Apple in enterprise — industry execs on what works, and what they want in ’26
With Apple Silicon its current crown jewel, Apple has continued to rapidly build its presence in enterprise computing throughout 2025, generating significant market share gains as companies accelerate Apple deployments across their fleets.
What’s driven Apple’s progress this year — and what should we expect from the company in the year ahead? To find out, I spoke to execs from a range of companies in the space: Fleet, Hexnode, Iru, Jamf, JumpCloud, MacStadium, SAP, and a newer entrant in the Apple enterprise scene, MacPaw.
For the most part, everyone I spoke with agreed that Apple Silicon and the profound power and performance advantages of the current Mac fleet has been the biggest thing to celebrate. They also suggest that what Apple does in artificial intelligence (AI) may be the biggest inflection point for the coming year.
What Apple says
Speaking in November, Apple’s Jeremy Butcher, who handles business product marketing, told me: “It’s so great to see the momentum [around Macs in the enterprise]. As you know, it’s very intentional.” Butcher also stressed how the company considers what business users need and works to introduce those features as they make sense.
“We’re seeing tremendous momentum around Mac in the enterprise,” said Apple’s Colleen Novielli, who focuses on MacBook product marketing. “We’re seeing this amazing spectrum of adoption across the Mac range.”
With that in mind, it makes sense to speak to people leading the charge in the enterprise, including Apple’s device management partners, major deployment partners, and others.
SAP: The mass deployment story
Martin Lang heads up enterprise mobility at SAP. He has led the company to deploy tens of thousands of Macs, iPhones, and iPads worldwide. For him, Apple in 2025 was all about scale. “At SAP, Macs now account for about 50% of our workforce, more than 54,000 devices. I didn’t quite think this was possible just a few years back,” he said.
That deployment has translated into, “verifiably fewer support cases and longer productive workdays,” he told me. “People trust the devices to serve them well for years, and that’s true for both entry-level and high-performance machines.”
Apple made significant improvements to its mobile device management (MDM) systems in 2025, and these changes extended to visionOS devices. SAP has about 100 Vision Pro units deployed across the company; most are now managed to the same compliance standard as other devices, making them viable for use with corporate data.
“One thing I’d consider ‘bad’ is that Apple still struggles with enterprise-scale logistics,” said Lang. He noted that iPhone 17 has been severely backordered since launch, meaning some SAP staffers have waited months for a new device, and speculated that distribution and supply chain challenges might have contributed to the delays.
Lang also wants to see Apple tout its enterprise success stories. “Enterprise customers did amazing things with Apple in 2025, however many of those stories stay hidden,” he said. “Enterprises want concrete, peer-driven examples, not just platform announcements…. I think Apple could push people more to share stories.”
Looking forward, Lang shared his hope that enterprise users will learn that iPhones have a much wider set of use cases than just collaboration and time management. “In our personal lives, we fully leverage mobile-specific capabilities like push notifications, biometrics, location awareness, [and] offline intelligence. However, in enterprises, mobile devices are still mostly just used for collaboration purposes,” he said.
He also noted how SAP is using Badges in Apple Wallet to provide door entry access across the company. “This is an example of how these tools can be used for so much more in business.”
JAMF: Now we have the hardware, here comes the AI
Michael Covington, vice president of portfolio strategy at Apple device management and security vendor Jamf, called 2025 an “incredible year” for Apple in the enterprise. Jamf continues to give IT teams ever more power to configure, secure, and support their fleets, but it all starts with the hardware.
“This year’s release of the MacBook Air with the M4 processor may have been the quiet highlight for many large organizations that have been waiting for the right price and performance boost before making Apple’s renowned end-user experience part of the standard issue tech,” he said.
Covington has also seen more businesses begin to deploy Macs. “Over the course of the year, we watched as organizations from across a broad set of sectors, stopped treating the Mac as an ‘exception’ and embraced it as the device that is driving growth,” he said.
In part, this is because the MacBook Air now delivers the kind of performance you’d once look to a pro machine to achieve, all at a cost that makes it easy and attractive for mass deployment. “Couple these hardware advancements with Apple’s investment in expanding management and security hooks, and you’ve got a recipe for success in the enterprise.”
AI is the next opportunity for Apple, Covington said. “It’s no secret that Apple waited for generative AI technology to mature before introducing its own Apple Intelligence suite to the market.”
In part, this reflects the company’s deep commitment to user privacy, which makes AI development challenging, but “also presents a huge opportunity to differentiate how AI is presented to end users for work.
“We are excited to see how Apple continues to enable their devices to seamlessly fit into enterprise IT in the year ahead,” Covington said. “As AI becomes a more integrated component of the end user experience, Apple is uniquely positioned to unlock a new wave of productivity, while also ensuring users feel safe and secure — whether engaging with a work application or personal data.”
