This is the year Apple (finally) breaks into the enterprise

For years, Apple occupied a strange middle ground in enterprise IT.

It’s long been the platform of choice for executives, developers, and creative teams while often considered too premium for broader use. That perception is starting to change across enterprises big and small.

From the release of MacBook Neo to the rising costs of components and growing fatigue around Windows 11, several converging factors are now making it easier to justify Apple at scale.

Meanwhile, with work increasingly living in the cloud, many roles no longer require a heavyweight PC. As a result, secure and reliable devices with predictable lifecycle costs are king.

In this context, Apple makes a clear case for itself across fleets rather than just in the C-suite.

MacBook Neo: Affordable but not ‘cheap’

In March, Apple launched its new budget laptop at $599.

It’s the company’s most affordable laptop ever but far from “cheap” – counting a 13-inch Liquid Retina display and an A18 Pro chip. Strip away the consumer marketing (largely focused on students) and there’s a clear enterprise use case.

Why? Because for a growing share of employees, the workday lives in a browser, an online collaboration suite, or a virtual desktop. Rather than a heavy workstation, these users need a secure machine that lasts all day and doesn’t create support drag.

By comparison, the rest of the PC market is facing headwinds. In October, Windows 10 support officially ended. Extended security updates bought some more time but, for enterprise users, the move is inevitable.

The forced transition to Windows 11 isn’t helped by the first set of mandatory updates earlier this year breaking sleep mode and other core functions on some machines.

Further, Gartner expects combined DRAM and SSD prices to surge by 130% by the end of the year, pushing PC prices up by 17%. That’s bad news for vendors fighting in the low-margin Windows laptop segment.

On the other hand, while Apple isn’t immune to supply chain pressure, a vendor that designs its own silicon, controls its own OS, and uses the same chip family across mobile and desktop has more room to maneuver than vendors stitching together x86 roadmaps, Windows licensing, and thin hardware margins.

Device management dictates adoption

Hardware is only half the battle in enterprise onboarding. The other half, and what the company hasn’t always had, is an equally compelling “day-two” story for admins regarding enrollment and support.

Here, too, Apple is showing an appetite to bridge the management gap with the announcement of Apple Business. The platform went global in April offering built-in device management as a free service, Blueprints for zero-touch setup, Managed Apple Accounts via identity providers such as Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra ID, and custom roles, along with an Admin API for larger deployments.

Apple is also fixing the plumbing inside its latest macOS. Tahoe adds device management service migration, enrollment deadlines, declarative app deployment, and Platform SSO during Setup Assistant. Taken together, these updates smooth out the deployment edges and ensure that rollout and compliance don’t become a side project for the help desk.

It’s also worth repeating that Apple (unlike many competitors) spans mobile and desktop with the same ecosystem logic. In procurement terms, that’s another win because a company deeply invested in iPhones or iPads then has fewer reasons to treat Macs as outliers.

Apple’s enterprise play here isn’t about arguing that it’s “better” but about being easy to adopt and integrate without breaking the budget.

Apple makes its case across fleets

This isn’t just another round of “Apple hype”. The momentum is real and admins looking to make the switch should be encouraged to experiment with onboarding. However, remember to pilot on a small scale where the job is already cloud-first, build policy around identity and data, and judge devices on lifecycle cost and support burden.

And despite Apple’s native improvements, don’t forego third-party device management. Rollout success still hinges on cross-platform insight, identity, compliance, and patch management.

During this evolution, expect to see more mixed fleets rather than a complete replacement of Windows. After all, legacy applications, industry-specific workflows, and procurement habits won’t change overnight.

Slowly but surely, however, Apple’s improving on what admins care about (the trifecta of price, performance, and management) while also benefiting at the macro level (supply chain math that favors vertical integration).

The goal isn’t to win everywhere and everyone but to stop being treated like a special case that’s only for business leaders and heavy-duty workflows.

It’s telling that nearly all CIOs in a recent survey consider Apple infrastructure important to their IT strategy and that AI workloads are driving new use cases across roles. Time and cost ultimately dictate enterprise onboarding and, for Apple, these considerations are moving in the right direction.

We've rated the best mobile device management (MDM) software.

This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit