get a second RC or later beta, only to discover that the issue is no longer fixed. I lost count of how many betas, RCs, and minor releases would delete existing printer queues during upgrades. To be blunt: keeping up with testing of betas, filing bugs, testing the fixes, the regressions, and the fixes that became regressions, performing tests for AppleCare, then updating the tickets was exhausting this year.

Shane Thompson: Do I hate Tahoe as much as some other people? No. I think there are some nice new features. The new Spotlight stuff is killer. Actions within Spotlight have allowed me to create some nice new automations, and after a couple of updates, the stability for myself and for most of our users has been pretty decent. There are some concerning trends with macOS, such as clutter, lack of attention to detail, readability issues, etc. I am hoping that macOS 27 starts to clean this up and we start going down a path to macOS being a first-class citizen again because it is getting tiring seeing all updates as mostly “let’s take this thing from the iPhone and force it on the Mac”.

Jeremy Leland: While Apple is making unpopular UI choices, I do also see some improvements. Many small details that have annoyed admins for some time have been improved, such as inaccessible (grayed-out) toggles for MDM-managed settings now displaying the correct state. The new UI needs more fine-tuning – there are some inconsistencies and places where the visual hierarchy has been compromised.

Allister Banks: I wish I could control my iPhone from my iPad, control sound or pair an Apple Watch to an iPad; there are so many corner cases that feel obvious in my personal day-to-day, things that could (yes, with not-insignificant effort) reasonably be overcome. I feel the mask unlock of iPhone is really reliable, network-ish auth at pre-disk unlock/FileVault got added (with asterisks), works more magic! 😉 Tahoe on Macs must be somehow less buggy than other recent releases, but iPhone connection to public wifi has become laggy to the point I have no idea how to jiggle its handle, I’m talking 1 minute+ times or no DHCP where I’d much rather be able to download a stores app or get at photos without racking up a cellular overage, spamming captive.apple.com and always seeing “success” 🫠. Also, is VisionOS still a thing? Would someone wake up the tvOS intern? Even watchOS feels stagnant.

Gabriel Marcelino: MacOS i have to be a little more picky, I have not seen any better performance from last year, but worst. I think the liquid glass was a fail for some, in my opinion i didn’t mind it too much, but a lot of people did not like it at all. however overall performance crashes and slowness, where hardware has been great, software has been hitting us hard and needs improvement in OS 27 across the board.

Jeff Richardson: Compared to the other platforms that we use, the Apple platform is fantastic. Having said that, it often seems that Apple isn’t living up to its full potential.

Tom Bridge: Woof, this was a rough year. The beta cycles were particularly fraught this year, with a lot of bugs coming and going, and several releases that had a lot of people hitting the delay button. All of that comes hand in hand with the worst visual design refresh in decades. Liquid Glass caused a lot of our users to just say “Ick” on the benign side, and others delayed their own adoption of macOS 26 until we made it mandatory in March. Even then, the complaints about the new interface choices were stronger than in years past. This isn’t an irredeemable design system, but it is the most difficult user interface adjustment in years, and it feels only half thought through. Apple has a lot of work to do to make this internally consistent and functional for end users.

Craig Cohen: Apple QA has dipped. We have had more issues this year than in previous years. We want to use and promote Apple native apps. We have had to move to a third-party for functionality, quality and support.

Chris Pommer: Nagging irritations and the growth of what can only be described as sloppy software (especially in the OS) continue to disappoint. That said, at least I’m not having to manage Windows machines.

Security and Privacy

John Wetter: The only thing keeping this from being a five is the uneven maturation of platform SSO.

Jeffrey Hoover: Leading the way.

Jeremy Leland: While I hate to just accept that there will always be new security issues, Apple has been extremely vigilant and responsive. Newer tools like DDM help ensure that Apple’s responses can be implemented quickly on our fleet.

W. Andrew Robinson: As is mostly true with our favorite Fruit Company, security and privacy are their self-stated ‘in our DNA’ priorities. And I think this past year mostly plays that out — but I am very much not an expert in this area. Two things like to point out — security researchers, like developers, seem to have a love/less love (I won’t go as far as to say ‘hate’) relationship with Apple. Bug bounties and information sharing should, it seems to me, be easier than I see commented on in the community. The other is that, I think personally Apple is still better than the others… but I also think that’s a low bar. In sum, though, I’d give this a great score.

Cameron Kay: Hasn’t got any worse, but it hasn’t got any better either. Apple still doesn’t provide the management controls needed to comply with various security baseline rules. Provides no real framework for application/binary execution control. Forced updating of apps if they’re running is still an issue—no method to force users to register their Mac with Platform SSO if the Mac is already setup. The UI on macOS needs to be redesigned so that passwords are referred to as Passcodes, like on iOS, and macOS needs to be able to tell the difference between simple numerical passcodes and complex alpha-numerical ones in Passcode policies and the UI. And for organizations where the security policy dictates users can’t run as admin, better control for all users to perform some tasks without admin permissions, without having to hack authorizationdb directly.

Joel Housman: They continue to excel in this category.

Andrew B: The number of uncontrollable, un-actionable pop-ups in macOS presented to Enterprise end users is out of hand. Users are being Windows-Vistaed to death by notifications they simply don’t have the background, let alone the time, to read, comprehend, and then make the correct choice. This is training users to simply click OK on a dialogue they neither understand nor care about, simply to get their job done. If an app asks to scan the local network for devices, how is the VP of Global Widgets supposed to know if that’s a good thing, or a massive security risk? In an Enterprise environment, any dialogue or setting potentially presented to the end user should be MDM-manageable and appropriately suppressible. We literally own the hardware, we put a banner in front of the user that tells them that everything they do may be monitored, so why does macOS continue to plague Enterprise end users with what are arguably administrative concerns that are often beyond their comprehension? Our goal as engineers is surely to protect the user to the best of our ability. This means managing everything we can in order to adhere to security policy and best practices, and get out of the way of the user while doing so. The proliferation of unmanageable, un-actionable dialogues and settings questions is the opposite of that.

Allister Banks: Is it great to have curl | bash protections? Yes! If you don’t document them when they’re still in beta (and you may as well not beta them if you don’t acknowledge they exist!), you’re actively harming supportability. Still no way to have MDM allow apps local(host) network access, not distinguishing it from loopback interfaces? Very frustrating. Just like how they apparently distrust Zoom to the point they still don’t allow us to manage, e.g., Location Services access for emergency services (911 in the US) or microphone or camera. The friction/struggle continues.

Michal Moravec: Apple’s platforms are probably still the best thing out there on the market in this aspect. I really appreciate the team behind Passwords.app and Passkeys. New features are added regularly, and the app is heading in the right direction (which can’t be said about the majority of apps Apple bundles with macOS). Apple could do much better in the security features intended for the enterprise. There almost isn’t an update that doesn’t fix something related to network extensions, endpoint security extensions, or content filtering.

John Delfino: Best of the major platforms for privacy, and security seems solid.

John Cleary: Apple likes to state in its marketing that “Privacy is a fundamental human right. It’s also one of our core values”. (https://www.apple.com/au/privacy/) Their choices say otherwise. It was simply disgraceful that instead of maintaining the security of all devices running iOS 18, Apple chose to force users onto iOS 26 if they wanted to stay secure. This is especially true on phones such as the iPhone 13, where iOS 26 is a significant performance downgrade. I note, of course, that Apple did maintain patches for iOS 18 for those devices that can’t run iOS 26 — so it wasn’t a software development limitation. Only a week after the Darksword vulnerability was published on GitHub for anyone to use and exploit, iPhone users’ security and privacy were compromised, and even then, it took Apple a week to publish the patch for iOS 26-capable devices. Given the high risk of the vulnerability, most iOS 18 holdouts had finally capitulated and gone to 26 to mitigate against a really bad vulnerability, only to have an iOS 18 patch published days later. 😡 I have never thought less of Apple for this choice. 😢 At a time that I should be celebrating Apple at 50, I am instead frustrated and disappointed. Even during the years-long “butterfly keyboards that constantly fail” era of MacBooks, at least millions of users’ privacy and security were not put at risk.

Brian LaShomb: It’s long past time for Apple to adopt One-Time Password over SMS for Apple IDs that require Multi-Factor Authentication.

Jason Hedrick: I would just like enterprise devices to have a different security and privacy experience than consumer devices.

Marian Albers: A middle way of high-class security and allowing managed devices specific controls without user interaction is about time.

