It's a great system. The only real pain I've run into with it, on macOS anyway, is that you can't isolate iCloud accounts and still receive texts on your Mac. So unless you have a separate phone for each client, that's not so great. Also, the lack of profiles on iDevices means any client-specific apps (2fa stuff, for instance, or if you like to have Slack on your iDevice, or dev/testing apps, or whatever) ends up in a shared space on there.

I created a new iCloud account with my work email.

Right, the trouble's getting text messages and such through to your laptop (text message 2fa is so nice with a synced phone—auto fill!), if you have multiple clients. One work phone + personal phone (or tablets, or whatever) is fine. It's when you have three clients, and maybe they rotate out sometimes, that it gets to be a little annoying.

... unless you can add multiple iCloud accounts to one phone. I guess I've never tried, because I just assumed you couldn't. Though you'd still have the problem of things like dev builds and all that existing in the same space, and email accounts (on the phone) syncing to the same application without much separation, and all that.

Why are you using SMS 2FA anyway?

I once worked with a guy in the early 2000s that did 1 laptop per major client project (this was local workflow type app stuff, so windows desktop clients with maybe some kind of data backend) when he was complete he literally took the laptop and put a label on it and put it on a shelf. He'd been burned once to many times on backwards compatibility and library quirks with windows.

Would almost be better with in addition a vm per customer or at least some kind of encrypted partition per user/customer. Not sure how easy it is under Linux.

> Not sure how easy it is under Linux.

Not sure how easy it is on other OSes. On Linux, it's easy.

Just bite the bulllet and move to Qubes

Another advantage of doing this on separate VMs on Qubes is it makes it easy to comply with end-of-contract requirements to destroy all data. Just delete the VMs, and if needed, old backups.

Didn't know Qubes had such a feature (encrypted home partition/container). Will have a look, thanks.

On the face of it, it looks fairly simple on Linux with the encrypted homes feature.

Don't have the need for that, so I've never tested it in practice, though.