MacStadium: Power and consistency
MacStadium CTO Chris Chapman saw lots of great moves from Apple across the year. In hardware, the M4 Air increased RAM and added powerful AI processing at a sub-$1,000 price. “This opened the floodgates for the TCO and value discussion around Apple as a preferred device in business,” he said.
Once you have the hardware, how do you manage it? Declarative Device Management was a “missing enterprise capability” that has now been realized. “DDM opens the door for Apple to be considered an enterprise platform that IT teams can use to manage Apple devices as business-owned assets,” Chapman said.
He also welcomed the ’26 series of operating system upgrades. “While we love creative names like Tahoe and Sierra, IT departments are tasked with consistency, repeatability, and stability. Apple finally adopted consistent, standard versioning with OS26, iOS26, etc. Now, a fleet of devices can be tracked by a linear-based version across form factors. This is a step toward IT standardization that has long been missing, giving IT administrators a much-needed capability.”
Chapman, like others, is watching Apple’s unfolding AI strategy. Apple now has “some of the best and most powerful hardware to run local AI models with very low energy consumption,” he said, but lacks its own compelling solutions for enterprise AI.
“Apple’s individual assistant features are lagging compared to other AI platforms like ChatGPT or Gemini,” he said. “It’s also very focused on performing tasks for the individual, but not as capable of learning or knowing your business or corporate data. Many IT departments blocked or disabled Siri because of visibility and management concerns. For the enterprise, this is a miss and somewhat confusing compared to Microsoft’s Copilot. Apple is still formulating its broader AI play, but the vague approach taken this year was lackluster for the enterprise.”
Those challenges may not last, Chapman says. “Apple is restructuring its AI team, and there is talk of a partnership with Google. Moving Apple into a strategic position to be leveraged for AI in business is an intriguing and powerful direction.”
Still, Apple’s visionOS work continues to seek use cases, Chapman said. “How Vision Pro can be an effective enterprise device and used at scale is unclear,” he said. “To be fair, I don’t think anyone has nailed the use case or technology yet, but Apple seemed uncharacteristically farther away from the field in form and function.” He does expect new form factor AI devices to appear and suspects that these, combined with visionOS, will open new opportunities for business uses.
The same may be true, he said, about any new folding devices released next year, which could “open new use cases and targets for application developers.”
Fleet Device Management: Amazing hardware
Mike McNeil, Fleet Device Management CEO, was impressed by Apple’s move to open enterprise opportunities with the introduction of MDM migration tools this year.
“Apple nailed it with openness in 2025, and I expect to see more of the same in 2026,” he said. “The push to make it easier to migrate MDMs was a major signal, even if it wasn’t quite as easy as we thought it would be at first. I see a lot of customers still using Fleet’s original custom migration tool, because it’s a bit more of a paved road. For example, one customer migrating 40,000 Macs to Fleet ‘the new way’ experienced an outage from Apple Business Manager midway through the migration, and that was tough. But I appreciate the energy Apple is investing here, even if some parts are rough around the edges.”
McNeil also told me his own personal upgrade story. “I finally upgraded from my old Intel Mac to a 15-in. M4 MacBook Air last week, and…holy cow, what a performance improvement. The fact that I’ve used a 2019 MacBook Pro through the entirety of my time building this company is a testament to the long-term value of an investment in Apple hardware, but also, the new stuff is amazing.”
Hexnode: We can get much more from Apple
I spoke once again with Hexnode CEO Apu Pavithran. He sees the conversation around Apple in the enterprise changing. Where before it might have been characterized by searching for reasons to deploy Apple’s kit, it is now all about maximizing the benefits of equipment business users already have.
“This is big in and of itself and Apple’s surely happy the fundamentals continue to move in their favor: happier employees, better retention, lower support costs,” he said. “As AI capabilities mature and management tools deepen, Apple’s privacy-first approach becomes a competitive differentiator. I expect the momentum we’ve seen to accelerate as the business case strengthens.”
Pavithran saw a lot to celebrate during the year: Mac sales are accelerating, user satisfaction is high, and Apple can continue to show a “positive feedback loop between workplace performance and subsequent tech investment.”
Apple Silicon delivers the best possible power, performance, and reliability. “I’m consistently impressed with Apple’s hardware — it’s never been more reliable than right now,” said Pavithran. “Failures are so low on the list of IT problems with five-year device lifecycles becoming standard. Again, the improved total cost of ownership, sustainability benefits, and resale value only strengthen the company’s business case.”