Michael Jon: Security and privacy in the Apple ecosystem really depend on which layer you’re talking about, and the answer is very different depending on whether you’re looking at endpoints or services. On the endpoint side, not much has changed. Gatekeeper is still there, XProtect is still there. It’s stable, which is fine, but it’s also basically the same story as the last two years. Solid, not exciting. On the services side, the SMS-only two-factor authentication on Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager is, frankly, embarrassing in 2026. We live in an era where SIM swapping and phone number spoofing are trivial. Telcos around the world are putting out statements saying, “Hey, this is illegal, stop it,” while doing nothing meaningful to fix their own processes. So what exactly are administrators supposed to do to protect their ABM and ASM accounts? It’s ridiculous. What makes this even more galling is that Apple already supports passkeys on consumer Apple IDs. The infrastructure exists. They built it. They shipped it. They just haven’t brought it to the administrative accounts that control entire device fleets. Consumer accounts get phishing-resistant authentication. The accounts that manage thousands of devices and hold the keys to your entire MDM enrolment pipeline are still protected by a six-digit SMS code sent to a phone number that any motivated attacker can port in an afternoon. The inconsistency here doesn’t feel like a resource constraint; it feels like a deliberate deprioritization of enterprise security tooling. Multiple countries are now actively moving to eliminate SMS OTP as an acceptable authentication factor for financial services. The UAE mandated it in March 2026, and India followed in April. If regulators in banking think SMS isn’t good enough for your savings account, it sure as hell isn’t good enough for the administrative console that controls your corporate device fleet. On the positive side, Apple’s zero-day response cadence has been solid this year. The patches for WebKit vulnerabilities discovered in coordination with Google’s Threat Analysis Group were shipped promptly across all platforms. The broader pattern of “extremely sophisticated attacks against specific targeted individuals” being the discovery vector for these flaws is a reminder that Apple’s endpoint security story is genuinely strong when it comes to keeping up with nation-state and spyware threats. The Image I/O vulnerability earlier in 2025, where malicious code could be hidden inside an image file, was another example of Apple patching quickly once the flaw was identified. Credit where it’s due; the response pipeline works. Apple’s updated App Review Guideline 5.1.2(i), which now explicitly names third-party AI as a regulated category requiring disclosure and consent before user data is sent to external services, is a welcome move. It puts a clear obligation on developers to inform users when their data is being shipped off to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or anyone else. The requirement for per-feature consent rather than blanket opt-ins is the right approach. Whether Apple enforces it consistently during review is another question, but the policy itself is sound. The screen recording permissions model is the other thing I have to call out here. Apple is effectively running two different security philosophies depending on whether your app is first-party or not. FaceTime and Safari get a single inline prompt when requesting screen recording access. Chrome, Firefox, Slack, and everything else get sent to a settings menu, require a force restart, and still sometimes break after a vendor update. That’s not a difference in security posture; that’s preferential API access for Apple’s own products dressed up as a security feature. I’m actively looking into whether this is something an Australian government body would consider anti-competitive, because I genuinely think it warrants the question. The consumer endpoint story is solid. The enterprise services story still needs real work.

Jeff Richardson: Security and privacy are incredibly important for my organization (a law firm), and Apple’s intense focus on these areas makes a big difference.

John Welch: I genuinely think Apple is the sole OS provider outside of edge cases like OpenBSD taking this seriously, and they take it more seriously than everyone else combined.

Marcus Rowell: Apple OS and Hardware security are amazing and continuously improving. BUT Apple continues to mishandle the government interventions I mentioned over the last few years. Government intervention in the Apple ecosystem is now becoming a global norm and risks the entire platform’s security. If Apple doesn’t fix the “gated” reputation of the platforms (especially the Apps store with its opaque rules), then governments will continue to intervene and impact the reliability, security, and privacy we expect from Apple. There is still an inconsistency in privacy controls. We, admins, can have full control of all data on devices and yet can’t pre-approve Screen Recording to make the user experience better. macOS should move to passcode to be consistent with our Apple hardware platforms, especially once PSSO is configured. This would greatly ease user confusion between the SSO password and the macOS password.

Jeff Anderson: I feel Apple still has some work to do to allow enterprise admins to have more control over endpoints. If we have MDM, we shouldn’t have to ask the user to allow our remote support tool to have access to screen recording, for example. I understand Apple is trying to provide privacy for the end-user, but in an enterprise, there is no expectation of privacy from the org. However, security on macOS is fairly solid.

Alex Meretten: I can turn off GPT integration in the OS. This alone is huge. Please, keep this up, Apple.

Armin Briegel: Apple remains fairly strong in this for individual privacy and security. For enterprise and education environments, Apple does not always provide the management controls required to override the built-in security, which often requires complicated workarounds for MacAdmins. It would be nice to have managed controls for all settings in the most common security benchmarks (and beyond) without needing to revert to scripts.

David McMonnies: The deprecation of RSRs in favor of BSIs is an interesting move, but not wholly unexpected given that RSRs went basically unused for several years. There’s not much else to comment on in the security space outside of the fact that Tahoe seemed to have had fewer issues in breaking third-party security tooling on day 0.

Craig Cohen: There will always be the “next” exploit. Apple’s built-in, not bolted-on, security allows for rapid response to new attack vectors.

Erik Kramer: Improvements to managed Apple Accounts have been welcome: you can use the Passwords app, now!

Peter Loobuyck: Still a lot of extra things need to be set up, which could be included by default.

Jered Benoit: Apple is great for device security. There are some annoying things related to privacy that would be improvements in my opinion, including the ability for corporate-joined devices to have public MAC addresses.

TJ Draper: Overall good work from Apple, as usual. I do always believe them when they talk about security and privacy as their focus. However, the reason for the slightly lower score than a 5 is that I think they’re a bit misguided on security in some ways. This misguidedness is particularly apparent with macOS. The nagging pop-up and modal dialogs are actually detrimental to security. I consider myself a very tech-savvy user (as a software engineer), and yet, just recently, a dialog popped up asking for permission to do… something… but out of reflex, I clicked “allow” before my brain registered anything, and then I wondered what the heck I had just permitted to. This is a phenomenon known as “banner blindness,” and the way Apple does this induces it to a very high degree. They need to fix this ASAP. It’s not very good. Additionally, once I have given permission to something, why must Apple continue to ask about it, again and again and again? Once I’ve approved something, I want Apple to NEVER ASK ME AGAIN.

Gabriel Marcelino: I think privacy is always key for Apple, and I am good with where they stand today. but can always use improvements. I feel that with the use of AI technology, there is a concern with Privacy and we need to feel that our personal data will still remain private with the use of this technology.

Dennis Logue: This has been an easy 5 in past years, but lately, some of Apple’s decisions regarding account security and privacy, while great for personal use, create an unnecessary burden in a managed education environment.

Justin McMahan: Apple prioritizes security and privacy really well. They balance it correctly with convenience for the user and handle the complicated bits themselves.

Bart Reardon: The bar for having better privacy than literally anyone else these days is so low it may as well be on the ground. The rest of the industry sold its soul for a dollar, but Apple chose to keep doing this properly.

Emilio Garcia: Apple does very well on privacy, or at least, admittedly, the vibes feel correct. On security, there were more ways to patch vulnerabilities than updating the OS (which feels like the only “fix” available sometimes). Users are certainly experiencing upgrade fatigue (OS and application alike), and the deployment process for BSIs leaves a lot to be desired for user experience (I’ll echo most other admins and say, how “background” is it when a restart is still required and users still receive prompts and notifications?).

Chris Carr: Apple seems to want to keep privacy in its DNA

Luke Charters: Great to see Apple adopting post-quantum hybrid cryptography with the current threat of harvest now, decrypt later attacks.

David Rizzo: Compared to their competitors, Apple is far above the others.

Deployment

Peter Loobuyck: Depends on where you set it up. With some MDM providers, all works great, but for some, it is really slow.

Martin Piron: As good as ever.

Marcus Rowell: The Apple deployment story is amazing. The OS Upgrade mechanisms can still be a little janky, but have improved drastically. The story with Background Security Improvements needs to be improved. Are they OS Updates or not? Should we install them ASAP or not? Why do they require a reboot if they are Background updates?

Guillaume Gète: Improvements in Declarative Device Management made a huge difference to ensure computers and devices are properly updated.

Armin Briegel: Apple has been consistently chipping away at issues and pain points here. DDM-driven updates have improved the managed software updates significantly. Automated Device Enrollment remains solid, with the new PSSO workflows looking quite promising, if a little more convoluted than maybe necessary. Account-driven enrollment workflows are still suffering from the slow adoption of Managed Apple Accounts.

Damien Barrett: It’s getting better. Improvements in ABM are stellar. OS Software Update via DDM is still far too hit-or-miss. Other OS manufacturers have figured out this basic tenet of fleet management decades ago; why can’t Apple? Is it better? Sure? But that’s like saying a pile of horseshit is better because you spray-painted it with gold paint. We continue to have to “bolt on” tools to nudge our users to run updates. If I actually enforce updates, there remain far too many endpoints that don’t get patched — for a wide variety of reasons. It’s 2026. Just fix this ridiculousness already. ADE works, as designed and advertised. My Windows counterparts wish they had such a reliable system for auto-provisioning endpoints. Autopilot is coming along, but it remains, uh, a work-in-progress.

Jeff Anderson: ADE is great. We have a solid zero-touch deployment strategy. OS updates are getting better with DDM, but there is still some work to do until I can ditch our 3rd party app, Nudge, that we leverage to help maintain OS updates.

Tom Bridge: There’s still room for improvement here, and I hope that this past year’s adjustments to the deployment platform give them space to grow a bulletproof version of software updates.

Craig Cohen: The ongoing evolution of Declarative Device Management has been a slow build but has reached a real world “out of preview” result driven goal.

John Welch: Deployment issues are so dependent on the tool you use that it’s hard to say how well or not Apple is doing. There’s no “reference” deployment tool to judge by. Overall, Apple provides solid deployment tools. As someone who has to regularly build deployments on Windows in SCCM, deploying in the Apple world is light-years easier.

David McMonnies: No change to report on since last year.

