Bradley C

One of the most significant changes in enterprise IT over the last decade has been with Software as a Service (SaaS) going from the minority to the expectation. Thanks to frequent (and free) updates of macOS and iOS, developers are having to spend considerable resources on maintaining their apps on top of trying to grow their feature sets. Instead of spending $1500 every time a new version of Adobe Creative Cloud comes out, organizations can have a recurring charge for the number of seats they need and easily monitor expenses. Setapp, the popular all you can eat service for apps, has recently released an enterprise version for businesses that is called Setapp for Teams.
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Apple has been playing the slow game with HomeKit compared to Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem. Where Apple is working on detailed projects like HomeKit Secure Video, Amazon and Google are being bundled into nearly every device that has Wi-Fi in it. I love HomeKit, and I prefer it over Alexa or Google Assistant, but as we come to the end of 2019, I have four Amazon Echo Dots in my home and no HomePods. One of the key reasons I finally succumbed and bought a few Echo Dots was when Apple Music support launched and I found them on sale. If someone who loves Apple has started to dip his toes into the Alexa waters, what should be on Apple’s HomeKit plans for 2020?
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IT professionals are known for having all of the latest technology products, so they can be hard to buy for during the Christmas season. In my Apple @ Work post for this week, I want to run through a handful of products that would make for an excellent Christmas gift ideas for the IT professionals in your life.
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A few weeks ago, I mentioned how, between all of the excellent podcasts, music, movies, TV shows, and books that the thing most creators are fighting for more than ever before is people’s attention. No longer are we limited by the songs in our library. Apple Music or Spotify gives us access to almost every song available. 99.99% of podcasts are free, so there is always something new to binge. Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, Hulu, Apple TV+, and countless others provide us with more TV shows and movies than we could ever hope to watch. The industry, in my opinion, with the most opportunity going forward, is the digital book market.
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I’ve been interested in what Apple is doing in the health industry for a while now. I love reading stories about people using Apple Watch to get healthy, prevent accidents, and more. While I was at JNUC this past week, I got to spend some time with Lindsey Koshansky from Locus Health to hear how they are using the iPad in the healthcare field. They are heavily invested in the Apple and Jamf ecosystem, so I was eager to hear more about what they’re doing.
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I love iCloud Drive. I love how integrated it is into macOS and iOS, and I long ago moved most of my documents away from Dropbox (except for Shared Folders). I am always looking for new ways to back up my photos, though. Since I keep an active Microsoft Office subscription, I thought I would use the 1TB of storage as another place to upload my photos. When I was using the OneDrive app, I noticed it had a Personal Vault section that I thought would be a great addition to iCloud Drive for storing sensitive files. Microsoft announced it back in June, and it rolled out worldwide in October. As I started using the OneDrive iPhone app, I quickly began to wonder why Apple hasn’t created a secure iCloud Drive folder with Touch ID and Face ID support.
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I’ve heard for years that you shouldn’t use your Mac with administrator privileges. I 100% agree with that statement, and I still use my Mac with administrator privileges. But to be perfectly honest, it’s just sort of inconvenient. In the enterprise, running as an administrator can certainly be against company policy, and depending on what environment you operate in, you may be out of compliance with industry regulations or customer contracts. But thanks to an open source tool (Privileges for macOS) from SAP, Apple focused enterprises now have a great solution. 
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The iPhone 11 Pro Max battery has been fantastic since the day I purchased it. Apple touts up to 80 hours of audio playback and 20 hours of video playback. Apple’s technical specs page says that it lasts up to five hours longer than the iPhone XS Max. With this increase in battery life, is a battery case still needed? I’ve been using the Mophie juice pack access for the past few weeks (which included my trip to JNUC 2019), so I wanted to share my thoughts.
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At JNUC 2019, Jeremy Butcher from Apple Product Marketing came on stage to give the Apple community an update on the state of Apple’s enterprise focus. He highlighted that all Fortune 500 companies are using Apple products.
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Over the years, IBM has been a big believer in letting its employees have a choice when it comes to technology. If you want to talk your supervisor into letting you use a Mac at work, you’ll want to see what they announced at the Jamf Nation User Conference (JNUC) about the productivity of Mac users compared to PC users.
