That’s the burnout talking. Took me a number of months on sabbatical before I realized that the idea of interviews no longer made me want to crawl into a hole.
For the record, I did not return my (4x cheaper) iPad. I didn’t ever buy a Vision Pro. Because of the Apple ID issue. I’m trying to convince Apple that they should care because they lost a sale.
I do not recall any example of Apple overtly listening to customers unless pressed by class action. That's the irony of this feedback post. Apple is just not an org that takes direct customer feedback (like you've noticed from their "you're holding it wrong" debacle).
Also, they've probably done the maths and knowing their "loyal" customer base people would be more than happy to pay for multiple redundant devices just to have them seamlessly work together. They are in business of selling premium devices to people who have low sensitivity to price and cost
Employers could be free to restrict use of such devices via MDM policy if they wanted.
Also, how many of us have purchased keyboards, mice, displays, headphones, etc with our own money that we happily use with employer owned computers because it’s safe to do so?
Some employers are just straight up control freaks.
Sometimes it's misguided thoughts about security and third party keyboards from "unapproved vendors" (which is not entirely invalid to be concerned about, but unlikely to be an attack vector)......
But other times, they really do want you to use exactly what they provide you and nothing else. Things like "looking uniform and professional" or not wanting employees bringing their personal belongings to the workplace or whatever nonsense they come up with.
> Some employers are just straight up control freaks.
Sometimes it makes sense, infuriating as it may be. My partner works for a bank and says that daily someone brings up an annoyance due to central IT's restrictions, but nobody wants to be a vector for exfiltration of customer data.
> Things like "looking uniform and professional"
Yeah OK, anybody like that is a control freak!
In extreme freaky control: Tom Siebel was like that at Siebel Systems: you can wear anything you want to work unless customers might see you, in which case you have to wear suit and tie (men) or equivalent. Doesn't sound so bad -- just salespeople, right? -- except that they would tour prospective customers through the development areas so...everybody had to wear suit and a tie.
> nobody wants to be a vector for exfiltration of customer data
I have a hunch that the companies that are most obsessed with this are also those who routinely outsource to third-world boiler rooms and are clients of very competent & secure companies such as Okta.
The banks are under pretty tight regulation in this regard. I have no illusion that bank management cares about the customers’ concerns but they sure do care about the regulators!
My partner has no exposure to live bank data (not even her own — her team all get bank accounts so they can see what it looks like to be a customer) and she has said to me that she and her colleagues are glad they don’t have to worry about accidentally leaking anything. I guess there must be other teams that have to deal with that.
To my surprise nothing she is exposed to is outsourced overseas.
Consider the setup process for the Apple TV. The TV shows a unique one-time-use QR code-like pattern that you can scan with the camera of an iOS device. Surely something like this would be sufficient for pairing a Vision Pro with a Mac.
Also the security implications of encouraging people to add their personal Apple ID to devices they don’t own are, IMO, worse.
I'm being more cynical and assuming it's probably to do with AirPlay screen-mirroring encryption and how tying everything to the same Apple ID account placates Hollywood's technophobic licensing execs.
I think it’s a lot simpler than that. If they require both devices are logged in to the same account, they don’t need to deal with authorization. You would not believe how much development time this saves.
> I bet Apple’s own employee issued macs are managed
I thought so too. The Apple retail employee that gave me the demo of the Vision Pro confirmed this. He said the manager at his store had a Vision Pro and wanted to use it with his Apple-issued Mac, which was managed via MDM.
Apple’s MDM is a bit different. It runs through a SSO service called Apple Connect and Apple encourages employees to use their personal Apple ID to link to it instead of creating a separate Apple ID.
It essentially adds a special entitlement to someone’s Apple ID, similar to how a dev gets App Store Connect access added to their Apple ID when they enroll into the developer program.
This makes it so that every MDM device is logged into the personal Apple ID.
Oh interesting. Might explain why Apple employees aren’t feeling this same pressure. Do you know if Apple’s MDM is the same for their retail and corporate employees?
Also - I’m not super well versed in MDMs, but they seem to come in two general flavors/deployment strategies: bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and manage a fleet of employer-owned hardware.
In my experience, I’ve only ever seen BYOD policies for employee-owned _smartphones_ (e.g. for access to an intranet mail server). I’ve never worked anywhere that permitted employees to use their own _workstations_.
> Do you know if Apple’s MDM is the same for their retail and corporate employees?
Apple Connect, SSO authentication service, is used by all Apple employees, both corporate and retail.
The actual MDM itself (what is allowed, how much is controlled, what can be accessed, etc. etc.) does vary from corporate to retail and between employee roles and departments and from device to device (BYOD v. Apple owned devices).
To facilitate this they use a bit of a patchwork of mainly in-house developed solutions and Jamf MDM services.
A lot of it is pretty well documented in public, The Apple Wiki page[0] on Apple’s internal apps would be a good entry point to go down the rabbit hole, should you be so inclined.
Just keep in mind that a lot of the information on the inner workings of Apple will be perpetually outdated, due to the nature of that information and its reliance on employees leaking information. You’ll find that most publicly available information is about stuff on the retail side, because corporate employees usually are more risk averse when it comes to jeopardizing their job.
There is work happening currently to make Kafka behave more like a queue: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-932%3A...