Michael Jon: I’ll correct myself before I even get started: deployment hasn’t stayed flat this year, it’s actually improved. The continued refinement of DDM has genuinely made OS upgrade enforcement easier to manage, and that’s worth calling out. There’s still room to improve the end-user experience around forced restarts and update timing, but from a compliance standpoint, I’m not losing sleep over it. Devices are updated, I’m happy. Automated Device Enrollment continues to do its job reliably. Zero-touch provisioning for new devices remains one of Apple’s strongest enterprise stories, and it hasn’t regressed. Lifecycle management via MDM is stable, and the combination of ADE with a well-configured MDM setup means onboarding and offboarding workflows are largely handled without manual intervention. App deployment hasn’t changed much, but it doesn’t need to. The tiered approach still makes the most sense: VPP licenses direct from Apple first, individual MDM uploads second, and your MDM provider’s catalog after that. It works, and there’s no reason to reinvent it. Appleseed continues to be a genuinely valuable program. Getting IT administrator and enterprise feedback into the beta cycle early matters, and Apple’s continued investment there is the right call. The standout this year is Apple’s new MDM migration tool, which allows end-user machines to move between MDM providers cleanly. That is genuinely groundbreaking. I don’t think the industry has fully absorbed what this means yet, but I think we’re going to see a wave of MDM vendor switching over the next couple of years as a result. Jamf in particular has a problem here. They’ve been at the top of the hill for so long that they’ve stopped innovating, and when the switching cost drops, that complacency gets exposed fast. Their per-device pricing has been climbing year over year while their feature velocity has been flat. That’s a hard sell when the migration tool means you can actually leave without a six-month re-enrolment project. Upstarts like Fleet Device Management, Iru, Mosyle, and Addigy all suddenly look a lot more viable when the wall between providers comes down. Fleet, in particular, is interesting because of its open-source model and its approach to treating MDM as infrastructure rather than a product you’re locked into. Iru has been aggressive on the Apple-native features front and is catching up quickly on the enterprise side. Mosyle continues to carve out a strong position in education and SMB. To be clear, the MDM migration tool is an Apple win, not a Jamf problem. Apple has done something here that genuinely reshapes the competitive landscape, even if that wasn’t the primary intent. Healthy competition in the MDM space means better products for administrators, and that’s good for everyone.

John Delfino: Inconsistent here as well; I wish I could, for instance, push updates deployed App Store software. When ADS works it’s magic; when it doesn’t, it’s frustrating beyond compare.

W. Andrew Robinson: I deal with this section every day. DDM I’ve already mentioned as coming along nicely, and ADE is (IMO) the key ‘secret sauce’ to successful enterprise deployments… I just can’t see anyone NOT using this now. OS upgrades have improved, as well as software updates. I will point out one recent example of where I am less than perfectly happy — the new ‘freemium’ Pages, Keynote and Numbers apps…. I know WHY they deployed them and removed the old versions from the App Store, but how it was done was a bit bumpier than I’d hoped. With the very recent introduction of Apple Business (née Manager), maybe the app deployment methods — while I’m used to them, I still don’t like them very much — will see some improvements. I’ll be watching this space.

Michal Moravec: There aren’t that many features in this area. Enforcing software updates via Declarative Device Management has become more reliable. However, on macOS, the user-facing UI (just notifications) is not sufficient. Admins still need to deploy custom UI, such as Nudge or DDM-OS-Reminder, which is more prominent, so users actually notice there is a pending update with a deadline. I wish Apple would provide a full-screen UI similar to what happens on iOS. We expect tighter integration of Managed Apple Account with Automated Device Enrollment in a future release. Currently, it is the only enrollment method that does not support the coexistence of a Personal and Managed Apple Account.

Gabriel Marcelino: Automated Device Enrollment has been good, and with the new DDM, we can see a light at the end of the tunnel. However, OS upgrades still need improvements—there is still no way to force updates when users are able to cancel updates, even if they are past their due dates. Users are still able to go around these updates by simply leaving software open, like a web meeting, or a simple computer being asleep can interrupt the update. We still need a way to have OS upgrades be forced on end users in an enterprise environment.

Erik Kramer: ADE is still magic after all these years. The rest of device management is whatever you can make of it. Shoutout here to the MacAdmins Slack as a resource.

Joel Housman: There have been a number of improvements in this area that we’ve been able to take advantage of.

John Wetter: Significant growth in this area over the years; however, some details continue to make deployment more difficult than it needs to be. For example, while rapid return to service has been an often-discussed workflow, there are still significant challenges where this needs to mature, especially while respecting user data on devices. Managed & enforced updates are still overly cumbersome with uneven implementations across MDM vendors.

N Clarke: OS Upgrades still a sticking point, managed devices should be able to prepare the update and be ready to install upon restart without requiring user authentication. That said, I have seen the other side (autopilot, Intune), and I am glad that this is my only issue.

Allister Banks: Letting us manage Migration Assistant? 😍 Heart to the folks at Apple who pushed that through!

Jered Benoit: Automated Device Enrollment is fine, but mobile device management is specific. A new device enrolls in my Apple Business account when purchased through some providers, but not others, based on how I am required to procure the device. Additionally, all software updates, app deployment and OS upgrades are dependent on the MDM being used. Intune is fine… but not great when interacting with Apple devices.

TJ Draper: Mostly good. Auto device enrollment is great. Pushing updates to existing devices sometimes lags.

Bart Reardon: Software updates are still a PITA, but are gradually becoming less of a PITA than they used to be. The bottleneck is always users who ignore update prompts for whatever reason (it’s amazing the amount of inconvenience some of them will put up with to avoid a reboot).

Dennis Logue: Steady improvement.

Andrew B: Enterprise Mac Admins swim in a world of foot-dragging vendors, products owned by teams that do not manage Mac, some of which have console version dependencies or show-stopper bugs on other platforms, vendor contracts, SLAs beyond their control, as well as requirements from regulators and auditors. On top of this, they have to contend with Apple’s release timing while trying to minimize negative outcomes for end users. Apple seems divorced from this reality, particularly as it relates to the timing of releases. This was starkly illustrated by the release of macOS 26.2 on a Friday afternoon, two days before the 90-day maximum on the Major OS Deferral profile expired, making macOS 26 Tahoe available to all users. This left admins with a choice of either properly testing 26.2 while leaving the 90-day deferral in place, consequently serving up macOS 26.0 (an under-baked cake) to end-users, or YOLOing by lifting the major OS deferral profile so that users would see 26.2. I don’t think this is how you want to roll out a major OS update in an Enterprise environment.

Jeremy Leland: Apple continues to provide new and improved deployment options and better management for first-run options seen by users. However, the first Background Security Improvement in some time was not a smooth process. Many admins struggle with poor MDM implementations of DDM and software update settings.

Alex Meretten: OS upgrades remain a black eye – there’s just too many edge cases where you need to rely on an XKCD-style stack of open source software maintained by one guy. But really, at this point, in 2026, it is far, far easier to deploy a macOS device than a Windows machine. I could never have imagined that ten years ago.

Cameron Kay: We still have issues enrolling Macs on our enterprise Wi-Fi. Why it can’t be as reliable and simple an experience as iOS is very frustrating to admins and users alike. There are still some edge cases with DDM software updates on macOS. I hope Apple can fix them before macOS 27. And I wish iOS/iPadOS had Bootstrap tokens so we could push out OS updates without having to wait for users to unlock their devices.

Shane Thompson: Commenting on Apple’s handling of deployment is tough to do because I absolutely love Automated Device Enrollment, but out of the box, it is pretty bare bones; however, we have built out a wonderful deployment system utilizing tools from our MDM vendor that blows away what is happening on our Windows devices. I guess I’ll give Apple credit for allowing MDM vendors to be creative and come up with good solutions, and it is nice to see Apple staying out of the way to allow this to happen. Software Updates via DDM are a complete game-changer for us. Due to that change, our fleet is more easily kept up to date, and we are able to create one DDM configuration that can be set and forgotten to ensure our devices stay up to date.

Jeffrey Hoover: Honestly, this is mostly third parties.

Emilio Garcia: DDM, or at least the concept behind it, for OS patching, is a good idea. The MDM commands previously available were reliably unreliable, and we’re happy to move away from them. However, when compared to just running softwareupdate, the experience still feels worse. There’s a big loss in control, which is sometimes sorely missed. We desperately need maintenance windows for DDM updates (had an experience with machines restarting mid-exam after they missed their midnight-scheduled update deadline), and when DDM fails, the process is so opaque that it becomes incredibly difficult to troubleshoot. Between the secure tokens, bootstrap tokens, system logs, MDM logs, etc., it’s hard to understand what’s really going on. Some sort of validation tool from Apple would go a long way.

Brian LaShomb: While DDM for Software Update is a good start, it’s still fairly limited. Without reliable scheduling and enforcement controls, we still see better compliance using Nudge.

Andrew Laurence: Compared to other platforms, Apple’s Automated Deployment Environment is best in class.

Morgan Schönberger: It is great, that Apple has implemented a way to move MDM vendors through Apple Business (Manager). While it still has some caveats and possible problems, it’s a great first attempt at an issue many admins face sooner or later.

macOS Identity Management

Joel Housman: This is not something we use.

Tom Bridge: Apple does not yet have a consistent story for Platform Single Sign On, and it shows in the implementations that are scattershot, and in some cases, slipshod, by major identity providers. Apple needs to do more to tell this story more accurately, provide a clear reason to adopt, and get buy-in from major identity players for a soup-to-nuts story for this important function.

Jeffrey Hoover: Still waiting on implementation, but that may happen soon. I think it is mostly on Microsoft for us.

Cameron Kay: It’s frustrating that Simplified Setup for Platform SSO is taking so long for vendors like Microsoft to implement, and not at all clear if they will implement enough to support Auto Advance in Setup Assistant for shared Macs. Apple and Microsoft are supposed to have a close working relationship concerning Platform SSO, but it seems Microsoft hasn’t found the implementation easy. Apple also needs to add PassKey authentication support to Apple Business Manager/Apple School Manager, AppleCare Enterprise portal, GSX, and allow us to use the same Apple Account on all of these services.

Alex Meretten: I don’t trust it as far as I can throw it – Jamf Connect + Okta for me, please.

Bob McGillicuddy: Needs more IdPs for Platform SSO

John Wetter: This is by far the most difficult to assign a number to, as there has been so much progress in this area, yet still basic frustrations remain. The extremely slow progress by IdPs to fully support all of the SSO frameworks seems to speak to either gaps or ambiguity in potential implementation practices.

