McNeil confirmed that both Apple and Linux systems are seeing rapid increases in deployment. “The new MacBook Neo is now cheaper than comparable PCs, so Apple adoption is increasing, but so are other OS options like desktop Linux,” he said. (Desktop Linux reached 3.16% market share in March, says StatCounter, while OS X hit 9.52% and Windows fell to 60.8%.)
That’s not to say migration to any platform is always easy. “I spoke to an IT director yesterday from a casino company whose team had bought a couple of Neos and tried enrolling them in Microsoft Intune, but gave up,” McNeil told me. This was because they hit an unrelated bug with their traditional MDM, didn’t have great diagnostics to work with, and the IT director then “assumed” that it must be because the Neo wouldn’t work for enterprise use. As it turns out, the issue was with the MDM, McNeil said.
“At Fleet, we’ve enrolled MacBook Neos ourselves with no problems, and seen customers do the same,” he said. “Enterprises are usually mixed OS environments, and [MDM] solutions limited to a single ecosystem, like Jamf that’s Apple only, are pretty restrictive.
