1. That's not how businesses work - the 10-year-old will be 28 when he becomes an IT manager, and their 40yo boss will say "LOL no, learn to use Active Directory, we're not switching the entire company to Chromebooks/MacBook Neos because you 'grew up with' them." They will then adapt and learn to use what the business has.
2. Even assuming charitably that our 10yo will be founding a company one day and making all purchasing decisions for themselves, it's worth pointing out that neither Google nor especially Apple has shown even slight interest in delivering "Enterprise" anything. Even MDM Apple farms out to third parties, likewise they have no realistic counterpart for Active Directory, nor business email or collaboration (at least Google has that though). A startup may be all-Mac. Eventually if it's successful though, it'll be too big to use 'consumer' tools only.
The MacBook Neo is a cute PC for a student or a grandma or indeed any casual user. But despite it giving Apple (for the first time in Apple's existence) a price point for an entire computer that's under the amount where you'd be embarrassed to propose adopting it for your whole fleet... the hardware is but one part of a larger ecosystem, and Apple has demonstrated that they have no interest into selling into "The Enterprise" except for tiny niches (relative to the whole PC market) such as "web and mobile" software engineers, video editors, VFX shops etc.
> A startup may be all-Mac. Eventually if it's successful though, it'll be too big to use 'consumer' tools only... likewise they have no realistic counterpart for Active Directory, nor business email or collaboration (at least Google has that though).
Between the two, they have those needs pretty much completely covered (also, Apple does have good support for MDM now). To me this reads more as a complaint that neither of them is trying to execute the same bundling/business model as Microsoft, or selling the same kind of security model as what makes sense for an old school IT shop that literally could never leave Microsoft products if it even wanted to.
Every single mobile device in "Enterprise" is using MDM provided and supported by those two companies for business users at multiple layers of the stack required to provide that functionality, they just don't make a business out of selling it directly as a Serious Enterprise Product to IT departments (the least important one, ie where a guy in a collared shirt with a web UI takes a middle manager out for a steak dinner).
Contrast that with a decade ago. All systems accessed via networked PCs using Windows native clients. I had to use RDP to a desktop to access anything from outside the network.
One day someone is going to realise that the organisation does not have to spend £££ replacing every PC just to keep running a Web browser.
source: been there.
As a result, I do not currently think that Microsoft is consumer-oriented. They have reinforced my opinion by doing anti-consumer changes in XBOX and then saying that they were pro-gamer. Seems like a pattern.
Maybe they will prove me wrong; I am sun-setting my final host that's running their software soon.
Windows used to be built for the user. Now, Microsoft builds it for themselves, as a way to help hardware partners sell hardware which includes a windows license.
So if Microsoft makes Windows for their own benefit, and not for the users benefit, I see no reason to use it at all. I don’t like games that much.
MacOS has gone downhill in a hurry but it’s still very good. Far better than Windows for me in every way.
The continual recall/ai push from Microsoft has not helped at all and is pretty gross. There is a way to do a “recall” style thing that some folks will really want if they can trust it. The msft approach has been the opposite of that.
Yet it was the end users that forced enterprise to embrace the iPhone, not the other way around.
If her vision was the only driver, we'd still be rocking Blackberries.