Shane Thompson: This is a tough one to grade, as the biggest issue we have with Platform SSO has nothing to do with Apple. We have been rolling out Platform SSO via Secure Enclave on our devices over the past year. For the devices where it is enabled, it has been a big quality-of-life improvement for our users. However, to really experience the best of Platform SSO, Microsoft needs to update the Company Portal app to allow simplified enrollment, authenticated guest mode, etc. Once that happens and we are able to test and roll out those features, we’ll have a better idea of how well Apple has developed Platform SSO, but at the moment, we are excited to see what the future holds.

Michal Moravec: There are some nice improvements in macOS 26, such as simplified Platform SSO setup, Authenticated Guest Mode with PSSO, and Tap to login with PSSO. The problem is that these features are mostly a preview. It takes many minor updates (sometimes even a major release) for Apple to fix the major bugs that make the feature unusable. Then we wait for MDM and Identity vendors to implement new features. Depending on the combination of these vendors, it can take many years for the features to become available for orgs/admins to use. My opinion is that Apple should engage more proactively with the vendors in order to get these features out there sooner.

David McMonnies: sPSSO seems to be a great feature, and while not an Apple issue, Okta requires ODA licensing to use it, and the Microsoft iteration isn’t even in GA yet.

Andrew B: Slowly getting better, on a pace not dissimilar from ABM.

Karsten Fischer^: I would have rated it a 5, but there’s too much work to be done by IdPs to fully support this.

TJ Draper: It works, usually.

John Welch: pSSO may be technically far superior to AD/LDAP binding, but it is nowhere near as easy to set up. Usability improvements are desperately needed, and this is exacerbated by, as with deployment, there being no reference implementation, so you can’t automate pSSO; you have to automate a given vendor’s implementation of pSSO. I’m not saying Apple should try to build their own MDM, but if there were a coherent OS automation framework, then some of this could be much easier. To paraphrase The Steve: automation isn’t something just bolted on, automation is a part of how things work.

Kale Kingdon: This is understandably difficult to grade, as Apples implementation of the framework is reliant on Identity vendors implementing the features to allow the benefits to trickle down to the end user. I grade this not based on the innovation of Apple’s frameworks but on the experience of the average IT Sys Admin & End User, which is poor. PSSO was announced at WWDC 2022. We are nearing 4 years on from that announcement, and I am struggling to implement PSSO in any configuration, simply, without direct IT touch and without bespoke tooling to improve the UIX. Currently, implementations are limited to environments with low risk, high touch and a reasonably technical user base. PSSO Simplified Setup & Authenticated Guest Mode are still a pipe dream 12 months on for their announcement. Those Veritable Paragons of Patience and Virtue are testing in production in the MacAdmins Slack post nigh on weekly, with complexities and edge cases that make my blood run cold. This is coupled with seeming strategic inconsistencies around things like User Channel Declarations. Two terms thought to be entirely incompatible and unholy in the new scripture of management, now impossible in any multi-user environment, as even secondary users of a PSSO-enabled Mac cannot become MDM-managed and not have a user channel! Pray tell how this Declaration is meant to be implemented on a multi-user Mac if not AD Binding with mobile accounts? Please excuse the theatrics. Login window agents such as JamfConnect & XCreds are still practically required for nearly all our use cases in Education, but they are consistently broken with minor point releases due to adjustments to background tasks, keychains, securetokens or otherwise. The grace I provided in the first few years, stating that “it will be great just wait for the IDPs to catch up,” is long since gone – The well of my patience lies dry. Regardless of how much the onus may still be with the IDP, I do. Not. Care. The experience is poor, and Apple needs to gather whatever leverage it has to solve the issue.

Peter Loobuyck: Maybe also work on expanding the platforms supporting identity management? Now, just a few support PSSO

W. Andrew Robinson: I will hold out hope for better cooperation and synergy between Apple and the IdP providers, but all in all, it’s been a steadily improving process. Slow, but maybe that’s not bad in this space. We don’t need big jumps forward in process if we risk big mistakes. I am happy with a slow buildout here.

Chris Carr: hard to know unless you have used the tech

Armin Briegel: The new PSSO setup workflows are a big improvement and a step in the right direction. But this is a topic where Apple has thrown out a solution implementing how they think something should work, but would have greatly benefited from more communication with the parties involved (identity providers, device management service providers and administrators) beforehand. Also, this is very much hampered by having to wait a year for major changes and updates.

Jeff Anderson: Apple is moving in the right direction with PSSO.

Gabriel Marcelino: Platform Single Sign-On has been eye-opening since it was announced, and I wanted to jump on it as soon as it was released. However, it’s been such a disappointment in my opinion. I feel that since only two companies right now are able to use the framework, it limits the choice of who you can use. I don’t think this is Apple’s fault, of course, but I do think the framework makes it far too difficult to implement, so companies do not invest time to implement it—and that’s what makes it a problem. Also, even these companies, Okta and Microsoft, do not fully have all the features that were announced at release, so we couldn’t test everything at once and had to wait. Even today, Okta still doesn’t have Secure Enclave support, which is huge for our environment to have, and we’re waiting for it to be released. I think this needs a massive update next year so that we can see a future where it can be a native replacement to something like Jamf Connect built into macOS.

Andrew Laurence: Simplified enrollment for Platform Single Sign-On looks great. As I write this, only Okta has shipped support; we need more.

Marcus Rowell: Platform SSO Simplified Setup seems to be app-handling over the Identity Management story to other vendors, which would be ok if they actually implemented the full PSSO Simplified Setup. It seems to be very difficult and hard to do.

Martin Piron: PSSO seems to be in the right place now, but it needs to be more widely adopted, without any additional costs. Being able to log onto a device with a Managed Apple Account would be amazing.

John Cleary: Platform SSO is amazing. 🎉

Allister Banks: TwoCanoes or GTFO when it comes to innovation and support. Apple is obviously not leaning on or steering partners like Okta and Google (with their Workspace’s LDAP-alike features) to deliver proper cloud-sync’d sign-on and telemetry about devices and not just individuals (Okta is terribad about signals for proper device attribution and attestation.)

Erik Kramer: Not there, yet. Apple’s horse is ready to pull, but the identity vendors need to do their part, and they don’t even have their harness hitched to a wagon, yet.

Emilio Garcia: I understand that Apple is not in control of Microsoft, or Okta, or Google, or whatever other IDP someone might be using. But it’s honestly a very poor experience to have Apple announce and promote certain PSSO features that aren’t available for use until many months later. Management constantly asks about implementing new features that we simply cannot yet, but Apple continues to promote them. I don’t know if Apple could make features available to IDPs longer before they’re announced, so they have a longer time to build them out, or work with the IDPs to speed up development, but it’s far too disjointed as it is now. Believe it or not, I miss AD binding sometimes.

N Clarke: I appreciate how Apple is building the tools for IDPs to use, and I appreciate how IDPs are using this to try to lock admins into their own system for (I’m looking at you, Intune). However, Macs are still treated as one-user-one-device for management purposes, and there are lovely configurations are assigned-user only (wifi certificate, dock web shortcuts). Also, file providers requiring the user to agree to sync is a sticking point for multi-user setups with follow-me data. I use Microsoft SSO, and the secure enclave PSSO makes for an amazingly smooth authentication experience across configured apps, so 5 stars for reliability but 3 stars for setup.

Michael Jon: Platform SSO is simply not at the maturity level that enterprises need it to be, and there’s no clear signal that a meaningful fix is on the way. The Extensible Enterprise SSO framework is the right foundation conceptually, and the SSO extension model gives identity providers a path to deeper integration. The problem is that in practice, the federation between Apple’s identity layer and third-party providers like Okta is still fragile. Device trust attestation is where it falls apart most visibly. I’m fielding questions about keychain pass issues, attestation failures with the identity provider, and having to fully remove and re-enroll devices to resolve them. For a company that markets itself on the tightness of its software integration, shipping an identity feature that generates this kind of friction in production is hard to defend. What I’d love to see, and what I think would be genuinely transformative, is Apple IDs as a proper front-end for enterprise account sign-on. The ability to federate Apple IDs with something like Okta, so that users authenticate through an Apple ID, but the credential validation happens upstream in your identity provider, would be a game-changer. Microsoft already does this. If you’re running Okta or Google Workspace as your primary IdP, you can federate with Microsoft 365 (more like 300 after the past year), have Microsoft accounts provisioned for your users, and the sign-on experience is seamless. Set and forget. My Windows users, small fleet as it is, never raise issues with it. The cloud identity synchronization just works. On the Mac side, that same confidence doesn’t exist yet. Three out of five, and that’s being generous.

Mike Stirrup: Really useful features, however, we are still waiting for vendors to release support, hopefully it won’t be 3.5 years like it took for PSSO

Craig Cohen: Although Apple is achieving great gains in Identity Management, the adoption of third-party providers has stunted real goals. This is a huge frustration.

Guillaume Gète: Platform SSO is still a promise, but the lack of support from vendors (especially Google) is baffling, and its implementation is still way too complicated (too many things to validate from the user side before having Platform SSO up and running), although the new Platform SSO baked in Setup Assistant is way better than before—still a WIP.

David Rizzo: I have yet to implement PSSO, but I’m looking forward to it and am pleased with its availability.

Dennis Logue: From what I can tell, Platform SSO has a lot of promise once IdPs fully support it

Luke Charters: Identity still needs a lot of work to be a great experience for enterprise users. Regardless of enrollment type, managing separate work and personal identities has a lot of rough edges, especially on iOS. Android’s work and personal profile management is vastly superior to Apple’s implementation.

MDM protocol and infrastructure

Peter Loobuyck: Apple is number one in maintaining MDM protocols.

Martin Piron: Declarative software update management seems to have finally hit the mark. Final tweaks required to get our head around Background Security Improvements. It would be good to avoid any odd released for specific machines, like the 26.3.2 for the Neo only. That really messed things up.

