Written in 2016, when IBM had just started replacing Windows PCs with Macs at scale and Android fragmentation was making broad mobile support expensive. The argument holds up better than the prediction.
Every few years someone asks whether Apple is about to take the enterprise. In 2016 the question had more force behind it than usual, and it is worth revisiting what the argument actually rested on.
Android dominated the market. IDC put it at roughly 80% of global smartphone shipments for 2015, with iOS at around 16% and Windows Phone at barely 2%. On those numbers, an organisation standardising its mobile fleet should obviously have standardised on Android.
Plenty of people advising on mobile device management at the time recommended the opposite — build on iOS, or on Windows 10 Mobile, and treat Android as the exception. The reason was support cost rather than market share.
OpenSignal’s August 2015 fragmentation report counted 24,093 distinct Android devices in circulation, up 28% on the previous year, across nearly 1,300 manufacturers. Every one of those is a slightly different combination of hardware, OS build and vendor customisation. A support organisation that commits to “we support Android” is committing to something with no clear boundary. A support organisation that commits to “we support iPhone” is committing to a list you can print.
That asymmetry is why device diversity, not device market share, drives the total cost of running a mobile fleet.
Apple had traditionally sold to consumers and let corporate adoption happen by accident. What made 2015 and 2016 different was IBM.
IBM announced a large-scale internal Mac deployment — projected at the time to reach between 150,000 and 200,000 machines — and simultaneously started helping other large organisations do the same in their own infrastructure. That was a company with as much institutional Windows expertise as anyone deciding, in public, that Macs were cheaper to run.
The number that got attention was the support ratio. IBM reported in October 2015 that only 5% of its Mac users contacted the internal help desk, against 40% of its PC users. Whatever you think of the comparison, it was a large real-world fleet rather than a vendor projection, and it undercut the standard objection that Apple hardware would generate more support load, not less.
It is worth noting the counter-case, because it was also common at the time: some organisations permitted Apple devices precisely by declining to support them, pointing users at online forums instead. A low support ticket count is easy to achieve if there is nowhere to raise a ticket.
The objections in 2016 were rarely about capability. They were about capital cost up front, and about the management tooling being thinner than the Windows equivalent — corporate IT had thirty years of Windows management practice and comparatively little for macOS and iOS.
That second objection was already dissolving. iOS 9.3, released around the time this was written, added a substantial set of MDM controls that gave IT departments meaningfully more control over managed devices, and Apple kept adding to that surface year after year.
The honest summary in 2016 was that Apple in the enterprise was Marmite. The developers and support staff we spoke to internally who worked on iOS were firmly in the hater’s camp. Apple was making real inroads, but it still had work to do to convince the people who would have to carry the pager.
Apple did not come to dominate the enterprise, and Android did not disappear. What happened instead is that the question stopped being interesting.
IBM’s deployment did pass 200,000 Macs, and it stayed the reference point for large-scale Mac management. But most organisations landed on a mixed fleet: Windows and macOS on the desk, iOS and Android in the pocket, and management practice mature enough on all four that platform choice became a procurement question rather than an architectural one.
The thing that did not get easier is knowing what you have. A mixed fleet means the answer to “how many devices do we own, and how many are under management?” is assembled from several consoles that each believe they are authoritative.
That is the part CerteroX is built to remove. CerteroX ITAM runs one native inventory agent across six operating system families — Windows, macOS, Linux, IBM AIX, HP-UX and Oracle Solaris — and manages iOS and Android devices directly, including Apple Device Enrolment Program enrolment, with a Microsoft Intune connector where that is already in place. Ten discovery methods resolve into a single schema, so a Mac, a phone and an AIX frame are three records in one system rather than three systems disagreeing.
Ten years on, the useful question is not which platform wins. It is whether your asset register can describe all of them at once.
To see macOS, iOS, Windows and Unix carried on one inventory cycle, book a demo.
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