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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand why Apple hasn't built something like this for the SMB market. Maybe they don't want to play in the true enterprise space, but even if a company has 5 workers, having a central cloud service to handle system configuration, baselines for security, backups, vpn, software push, hardware replacement, etc. would be essential.

On mobile there are a variety of MDM services so you can almost do this for phones, but there isn't much for the SMB market for desktops/laptops. In the Microsoft world there are some tools, but even those are generally too much work for a small business to set up (even a non-tech business with 100 employees isn't likely to do it, at best they'll have ghost or something to image new machines -- a tech business might after 25-50 employees)

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They don't see themselves in that market...yet, and the trends don't look good in that direction either. As we all know, Apple has continued to shy away from actual computing in recent years. Now if you could do something like this for Linux, businesses that don't yet have an MS infrastructure could find this very compelling, especially if the rumors of Linux MS Office come true. I work in IT in a large nationwide law firm and we spend so much time of our days dealing with viruses and general Windows headaches when what people do is mostly either 1) through Citrix, where we manage the Windows instances or 2) on the web. If MS Office for Linux dropped, I think businesses like ours would find this a very compelling option.

"we spend so much time of our days dealing with viruses and general Windows headaches"

Rather than maintaining all this enterprise stuff to fight off the Windows tar-pit of viruses and dreaming of a day of MS Office on Linux, why don't you switch to Macs which require no such special effort to stay virus-free and already have MS Office available?

Am I missing something here?

Because double the price ?

Apple Remote Desktop does almost everything you're describing.

As does OS X Server, but it doesn't "just work" out of the box the same way Macs do in general, or even iCloud for individuals.

For a 5-25 person SMB, there's not a full-time IT guy who could set it up. At best, there's a desktop support/printer/office manager type. At a tech company, you might get lucky (or unlucky) and one of your devs or site-sysadmins spends much of his time setting stuff like this up.

ARD is pretty weak compared to MS SCCM, and super-weak compared to something like AirWatch or Zenprise (MDMs).

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