Guillaume Gète: I’d love to give a 5, but DDM is still a bit too finicky and difficult to troubleshoot.

Justin McMahan: Jamf Pro + Apple’s MDM framework is a winner.

Joel Housman: Major improvements to the protocol. There are a number of features they’ve added that we’ve needed in the past but simply didn’t exist. We’re taking advantage of these changes and are seeing benefits.

Michael Jon: MDM protocol and infrastructure are one of the areas where Apple has quietly been putting in solid work, and the results are showing. DDM continues to mature and has meaningfully improved the administrator experience, particularly around OS update enforcement on macOS. Personally, I’ve had reliable results rolling it out across the fleet, and the direction of travel is good. The protocol’s reliability on the macOS side is in a strong place. On iOS and iPadOS, the MDM command and payload reliability has been consistent. Supervised device management on iOS continues to be one of the more dependable parts of the Apple MDM story, and that hasn’t changed. The declarative management story on mobile is still catching up to where macOS is, but it’s moving in the right direction. The MDM migration tooling Apple introduced this year deserves a mention here because it directly touches the protocol layer. Making clean device migration between MDM providers possible is a significant infrastructure improvement, and it has real downstream effects on the vendor ecosystem. It lowers switching costs, which is healthy for competition and long overdue. The one drag on the score is the interaction between MDM and Platform SSO. Attestation failures that end in a full device re-enrolment aren’t just an identity problem; they’re an MDM reliability problem, too. When the fix for an SSO issue is “wipe the enrolment and start again,” that friction sits squarely in this category. It doesn’t happen constantly, but it happens enough to notice. The other gap I want to flag is the continued absence of a proper MDM event log or audit trail on the device side. When something fails, you’re relying on your MDM vendor’s interpretation of what happened rather than having a first-party, device-side log that tells you exactly what command was received, when it was processed, and what the result was. For an ecosystem that’s increasingly dependent on MDM for security compliance, having to guess at what happened on the device when a command fails is not acceptable. The last thing I’ll mention is preference and configuration keys for apps. Apple needs to dramatically expand the set of manageable preference keys available to administrators across both first-party and third-party apps. The ability to configure app behavior at scale via MDM profiles is one of the most powerful tools in an administrator’s toolkit, and right now, the coverage is patchy at best. Too many Apple apps ship with behavior that can’t be overridden or configured via a profile. Third-party developers are even worse; most don’t document their preference keys at all, and there’s no enforcement or incentive from Apple to change that. This needs to be a priority over time. Every app that ships on a managed device should have a documented set of configuration keys that administrators can set via MDM.

Chris Carr: MDM keeps getting better incrementally

Craig Cohen: Apple has added wonderful and fruitful capabilities for device management; the reliance and inconsistency of the third-party device management providers diminish our real-world strategy.

Bart Reardon: You know something must be doing OK when you realize you haven’t had to think about it in a long time.

Armin Briegel: Solid progress here. DDM has become a useful and necessary part of device management. Still work in progress, though in this case, the slow and steady approach is appreciated. Major changes and updates more than once a year might be useful here, too.

Chris Pommer: Auto-enrollment seems rock solid. “It just works.”

Jeremy Bodokh: DDM still needs some work, but it’s definitely a huge step in the right direction

W. Andrew Robinson: Another top score for me… Device Management and the subset of MDM tools here seems better than ever. My focus is on macOS here, and I think back even 5 years, and I see things then I don’t have to worry about now. In the past year, I can’t think of anything that would downgrade this score… well done, everyone!

Emilio Garcia: The concept of DDM makes sense, and I think it’s a good direction to head. But it’s still simply not as reliable as we’d like. Or, perhaps it is reliable under the circumstances Apple expects us to be working under, but it’s unreasonably difficult to reach that point (e.g., managing device tokens or MDM trust when they fall out of line). In any case, the experience we have with DDM has been that it does mostly work, and it’s more reliable than some of the old MDM commands, but it’s not perfect, and is more difficult to troubleshoot than previously.

Dennis Logue: Declarative Device Management has been an improvement, but still needs further refinement regarding monitoring (some of this may be MDM vendor issues)

Marian Albers: Providing the MDM protocols is the one thing, but Apple should introduce some score or label for MDM Vendors and their implementation (looking at you, JAMF, with your IDP Force to get DDM).

Jered Benoit: You can truly control almost every aspect of the device. This is one place where Apple shines.

Jeff Anderson: We use Jamf and are pleased overall. I do wish Apple would allow a little more control of MDM-managed devices, as per my previous comment about Privacy.

David McMonnies: Rollout of new DDM functionality is quite slow. I would have expected a much more aggressive deployment of new and existing management features to DDM over the last year or so, but this has not eventuated. Similar to a previous response, communications on these are poor, and often fall to MDM vendors to get the word out to the broader community.

Andrew Laurence: The protocol YAML files on GitHub are a godsend. Apple introduced Declared Device Management (DDM) at WWDC 2021; going on five years later, vendor adoption remains a mixed bag.

Jeremy Leland: It still appears that Apple can improve in its communications with MDM vendors, especially around best practices with DDM and software update management. Also, declaring certain MDM features deprecated while at the same time not having information about their replacement can be confusing for admins. Finally, Apple needs a more centralized way to control the OS and Apple products integrated with AI.

Jeffrey Hoover: The current and future solution.

Gabriel Marcelino: With the coming of DDM, I think this is going to get better, and we need to look into the future of transitioning fully to DDM in the coming year. I feel like MDM companies, however, at least Jamf, are still catching up to DDM in m

John Welch: The diversity and capabilities of the MDM marketplace, and the fact that MS is trying in its own tedious way to move to MDM says that Apple basically created the foundation of computer/device management with MDM.

Kale Kingdon: Overall, when I look at the march towards DDM, I am consistently struck by the elegance and grace of the framework, with a variable amount of impatience depending on the use case that I want a status channel for, on that particular day. But those are the days of future thinking and hope, rather than being stuck in the trenches, wondering why it’s 2026, and we still don’t have a “Set Once” enforcement for things like the Dock, Homescreen, Safari or Finder—truly lost knowledge from WorkGroup Manager. Some example limitations or omissions in the Profile Spec seem glaringly obvious to me, but YMMV. – Force Bluetooth On or Off, rather than freeze it in its current state on MacOS. – Restrict MacOS only to connect to Managed Networks, like in iOS. – Choose/Default the Windowing/Multitasking mode for iOS for the user, either normal or Shared iPad, especially. – The iOS app does not have a managed app config for UI customization or mounting a network share. – iWork Suite does not have Managed App Configurations, or at least they are not surfaced and documented. Ensuring any UI changes and quirks from using keys to Restrict External AI Providers are not consistent. – Continuing to use the User Channel for Declarations (Safari Extensions) long since the User Channel was seemingly abandoned. These examples and many more undocumented make me believe the team implementing DDM is under-resourced and under extreme pressure, with little time to go back and adjust keys already implemented.

Jeff Richardson: My only MDM complaint is with Microsoft, not Apple, and its failure to provide MDM support to the Apple Vision Pro through its Intune software. Apple has made the tools for this available, and Microsoft has been saying for a long time that it is coming, but we are still waiting.

Erik Kramer: The protocols are often mature and working, but the vendors sometimes just don’t implement them in the best way. It’s like a third-party monitor for a Mac Studio.

TJ Draper: No real change from last year.

Shane Thompson: We are at a point of transition, DDM is replacing more and more MDM commands, and it seems that MDM vendors are having to find a way to handle that; some are doing it more elegantly than others. In my experience, DDM is far more reliable than MDM, and it seems like there is a bright future with this transition.

**Jeff Wimer **: While Apple does have documentation for MDM protocols, because every MDM provider implements them differently, it’s hard to determine what they do without extensive testing, which takes time and resources

Allister Banks: DDM app delivery for iPad/iOS apparently (due to HTTP error codes we see) fails in Apple infra – they want vendors to adopt protocols and then fail to admit reproducible symptoms exist, making us fall back to v1 of the MDM spec. It’s also a nightmare to orchestrate updates on iPad/OS in 2026, to the point we just wipe/redeploy instead, ignoring Autonomous Single App Mode and how old the app versions are, still using Guided Access for signage/appliances… in 2026, what year is it 🤪

Cameron Kay: DDM is still a work in progress, but it is usable for things like Software Update now. Still, it’s not a replacement for all config profiles and MDM commands yet. Some of that has to do with DMS vendor adoption. It will be interesting to see when DDM can be used to implement security baselines from the macOS Security Compliance Project. The Apple management agent still breaks at times and stops executing commands until you reboot the device. Apple needs to add Update Inventory, Restart, Shut Down, Set Time Zones, Enable Remote Login (SSH) and Manage Login Window wallpaper commands for macOS. Apple Business Manager/Apple School Manager API should also handle the automatic renewal of certificates and tokens with Device Management Services. A management command that allows the MDM-created local admin account’s password to be changed without breaking Secure Token access for LAPS solutions is also needed.

Michal Moravec: Same as last year, some new areas can be managed. Some of the new management areas are only manageable via Declarative Device Management (DDM), which is good (example: Safari management). However, Apple has been awfully slow with the migration of the old profile configurations to DDM. Also, there are certain areas, such as the ManagedApp framework (introduced in iOS 18.4), which are still not available for macOS.

Bob McGillicuddy: Declarative still feels messy and incomplete, which is often the case with MDM software makers. However, the fish can rot from the head if not done as full-throated as it should be. Could improve

John Wetter: Solid progress here as I expect non-DDM commands to start being deprecated very soon.

