Apple has never been considered an enterprise technology company, but it owns a significant share of the mobile enterprise market, largely due to the success of the iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air.
Apple billed this summer's release of Mac OS X Lion as having more than 200 new features, but most coverage of Lion in the intervening months has focused on only a handful of them. While iOS-like navigation and app-launching interfaces, autosave/restore capabilities, AirDrop file sharing and an emergency restore partition are by all means important, there are a lot of helpful tweaks and enhancements that can easily be missed.
Apple has made it clear that one of the next industries it hopes to disrupt and reinvent is education. It's an arena the company has a long history of working with: schools have been one of Apple's biggest market since the days of the Apple II.
2011 was a big year for Apple. The company continued to <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218529/Apple_wows_with_record_iPhone_and_iPad_sales_largest_revenues">dominate the tablet market</a>, with no rival coming close the iPad in sales. It also <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9220529/OS_X_Lion_sells_6M_copies_grabs_22_share_of_Mac_market">released Lion</a>, an update to OS X that delivered hundreds of new features; pushed out a <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9220747/Hands_on_iOS_5_delivers_a_wealth_of_changes_">major update to iOS</a> that finally cut the cord for backups and syncing; <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9220766/Apple_launches_iCloud_ahead_of_iOS_5_debut">launched its new cloud service, iCloud</a> (albeit not without some issues); and continued to rack up record sales of Macs.
One of the biggest technology trends this year has been the continuing influx of consumer-oriented into the workplace. From <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9220934/Caution_iOS_5_iCloud_and_the_iPhone_4S_in_the_enterprise">iPads and iPhones</a> to Android phones and tablets, 2011 will go down as the year the consumerization of IT reached a critical mass. It's no longer a question of whether IT departments will support and embrace consumer-first devices, <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9221289/IBM_opens_up_smartphone_tablet_support_for_its_workers">bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs</a> and the expanded sphere of mobile platforms -- now, the issue is more about when and how.
The knock on managing Macs in business environments has long been Apple's ambivalent attitude toward providing significant enterprise support. Apple does, of course, offer tools for deploying, configuring, and managing Macs. But to move Macs beyond a departmental setting, IT will often find it necessary to look to third parties for help.
Apple's iOS 5 and the new iPhone 4S, which went on sale Friday, are packed with new features, many of which should boost the productivity and on-the-road capabilities of professional users. But, as with many consumer-oriented mobile platforms making their way into the workplace, iOS 5 and iCloud service present some serious challenges in business environments.
Well, now we know what Apple meant when it billed yesterday's big announcement as a "Let's talk iPhone" event.
Entire books have already been written on the contributions Steve Jobs has made to Apple, the company he helped found 35 years ago. In many ways, the most significant ones took place after 1997, when he returned to Apple from exile and set about to change not just the company but entire industries.
Since its release on July 20, Apple's newest version of OS X, known as Lion, has been bought, downloaded and installed by more than a million users. As an operating system, it represents a new paradigm: Apple's desktop platform is becoming more iOS-like. To date, most of the focus has been on new features like gestures, Mission Control, the new download-based install process, and user interface tweaks that are the biggest since the OS X public beta was introduced in 2000.
More than a year after its introduction, Apple's iPad continues to dominate a tablet market that has grown crowded with a variety of would-be rivals. Most of these are Android tablets like Samsung's Galaxy Tab and Motorola's Xoom. (The Xoom became the launch vehicle for the tablet-optimized version of Android, better known as Honeycomb.)
Apple and Google now dominate the world's smartphone and mobile device markets and both are now pushing quickly into the cloud. While Apple this week finally acknowledged the cloud as the future of computing -- and will finally allow iPads and iPhones to be set up and backed up without being tethered to a computer running iTunes -- many Google fans accurately note that Apple's iCloud doesn't bring a lot of new features to the table.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs is known for wowing audiences with his presentation style and with new and polished technologies for Apple's desktops, mobile devices and media services.
The Windows 8 demo from the All Things Digital conference left me kind of confused. More accurately, it left me thinking Microsoft is kind of confused. Perhaps most important, it left me thinking that most end users who pick a Windows 8 device are likely to be confused.
Apple did something really unusual this week: It pre-announced what it's going to talk about next week at its big Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). For many companies, talking up new products, technology roadmaps, earnings estimates and overall plans is standard operating procedure. For Apple, it's unheard of. The company always keeps its plans quiet until they're actually announced -- even if most Apple watchers have some idea beforehand. That's what allows Apple CEO Steve Jobs to offer up his signature "one more thing" when he speaks.
