Yep. People who have never tried to add Mac support to an existing organization do not realize how freaking expensive it is.
There are basically two cases. If you use Microsoft, you are often already paying for Entra ID and Intune, then still adding the Apple-side pieces for Mac support: Apple Business Manager and often Jamf or Kandji. If you do not use Microsoft, you are buying the full stack yourself: Okta or JumpCloud for identity, Jamf or Kandji for device management, and Apple Business Manager for enrollment. Apple Business Manager is free, but the rest is not, and the cost adds up fast.
This means that, in practice, a managed Mac can easily end up costing close to twice as much to support as a Windows device.
Actually Intune handles MacOS reasonably well, you don’t need Jamf; that’s the way we went, and it’s okay-ish for the most part. By far the annoyingest thing is getting Macs bought before we went down the Business Manager integration route into MDM.
You think there’s a standard way to do that? Just install company portal? That worked in exactly 1/20 cases. It’s an exciting new error on every single device. Awful. Just awful.
The only thing you need out of any of those to correctly support the Mac is an MDM, of which there are free ones and expensive ones and everything in between. So long as it can deploy configuration profiles and declarative management configs, you can spin up Munki to be your pkg/script runner and script the rest. Installomator to install and patch applications.
But if you also wanted identity, there are plenty of free selfhostable SSO/ID providers out there. If you're just starting out and not at the scale where a big Microsoft CoPilotM365OfficeWhatever contract makes sense, you probably don't even really have a need for a lot of this stuff. A minimum contract for Jamf Pro is like $5k a year or something. That's two well kitted developer MacBook Pros per year in license costs.
Dunno if you've ever had a business relationship with Apple but they're really good on that front. Proactive and helpful, along with always trying to sell you stuff, but proactive and helpful nonetheless.
A B2C relationship and a B2B relationship are not the same thing. Apple does well with the B2C pipeline, but they will only surpass Jamf in the B2B department if they play dirty.
I have managed multiple relationships with Apple business and the only thing I can think you could possibly be talking about is having a local store reserve devices for you to buy.
As far as identifying a bug in the software and getting it fixed, or requesting a feature, you run into a brick wall. Taking that feedback from customers is not the Apple way. This is why there is a market for third party MDM companies in the first place.
By excellent, you mean excellent at not being able to talk to someone about your real world problem and need to rely on your linkedin contacts to find someone to talk to?
I would say that most SMBs don't need Jamf because they provide overlapping features. The most important thing you want is remote erasure of company data (for compliance purposes), app assignment, and ensuring your devices have screen lock. This basically makes the most important parts of MDM for Apple devices totally free.
It's not apparent that this apple mdm will do internal distribution or just provide for encouraging a set of installed apps already on the app store. If it does, that would be the biggest reason for me to jump to the free product.
It’s also hard to hire for. Candidates for job openings must be between the ages of 21-31 years old. Yes they are legally forbidden from hiring anyone older.
Since they have a mandatory retirement age of 56 (if they're not retired earlier for health conditions) it's not crazy to have an age cutoff for intake. Why put someone through a 2 year training with a high failure rate if after they make it through all of that you'll get at most 10 years of work out of them?
Modern vehicles make disabling data collection fairly difficult. And even if it is disabled, there is no guarantee data is not being sent despite your user settings.
I would love for investigative groups to target the auto industry’s data collection practices and have meaningful legislation created and implemented as a result.
200-500k would make a large negative impact in healthcare. Specialty doctors cannot be trained in a snap, and there are limits on how many MDs and DOs are churned out of schools.
So healthcare industries turn to H1Bs to hire specialty positions in underserved / rural areas. The alternative is to shut these facilities down, which has other negative aspects to communities.
I was surprised to hear in this thread that there is a physician shortage in the US, because my understanding was that most Americans go to university and that doctors are paid well. Why aren't more graduates pursuing careers in medicine?
It turns out that they are, but (if I do not misread the situation) there is a regulatory bottleneck:
>The United States is grappling with a physician shortage, but the solution does not lie in simply opening more medical schools. As a physician-scientist and former founding dean of a medical school, I argue that the true bottleneck is not the number of medical school graduates but the insufficient number of residency training positions. Since the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which froze the number of Medicare-funded residency slots, the United States has seen a steady increase in medical graduates, yet the availability of residency spots has stagnated. This mismatch between undergraduate medical education (UME) expansion and the lack of corresponding growth in graduate medical education (GME) is the key issue.
As this has been the arrangement since 1997, by now a graduated American child of an immigrant H1B specialist trained in a foreign country may be unable to secure a 'residency training position' and therefore unable to practice medicine in his or her own country? It sounds absurd.
As a current parent, I assumed this was due to people having fewer kids, not AI. Additionally, with childcare centers becoming more expensive, many more families are looking to be stay at home parents or using grandparents / relatives to watch their kids during work hours.
I do this quite often, but I also instruct Claude to limit its output to 2-3 sentences or paragraphs, depending on the context. Also "Write this for a team of software developers / MBA's" goes a long way too.
I also do the extra step of eliminating things that are not needed, or we review this during backlog refinement.
Sounds like a lot of work to ensure it's correct, without the guarantee that it's actually correct. Why not just do it oldschool? Is it really saving you that much time?
I think book sales are significantly down compared to most periods in the last 50-100 years? Still a culturally significant thing, but economically not what they used to be ...
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