Morgan Schönberger: For me, DDM got way more stable in the last year. Especially, software updates have become more reliable and are much less of a burden. The real task here is with the MDM vendors to integrate the new capabilities into their products.

The Future of Apple in the Enterprise

Kale Kingdon: The closer I get to the end of the survey, the more verbose, conversational and agitated my responses usually become. Now, enter the feeling of catharsis and gradual acceptance. I am intrinsically tied to Apple management. It is a chosen profession, and I enjoy it immensely. Providing anecdotal responses to these surveys over the years has provided perspective. I do firmly believe that Apple has improved and will continue to improve on its delivery to the Enterprise long term – This does not, however, mean they can afford to take their foot off the accelerator. I cannot understate how the MacBook Neo is a once-in-a-decade opportunity for them to acquire market share against their competitors, and it’s utterly imperative that all other facets of their business attempt to keep pace with the hardware team and ensure they are taking full advantage of the opportunity that has arisen. Don’t let “It Just Works” lie on the cutting room floor, to be used as a meme to denigrate the product. Make it the guiding star again.

Jered Benoit: I feel like they are hesitant to be in the space at all.

Chris Carr: I think it will continue to creep in bit by bit

John Delfino: It will be interesting to see what the Business restructure means, and whether MDM built in solves problems for anyone.

Marcus Rowell: I’m still wondering: With all our data, apps, and now AI, residing in the CloudOS and delivered by a browser, where does Apple fit? Apple currently seems to have an edge for the adoption of on-device AI (almost all the 3rd party AI tools are macOS first). Maybe “Private Cloud Compute” tied to our Apple devices’ security will bring us a privacy-first CloudOS. All the large AI companies are building AI-controlled browsers. It would be wonderful to have an AI browser that uses a Private Cloud Computer to run the models, instead of one that is focused on harvesting everything it can from our lives.

Luke Charters: Never in my career have I seen this volume of schools investigating a move to Apple. The MacBook Neo could not have come at a better time, as sharply rising PC prices are prompting schools to look for other options. Apple has a unique opportunity here to pick up significant market share in the education space with a product that cannot be beat on the combination of price and performance. I sincerely hope they don’t somehow squander it.

Shane Thompson: Apple seems to be taking enterprise more and more seriously every year; they have to be seeing the increase of Macs in everything from SMB to higher ed to full-on enterprise. The tooling is getting better, it seems that the communication and documentation are improving, and we are even hearing from our Apple rep more regularly than we ever have in the past. I think due to the quality of hardware, improvement in management protocols and identity, this is going to become something that keeps this momentum, and we start seeing more businesses choosing Macs as their standard computer of choice.

Martin Piron: I’m very confident in Apple’s enterprise future, especially given the AxM improvements in 2025. If Apple stays on this trajectory, and with the Neo likely to accelerate adoption in education, the future is bright.

Bart Reardon: Everyone I speak to at Apple who is adjacent to this area wants the experience to be good and wants to know if/how it can be done better.

Christopher Cook: The enterprise landscape looks great thanks to even the lowest-spec’d Macs being so capable and power-efficient. The problem with the enterprise is Apple’s lack of leadership in enterprise management. They create APIs and protocols, but leave the management of the devices to third parties who implement them differently. By way of comparison, Microsoft says, “This is how you update Windows,” and it works exactly the way they say it does because they also designed the tools to manage it. Apple says, “This is how macOS should be updated,” and their MDM partners all handle it differently. Apple exerts far more control over third-party apps in the App Store than they do management over its own operating systems, and it’s maddeningly backward.

Andrew Laurence: This last year, Apple delivered on pent-up asks: AxM APIs, AxM-managed MDM migrations, simplified Platform Single Sign-On enrollment, and – wonder of wonders! – a first-party MDM offering. Apple’s combined enterprise value has gone up.

Craig Cohen: Apple, always the visionary, has become a good partner to the enterprise. We need our other partners to stop the multi-year preview of Apple technology.

N Clarke: One thing I’ve experienced is that a lot of conversations come down to money. The MacBook Neo: cheap, powerful, much desired. On the other hand, if you use Microsoft anything, why not use the bundled products on your tier? Why spend money on a responsive MDM if we get the same-day Intune bundled in? Why investigate more performant AV products if local Defender came with our Cloud Phishing Protection? Excel doesn’t perform as nicely on Mac as on Windows and occasionally loses data… Why don’t we just use Windows? I am looking forward to the European Union’s migration away from Microsoft services in the hope that either Microsoft will step up its game and make better products, or that there will be strong alternatives in the File collaboration + Data Storage + Security + IDp combined space. It is my opinion that Macs don’t do particularly well in the Enterprise, both despite (lack of competing players) and because of (low quality Mac-specific services), Microsoft.

Jeff Anderson: Apple will continue to gain market share in the enterprise.

Tom Bridge: The hardware is saving the software’s bacon, and has been for years. Apple has a lot of work to do to make its software justify its hardware, in terms of reliability, operability, and configurability. I hope that this is a change that Apple will invest in, because the hardware is universally loved, while the software this year has been unexpectedly weak in the face of the new design system, challenges with reliability in the OS functionality, and continued weakness of the management platform as compared to Android and Windows. Apple could do so much better here to shore up its future.

Cameron Kay: Apple in the Enterprise is making progress, but it does still feel the pace needs to pick up considerably. There’s definitely a bottleneck in what they can implement. As I said before, if Apple had 1000 engineers in the Enterprise team as they have in the iPhone Camera team, we’d see a lot more progress. I’m not sure Tim Cook’s Spreadsheet is quite willing to go that far, but we can hope.

Jeff Richardson: I feel confident about the future of Apple in the enterprise market in the foreseeable future, not only because of Apple’s efforts in this area but also because individual users love using the iPhone and iPad, which means that enterprise customers who want happy users will devote the resources necessary to make everything work.

Jeremy Leland: Apple devices continue to be my most manageable end-user devices. They should be considering how much vertical integration Apple has in place. Apple Silicon devices have been reliable and show real staying power, still feeling useful and relevant after 4+ years of use.

Michael Jon: Apple is on the right track with enterprise, and I’ll defend that position even when others won’t. A lot of the foundational work is already there. Security on these devices is genuinely good; I can’t fault a MacBook against a Lenovo or a Dell. If you’re an enterprise with the budget for it, Macs should be what you’re doing. The MDM migration tooling has been a significant addition this year, and the overall device management story continues to mature. Where Apple needs to focus now is on the niche use cases that are still being handled with a sledgehammer. Personal Apple IDs on managed Macs are a prime example. Right now, it’s a tenancy-level switch: personal IDs on or off. That’s too blunt. What I actually want is a preference key that lets me define which Apple ID domains or addresses are permitted on a managed device. A blanket policy doesn’t work when you’re managing executives who have a personal Apple ID tied to years of purchases and genuinely don’t want to give it up. That’s a real conversation I’ve had, and “sorry, it’s all or nothing” is not a satisfying answer. Platform SSO reliability also needs to be resolved. That’s not a future wish list item; it’s a current problem that’s actively eroding confidence in the platform among administrators. The longer-term concern I have is the competitive pressure from Linux. It’s not quiet anymore. Valve’s continued investment in Linux compatibility, Framework and their repairable and upgradeable hardware and a developer community that’s increasingly comfortable on Linux means I’m seeing more engineers and developers opting out of the Mac ecosystem entirely when given the choice. Right now, my Mac fleet is primarily finance, HR, and customer-facing roles, and that’s probably where it stays if Apple doesn’t address the customization, storage, and repairability gaps that are pushing power users elsewhere. And it’s not just Linux eating from the top. ChromeOS Flex is quietly eating from the bottom. For the “I just need a browser and an email client” tier of enterprise devices, which is where a lot of those finance, HR, and customer-facing roles actually live, ChromeOS Flex on commodity hardware is a compelling alternative. If Apple’s answer to budget-conscious enterprise is the MacBook Neo, they need to be honest about what it’s competing against. It’s not just Windows anymore. It’s a $300 refurbished Lenovo running a managed browser OS with zero-touch enrolment and Google Workspace baked in. That’s a hard conversation for Apple to win on cost alone, and the Mac’s advantage in that tier comes down to ecosystem lock-in more than capability. Apple has the bones of a great enterprise platform. The question is whether they’ll do the detail work to keep the people who are starting to drift.

Erik Kramer: They’ve shown improvements in their products this year, and the Neo is just the latest example of Apple showing that they care about this market.

Michal Moravec: Enterprise management of Apple platforms is pretty good when you compare it to other vendors. If you look at it in isolation, there is so much potential for it to be better. The problem is that Apple is unable to focus on nearly anything lately. From the outside, it looks like the company is spread thin on so many things, which is weird when you consider Apple is one of the wealthiest businesses in the world. Personally, I think the current leadership knows very well how to build and sell physical products. This is not surprising since Tim Cook is well known for his skills in supply chain management. I wish Apple would have similar success with software engineering. Apple needs to learn how to create good software again.

W. Andrew Robinson: This past year saw better progress for enterprise initiatives than in other years… whether it’s a combination of market share or adoption or something, Apple seems to be paying more attention to this part of their business. Apple’s priorities shift in this space year to year, but I think it’s a good ‘thumbnail guesstimation’ to say this year’s been more good than bad.

Peter Loobuyck: Future looks great, sure, now pc competitors are getting nervous since the release of the Neo.

Gabriel Marcelino: Apple Business changes, we now see a better future, but not quite there yet. We still need to get better with macOS updates and better control for Mac Admins to roll out Updates.

Guillaume Gète: The MacBook Neo is a game changer, and the new features in Apple Business should make companies even more eager to invest in Apple.

David McMonnies: With the Neo marking a significant play into new markets, I would hope this would come with significantly improved enterprise focus. The April 14 ABM changes do represent a positive direction. I would hope to see a greater impetus on larger-scale uptake of macOS into the enterprise, with OS functionality being the key driver.

