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Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

I’ve never worked for Apple, but I can only imagine what a disaster their internal IT situation must be given that they use their software nearly exclusively internally but spend almost no effort on enterprise functionality or even basic stability, maintenance and documentation of the limited enterprise features that exist.

The big tech company I do work for uses plenty of Apple hardware, but employs the equivalent of a mid-size startup in teams building internal solutions for gaps in the Apple stack.

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Not true. I worked for HPE for about 3 years and Apple was one of our largest customers. This was around 2014-2017ish and AFAIK, most of their internal systems were HPE hardware running Linux.

I suspect that every large company's internal IT is a disaster. I say this having worked for a large IT consulting firm that did lots of M&A. Nothing ever got fully integrated, lots of dangling legacy systems.

In this case, I believe Apple largely uses Linux for their server use cases.

Another anecdote: I work for a BigTech cloud provider and our internal applications can’t stand up to nearly the load that our external customer facing services can.

The solution is obvious: cloud providers should mutually serve each other

There were plenty of jokes internally that we should go “multi-cloud”.

I heard from someone in Apple that Siri, as least at the time, was on Oracle databases on Dell Blade servers.

"they use their software nearly exclusively internally"

This isn't true.

Anyone who has tried to use their server products knows that Apple doesn't use them themselves for running the company. Heck, look at their opensource software and you can tell the teams are using Linux boxes.

This is very interesting. I never thought of the enterprise side of things. Can you tell me a bit more about what these gaps are?

The problems start with the AppleID that you have to share with colleagues ...

You don't need to do that. Buy apps through Apple Business Manager, deploy via MDM. In fact, that's probably a violation of the license agreement, since purchased apps on a single Apple ID are only really supposed to be used by one person (or a family).

That seems to hold only for new versions of their hardware/software.

Everything in the enterprise env is likely MS based. Active directory, Office, fileshares, etc. I don't even try to integrate Mac's with that stuff, they are on an island.

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