Pavithran, too, sees the Apple hardware story forming strong foundations for the company’s upcoming AI story. “From my perspective, Apple’s done a terrific job embracing this AI moment in line with the privacy requirements of big business. The one-two punch of stronger hardware and on-device data processing makes it easier for security-conscious companies to say yes. Unlike cloud-dependent competitors, Apple’s privacy-first approach goes a long way toward alleviating data concerns about AI. They’re threading the needle between market evolution and compliant, careful onboarding.”
As for device management, Pavithran sees Apple’s willingness to continuously refine its approach as proof that it is listening to enterprise IT. “For example, it’s promising to see more granular restrictions on Apple Intelligence being released after we discussed it earlier this year. As usual, this shows the company cares about what enterprise users want and adapts its solutions accordingly.”
Challenges continue, of course – regulatory oversight, particularly in Europe, will likely make IT harder in the region, while spatial computing continues to seek real use cases. “We hope for additional shared device management features: Return to Service, Shared iPad, and Authenticated Guest Mode are available, but currently lack depth. Admins should be given extra room when it comes to isolating sessions, user sandboxing, and pre-staging apps based on the next user’s role,” he said.
Iru – another Mac story
Weldon Dodd, distinguished engineer at Iru (the company formerly known as Kandji) also sees Apple Silicon as a triumph. “[The] Mac has never been in a stronger hardware position where it now simply dominates the price, performance, and battery life balance for most use cases.”
Dodd also noted that while we wait for Apple to introduce the next evolution of its approach to AI, its existing hardware ecosystem is ready for action. “While it doesn’t enter into the equation for enterprise AI model training with specialized server hardware from vendors like Nvidia, Apple’s chips have been shown to be very capable at running AI workloads on the endpoint,” he said.
And while 2026 may be an inflection point where the advances slow a bit, “I expect Apple to maintain its lead on hardware performance through the year.”
Enterprise deployment is part device and part device management. Like most such firms in the Apple space, Iru makes use of the systems Apple creates; this year’s big upgrade was around Platform SSO, which Apple improved at WWDC, Dodd said.
“Platform SSO continues its siren song luring Mac admins towards an integration with cloud identity that still presents a bit of friction for admins to fully implement. PSSO improved in a few important ways this year in macOS 26 Tahoe, where the two big features are authentication with Automated Device Enrolment during Setup Assistant for initial account creation with IdP credentials and being able to use PSSO sign in at the File Vault unlock screen. This launched with support from a single IdP vendor, but another has joined. And it would be great to see more support from other vendors in 2026, as well as further improvements from Apple to make this into a truly seamless marriage between macOS and cloud identity.”
Dodd also sees a second wave of change coming for AI. He believes we all became more aware of the limitations of genAI during the year, which means IT admins will now focus on learning how to use Model Context Protocol with agentic AI to pull together disparate systems. “There’s real potential for a new kind of integration layer in enterprise IT that will allow for real insights to be developed by bringing data together from what have been separate tools,” he said.
JumpCloud: Reality must catch up
Joel Rennich, senior vice president for product management at JumpCloud, welcomes the improvements in DDM and Platform SSO, but warns: “It will take some time for MDM vendors and Identity Providers (IdPs) to actually support this,” he said.
“Apple mostly kept improving on the security and identity threads that they’ve been pulling at for the last few years. There weren’t any major new changes for vendors to have to pivot to, or new flows to support,” he said.
But he warned that few vendors “support the full scope” of the changes that Apple has instituted in recent years. “Since much of the Apple improvements over the last few years are not in any way industry standard, this has become very hit or miss,.”
Rennich warned that the biggest challenge for Apple in the enterprise is Apple itself. “The aspects that make Apple great in the consumer space are many times inherently at odds with what enterprises are looking for, and in most cases Apple refuses to compromise on aspects like user privacy and experience,” he said. While he doesn’t expect Apple to change its stance, he expects business users to continue to request more controls and management tools.
MacPaw: A new wave for enterprise IT
Ukrainian developer MacPaw recently introduced CleanMyMac Business to the Jamf Marketplace. Dan Jaenicke, MacPaw’s director of B2B product strategy, also sees Apple’s enterprise success as powered by Apple Silicon. “The hardware continues to outperform competitors, and Macs are lasting longer than ever. That longevity is invaluable for IT teams, allowing them to focus on productivity and strategic initiatives instead of constantly replacing devices,” he said.
However, the AI story must evolve, he said, pointing to MacPaw data that shows almost 60% of Mac admins already use AI at work.
“The spotlight in 2026 will be on Apple’s progress in enterprise AI. IT leaders are looking for tools that make workflows smarter and more secure. With key developer and executive departures on the horizon, the entire community will be closely watching to see whether Apple can maintain momentum, lead in AI adoption, and continue to balance hardware and software innovations,” he said.
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