Emilio Garcia: With the release of the MacBook Neo and a renewed focus on education, I’m hoping for an increased focus on the challenges of managing fleets of computers assigned to users with varying levels of trust (e.g., things like allowing us to manage the pop-up for applications to access the network).

Justin McMahan: Apple does feel like it’s focusing more on the enterprise. Some pieces of their platforms still feel like they’re designed with consumers in mind, but they’re gradually improving.

Morgan Schönberger: I‘m looking very optimistic into the future of Apple in the enterprise. I’ve seen a solid foundation with great hardware products standing on it. The new MacBook Neo is a great addition and allows for some low-cost workstations that mainly rely on one or two web apps. We see several departments considering those instead of their Dell PCs, which they had before.

Armin Briegel: The foundation is solid. There is real momentum. We will have to see how the MacBook Neo and Apple Business work out in detail, but they are very likely to have a positive impact.

Andrew B: The future of Apple in Enterprise is a coin toss. On the one hand, the unmatched hardware, ease of deployment and zero-touch capabilities are all easily sold in Enterprise. On the other hand, the lack of crucial controls and management for Apple Intelligence and end-user-facing security prompts, the failure to recognize the constraints imposed on Enterprise that are beyond the admin team’s control as it relates to Apple’s release cycle, are liabilities that Apple currently seems to be underestimating.

John Welch: This is not on the server side. Apple is not a server provider, and that’s not a bad thing. The Enterprise is fertile ground for Apple with good reason. They’re not perfect, but ye gods, compared to their actual competitors, they’re killing it.

Jeffrey Hoover: I have to compare Apple in the past with Apple now and in the future. Past Apple had Xserves and in-house training. Now, anything like that is gone. The next two to three years will be telling, particularly around how gracefully they handle the DDM transition for organizations that are behind, and whether they invest meaningfully in the macOS management surface and Business Essentials. But overall, it’s a reasonable bet, but you should plan for continued dependency on third-party MDM vendors, build in a change management buffer around annual OS releases, and watch the DDM adoption deadlines closely.

Alex Meretten: The rate of improvement on Apple Silicon and the importance of local power for LLMs is no joke. So yes, Apple has a long future in the enterprise. But this question also asks about “[Apple’s] decisions will help IT administrators in the enterprise”, and the answer to that is, “lol, lmao”. At best, we can continue to hope they ignore us.

Joel Housman: I think their refocus on “Apple Business,” which is an Apple Business Manager 2.0 of sorts, is great. We’ll continue to stick with our 3rd party MDM provider, JumpCloud, as they allow us to manage Windows devices over Windows MDM as well, but I think AB for small organizations or small businesses is fantastic. I could see this being super useful for educational institutions as well.

Dennis Logue: The MacBook Neo is a potential game changer….IF Apple keeps a regular, predictable upgrade cycle and the price remains in the current range.

Marian Albers: macBook Neo.

Chris Pommer: Hoping for better.

AI adoption and management

Erik Kramer: This topic is too big for one comment box!

Luca Accomazzi: My company believes this to be a game-changer. Top management is in both “all in” camps, the “we don’t want to be Nokiaed” and the “this will multiply individual performances by 3x”.

TJ Draper: AI has great potential, and it should also be entered into cautiously and judiciously.

Andrew B: Enterprise needs an “off” switch for Apple Intelligence. As in, “disable all of it, and prove that it’s disabled.” Again, this isn’t a preference; it’s a requirement imposed by C-levels, regulators, and auditors. Apple seems to think that this is because Enterprise doesn’t understand the benefits of Apple Intelligence. It’s not about that. It’s about having empirical, auditable control over where company data goes, regardless of how “safe” the destination may be.

Michal Moravec: We appreciate AI vendors that think about enterprise use cases and implement policy management for their tools. Claude Code is a good example of a vendor trying to provide necessary control for enterprises.

Allister Banks: I hear a huge majority of rank-and-file business workers are being told they must use developer tools to e.g. leverage MCP servers and access data to do their jobs now, which is false in several ways: 1. the data is usually incomplete so they draw poor conclusions/are investing in the intuition a robot deigned worthy and 2. the tools are IDEs or command line heavy, designed and supported by under-resourced devtools teams – this is not for mere mortals to snap their fingers and be savvy with. Atom’s lineage with VS Code and its clones that release an update if you look at it funny means an absolute shitspray of Electron versions clogging pipes.

Chris Pommer: Individuals in the office (several non-native English speakers) have been using chatbots to help with translation of professional jargon in correspondence (we’re architects), and some light use reviewing RFP documents and the like to summarize them before we draft proposals.

N Clarke: The biggest concern with AI features is data exfiltration to unmanaged external providers. Apple Intelligence purports to be safe (for now), but the lack of custom integrations via the ‘Extensions’ section leaves a lot to be desired. Copilot is making a compelling argument (You trust us with your data, how about your drafts? “), but how secure is the cloud itself? There does seem to be an interesting rise in the ability to host your own models, I’m looking forward to seeing if anything comes out of the M5 generation in local cloud machines (Mini, Studio).

Cameron Kay: Selected vendors’ tools are made available to all full-time staff and part-time staff, and students have access to a smaller set of less expensive tools. I have no real knowledge of how widely these tools have been adopted, but I suspect that for most users, for work purposes, it’s still very experimental.

Chris Carr: A lot of AI products are garbage and marketing hype. Or they are security nightmares. But some generative coding tools are useful.

Gabriel Marcelino: We host our own AI and implement other companies’ AI models as well, but for our medical devices, we do not use AI for HIPAA compliance

Joel Housman: We use Google Workspace, so we’re steering our staff to Google Gemini, because through Google Workspace, Google is giving us document retention and data controls over how our staff uses Gemini. It’s built into our existing product and licenses, whereas if we wanted to use ChatGPT or Claude, we’d have to sign a contract with OpenAI or Anthropic and would need to pay additional money for our staff to use these. We’re a non-profit, so we don’t have a huge budget to go out and acquire new software when we already get a similar product from Google.

Morgan Schönberger: While some people use AI with a great effect, others still expect it to just create their PowerPoint presentations, complete with company design and without any need for proofreading. There is still a way to go to teach users the capabilities and caveats of AI tools.

Chris Waldrip: All in, but only with approved and vetted vendors.

Marian Albers: Local AI needs more support/marketing from Apple, which is already happening, but hasn’t reached real enterprise use cases.

Emilio Garcia: We are beyond “trying it out”, as we have an official vendor (Google Gemini) and it’s available and in use by our users. However, I would hesitate to say we are “all-in”, as it’s been purely up to the user to decide if they want to participate or not. I’m not aware of any unit that is mandating AI use, or so heavily pushing it, to consider us “all-in.”

Bart Reardon: I’d like to see more effort and research put into how AI can be made sustainable from a resource usage point of view (RAM, electricity, etc.) and more ethical in the source of training materials. LLM tech is fascinating—the way in which it’s made available, less so.

Jeffrey Hoover: We are using it to keep ahead and stay ahead of the competition.

Martin Piron: We are moving from early experimentation into broad AI adoption, with GenAI now embedded in company OKRs, core products and internal productivity tools. We manage this through a central AI Gateway that routes most LLM traffic, applies shared guardrails and observability, and a Responsible AI framework (policies, training, and ISO-aligned guardrail POCs) that governs which tools are approved, how data is used, and how risks are controlled across the organization.

John Wetter: There are still significant concerns around data security and respecting your privacy with many artificial intelligence services currently available, with some AI vendors choosing to embrace shadow IT and worse as their marketing/adoption strategy. Short to medium term, our most likely adoption will be around specialized tools with a fixed source of information and strong data controls.

Jeremy Leland: There will always be a new avenue into AI, whether it is a web-based tool, drag and drop app that is user-installable, or integrated into an existing app. We are trying to focus on user education and providing viable options that help enhance what users can do. That way, the tools in use stay predictable and manageable, allowing us to fine-tune things for our users’ needs.

Michael Jon: We’re all in on AI at [large software company in the renewable energy industry], but we’re being deliberate about it. The goal is to build AI into how we work in a sustainable way, not chase every shiny thing and end up looking like a company that got swept up in a fad. On the infrastructure side, we’ve introduced LiteLLM as an LLM and AI gateway, which gives us a centralized layer to manage model access, usage, and spend rather than having teams spin up their own GCP projects every time they want to experiment with a model. That sprawl was becoming a problem, and consolidating through a gateway was the right call. We’re also actively reviewing our enterprise use of ChatGPT. OpenAI’s recent posture around government engagement and the general direction the company is heading has raised enough flags that it warrants a proper look. Honestly, OpenAI has become the McDonald’s of the AI world. Ubiquitous, convenient, and fine if you’re not thinking too hard about what you’re consuming. We’re shifting our attention toward Claude and properly integrated tooling like Gemini, where the enterprise story is more mature, and the vendor behavior is easier to stand behind. Our internal philosophy is that AI is an accessibility tool first. It’s there to help people close gaps, cover tasks they struggle with, and lower barriers to entry. A good example is people with ADHD, where AI-assisted dictation and scheduling tools can address real stopgaps and interruptions in their workflow. Transcription tooling is probably the clearest case where AI has genuinely delivered on that promise; that problem is largely solved, it’s being used by a lot of people, and I love that. It doesn’t need to be reinvented; it just needs to keep working. My apprehension is around the other end of the spectrum, where AI is being used to do someone’s job for them entirely. There are engineers out there having AI pick up a task, write the code, open the pull request, and conduct the review before anything ships to production. They’ll say it works fine. I’ve even heard “It’s only a problem once it hits production”, ridiculous and negligent to say the least. The problem is that executives see those case studies, and the mental leap isn’t “great, our engineers are more productive.” It’s “Why are we paying this person?” Mass layoffs are already happening, and when someone can point to a workflow where AI handled the full cycle, that becomes a justification. That’s the trajectory I’m worried about, and it’s why we’re building guidelines around AI use rather than just opening the tap and seeing what happens. Vendor scrutiny is part of that, too. We use GitHub Copilot, and after X’s well-publicized controversies around child safety and AI-generated content, I raised the question of why we were still routing usage through XAI models in Copilot at all. Those models got blocked promptly. Knowing what your AI tooling is actually running under the hood, and being willing to act on it, matters. We’re not sending money that direction.