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Jamf is kicking off JNUC 2019 today with some exciting announcements for IT departments who manage Apple devices in the enterprise and K–12. Today, they have launched Jamf Protect, an enterprise endpoint protection solution build from the ground up for macOS.
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Out of all the electronic devices I own, the one I’d want to give up last is my Kindle Oasis. In my opinion, it brings the best of technology while ignoring the worst. I even wrote a few months back about the idea around Apple creating an e-ink reader to take on the Kindle. Despite Apple’s attempts with the Apple Books redesign, the Kindle and Audible ecosystem is still the best place to be for book fans. I was recently made aware of a feature of the Kindle that Apple hasn’t matched but should be on their radar for a future Apple Books upgrade: US public library system integration.
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A few weeks ago, I looked at the role that subscriptions are playing with the App Store economy. One of the comments that I got was about in-app purchases in Apple’s School and Business Manager programs. Despite the advancements in features of Apple’s deployment platforms, in-app purchases are not able to be deployed via Apple’s deployment programs for schools and businesses. While a lot of developers have created School Editions of their apps, many others remain unable to be deployed in mass because of this limitation. How could Apple implement in-app purchases in their deployment platforms?
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Over the past few weeks, I’ve watched two long-standing apps release new versions with business decisions that led to an outcry from many users. Pocket Casts went free but introduced Pocket Casts Pro as an optional subscription that included Desktop applications access to the web player. Customers who had previously paid $9 to unlock the web player were frustrated because they were awarded three years of Pocket Casts Pro but would need to subscribe after that to keep access to the web player. Weather Line 2 was also recently released with a new optional subscription to unlock new features. Users who choose not to subscribe will now have ads inside the app. Some customers were frustrated that an app that previously didn’t have ads now required a subscription to avoid them. Are app subscriptions fair to customers?
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I’ve been testing out the Robo Wunderkind Robotics Kit for the past couple of months from the perspective of an educator and a parent. I’ve tested out a dozen or so of these types of products (building blocks + iPad app), and they’ve all had one thing in common: they can be overwhelming for kids. Many of them include hundreds of pieces with pages full of options of things to create. After spending some time with it, I am ready to give you my Robo Wunderkind Robotics Kit review.
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I’ve been obsessed with photo management and photo backup for years now. Before iCloud Photos, I used services like Everpix (RIP), Loom, and others. I’m all in on iCloud Photos, but I also let Google Photos and Amazon Photos upload my photos as well. My iCloud Photo library has grown to the place where I can no longer keep it all offline on my laptop (500GB) and still have room for other things. This situation makes my Time Machine and Backblaze backup useless for my photos since the majority of them are in iCloud. I’d love to see Apple or another company offer a way to backup iCloud Photo library. Since iCloud Photos is a syncing service, it’s not a real backup. Why isn’t iCloud Photo a backup of your photos?
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A few years ago, I heard about Twitch and the idea of people watching other people play video games. I didn’t understand the appeal. Why would someone want to watch someone else play a game when they could play it themselves? I heard someone explain it in a podcast, though. They said it’s no different than sports. I can certainly play basketball, but I also enjoy watching it as well. Video games are no different. As time has gone on, it’s become clear that a new trend is happening around gaming that cannot be ignored: esports in schools.
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A few weeks ago, I was having some issues where I couldn’t get my VPN to work on my laptop. I was running the beta of macOS Catalina, so I decided to fix the problem by just reformatting and setting up my laptop from scratch. Thanks to iCloud and the Mac App Store, doing a new install of macOS is pretty easy time-wise. It did fix the problem, but as I was changing my Safari Start Page back to DuckDuckGo, I had a thought. Why hasn’t Apple built a default “Start Page” for Safari to create a tremendous first-run experience for Apple products?

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If you have become an Apple fan in the past decade or so, you are used to yearly operating system updates for free. If you have been a Mac user longer than that, you remember actually paying for OS updates every 18 months or so. I know Halloween is coming up, so I’ll inform you of something even scarier: we had to wait in a line to buy a new version of OS X on a CD. While we’ve gotten used to free OS updates as consumers, it has been a big help to Apple in the enterprise. This week, I want to explain why frequent and free OS updates are a big help for Apple’s growth in the enterprise.
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