Andrew Laurence: This institution is strategically AI-forward.

Marcus Rowell: I’d love to run a major model in Private Cloud Computer with security tied to our Apple devices. I am concerned that without moving to inspecting and policing all external traffic and implementing tooling like DLP, data will end up everywhere with AI usage. Without strong traffic-based guardrails, I think trying to “manage” our data will be a losing battle. Previously, to lose control of data, the user had to actively upload information, or an attacker had to compromise your systems. In an AI & Agentic world, your organization’s data can be scanned, assessed and extracted without the user or IT understanding what is happening.

Personal use of AI features

Joel Housman: I use it to help me quickly write basic scripts to automate simple tasks.

Armin Briegel: I have been evaluating AI for coding and other use cases. Overall, I find there are some tasks that are well-suited and others where the benefits are questionable at best. The ethical, economical, ecological, and social implications of the technology and especially the corporations that are pushing them and how they are being sold and marketed concern me deeply, and I am holding back on those grounds.

Jeffrey Hoover: Amazing at debugging large logs. Write nice responses given the information.

Allister Banks: Tech, and by extension robots/clankers/LLMs, is about seeing through lies and proving out usefulness. (I don’t think so poorly of proper research like ML by actual scientists.) I wish I could hibernate for like 4 years. I would miss nothing, and the dust would have settled (hopefully). When I wake up like Stallone in Demolition Man, if I need to bake bread or fix bicycles as a career because no jobs, so be it

Jeff Richardson: AI will be as transformative as mobile technology. Apple is not currently in the lead in this area, but I would much rather Apple take the time to get it done right. Apple didn’t sell the first MP3 player or the first smartphone, but once they fully got there, they did it right. I hope to see the same with AI.

TJ Draper: I use it often as I’m writing code. It can, at times, be very helpful. Other times, it misses the mark so badly as to make me wonder how it could get it so wrong. Judgment Day is not very near…

John Welch: It’s useful for specific things like “Give me a syntax example for running PowerShell commands in .NET.” Not perfect, but useful. Beyond that, I am fully capable of both reading and writing emails, Teams messages, and Slack messages. I am neither a CEO nor a billionaire, nor am I trying to decimate my workforce to goose my next yearly bonus.

Andrew B: Meh.

Peter Loobuyck: mostly lookups and checking code

Mike Stirrup: Finishing the UI on apps/utilities that nobody else would write (yes, I got the idea from Fedderico)

Morgan Schönberger: My main use for AI features is in coding assistance. I’ve made many little tools and apps to support my work. Tools I probably wouldn’t write myself, because the effort wouldn’t be worth it.

Karsten Fischer^: Sometimes hilarious results when asking for a simple task, sometimes nice when exploring things I haven’t looked into and utterly useless when asking for the latest changes Apple did incorporate.

Cameron Kay: It’s still early days using AI with Apple device management. It helps write scripts, but is not mature enough to provide in-depth reporting or automation of management tasks. Apple and DMS vendors will have to provide better APIs to allow the Apple Admin Community to explore the possibilities. I’m sure more sessions making use of AI will show up at conferences in the coming years.

Luca Accomazzi: We’ve tried them all. Nowadays, my team, for development, uses Claude Code, CodeSense, GitLab Duo, Aikido AI for security, Gemini Gems, you name them.

Chris Pommer: Beyond assessing whether there may be uses for our team that would be productive, I have primarily found AI tools useful in helping with writing more complex scripts and Shortcuts to help other team members and me with specific tasks. Early days.

Marcus Rowell: I’ve had some amazing success with AI Agents writing code and building new systems with simple prompts in minutes. I’ve also spent many hours trying to build something that I thought would be easy for the AI. I think this is mostly down to me identifying and scoping the requirements, and understanding what AI is good at. I see a lot of work in our Org for the next year in making systems (e.g., logging, MDM) accessible to AI Agents so that they can do their work efficiently.

Emilio Garcia: I tried Gemini once to help with a specific CGEvent command in Swift. The first prompt was not successful, and the second was. However, I felt gross, like my project was tainted — it no longer was a product of my own creation. I haven’t tried using it since, but I’m frequently in calls where colleagues offer “Gemini said this, and it’s less than helpful.

Jered Benoit: Claude is my IT intern, helping me work through troubleshooting and process, project, and policy management.

Michal Moravec: Chatbots are very helpful in making me faster when I work with things I know and understand. It’s quite risky to rely solely on chatbots in areas where I don’t have much knowledge. Two examples: (1) When I ask questions about more obscure subjects (e.g., macOS device management), chatbots are happy to hallucinate solutions that don’t exist or suggest something that Apple deprecated/removed years ago. I can easily spot the problem because Apple Device Management is my area of expertise. If I ask about a different area, I can’t fully trust the information. I need to verify it constantly. (2) I have written some Python/shell/etc. programs over the years. I can use a chatbot to generate code so I don’t have to write it or find a place to copy it from. I can course-correct the chatbot because I have some idea about what I am doing. When I generate code in a language/framework I have never worked with, I need to choose between blind trust (dangerous) and continuous verification (somewhat decreases the speed I gained by the code generation).

Michael Jon: I try to use AI in an accessibility context first and not let it dictate how I work day to day. A good example of that is using it as a glorified grammar tool rather than a writing replacement, which is closer to what these models were originally built for anyway. Outside of LLMs, I find AI genuinely exciting. Language transcription in meetings, translation tooling and real-time captioning; these are the applications where AI is quietly doing meaningful work for people and not getting nearly enough credit for it. In my actual role, I use AI for reviewing code rather than writing it. I’ll use it to spot inconsistencies and flag things I might have missed. That’s where it genuinely earns its place for me. Working in a remote-first capacity, largely on my own side of the world, I don’t have the luxury of leaning on colleagues to sanity check my work outside of the Mac admins community. AI fills that gap practically. It’s not replacing my skills; it’s acting as an observer and reporter on how I do things and helping close the accessibility gaps that come with working solo at odd hours. I don’t let it do the work. I let it watch the work and tell me where I’ve slipped up, but I don’t let it jump into the driver’s seat. It’s a backseat passenger that I can choose to hear out.

Craig Cohen: Helping organize my thoughts to help respond intelligently and not emotionally.

Bart Reardon: My world is full of short-form tasks. Scripts or tasks that do a specific thing and are relatively short. AI is amazing at this stuff, once you learn how to prompt it efficiently, and it can read a few hundred lines of log files much faster than I can and tease out issues that make troubleshooting bugs a heck of a lot easier. The other thing it does well, that I suck at, is writing documentation (not the writing so much, but getting around to writing). “Write a readme.md for this thing” is something that an LLM can spit out in 5 seconds and take me a minute to review and correct if needed. Personal rule, though, I don’t ask an LLM to do anything that I couldn’t do myself if given time and motivation. If I can’t review it and know what’s going on, it becomes a liability for future me.

Erik Kramer: I work with sensitive data too often to invite AI into the majority of my work.

David McMonnies: AI is useful for speeding up existing workflows that were kludgy and manual, being something of a sceptic I do not trust it to wholesale replace what I do more broadly. I dislike using it for code reviews or to suggest improvements. It is useful for me, as it is mostly around transcription summarisation and formatting documentation. I also prefer to learn what I don’t know instead of having things done for me, so I’m not exactly all in on it.

Andrew Laurence: LLM tools are increasingly, materially helpful in IT tasks: the grunt work task you might fob off to a junior staff member, or as a learning/coaching/editor tool in an area you’re familiar with but not an expert. Like Cliff’s Notes, a useful companion to actually doing the work.

Christopher Cook: AI tools are great for getting through the “writer’s block” of starting something new, before we do all the work and write the analogical novels ourselves. It’s like having an eager, junior member of the team whose work absolutely cannot be trusted. Every time they try to help, a senior engineer grumbles under their breath and says, “Never mind, I’ll do this myself,” and gets to work.

Jeremy Leland: I have found AI useful for vendor research, especially now that so much information (pricing, tech documents, feature details) is gated behind “contact us” buttons and forms. It has also been helpful in creating support documents – taking vendor-supplied information and rewriting it in terms of what the AI tool has been taught about our operations and infrastructure.

Charles Misson: Claude and Claude Code are both helpful!

Gabriel Marcelino: I am all in with AI and use it almost daily. I was one of the first to embrace AI, or we will be the ones being replaced by AI, is what I used to say. If we didn’t know how it worked, we would be the ones replaced by it.

Marian Albers: mlx

John Cleary: The AI that I use is never Apple’s. 😂 I love Apple’s Machine Learning, which the system uses all the time. Apple Intelligence is a total bust. Maybe if they announce it for a third time at WWDC this year, they’ll actually ship it! 😂

Martin Piron: AI has made my scripting, documentation, and research work both faster and in a more effective way. Different tools excel at different tasks, so it’s crucial to know which one to use for what. Our internal AI platform, wired into enterprise data, has been especially invaluable for surfacing old threads and documentation I didn’t even know existed.

David Rizzo: I’m a novice script writer. ChatGPT has helped me with some quick BASH scripts.