My cut n' paste pet peeve example of why macOS seems like a "toy" and not for serious business use:

The file save dialog box has this unbelievable limit of 38 viewable characters! I regularly have to deal with 50+ character naming conventions where the first 38 characters are the same among many files. It is a huge hassle of cursor navigation that is so unnecessary as I am looking at all this unused real estate in the dialog box.

I agree that this particular aspect of the the dialog box is bad. But if something as minor as this keeps you off an entire platform, it sounds like making excuses.

I save ~50 - ~100 character filenames all the time. I even cut, copy, and paste bits of them in that little box. It doesn't feel like a big deal to me.

But yeah, it's the little things like this that belie Apple's reputation for attention to detail.

> If we could deploy Apple products in a business environment we would in a heartbeat.

I'm not gonna pretend to know about how IT works in business, but most employees at big tech companies do all their work on Macs, so it's certainly possible in some cases.

Is Active Directory still LDAP compliant? Embraced and extended or compliant?

Open-LDAP should be able to get you most of the way there. Stuff like CIFS allows for mountable shares, and roaming profiles is easily handled by LDAP login and a mounted /home

Oh wait, then you could use actual FOSS systems, Sorry I forgot that this was about Apple.. Ok so they can license AD, giving M$!a bone in the process

I actually used to do this. Samba on Mac used to be great, so you could do a good hybrid setup. And once you had Samba working your linux users could jump in more or less if they could self support.

I think Samba went to GPLv3 and updates for it on mac seemed to stop entirely cold which killed this as the easy integration glue. Does anyone remember details? This great integration point went away and basically you end up tilting at windmills.

You realise that something like 99% of all LDAP authentications in the world go through Active Directory, right?

This is like someone screaming that Linux is a toy because it’s not really UNIX unlike SCO.

I have worked on big companies that do pretty much all of this on Mac. I agree that it might be harder to do than on Windows, because there is so much industry know-how on the MS side. But there is no real technical barrier for this to happen.

Provide a service similar to Active Directory? Absolutely, that's what is needed from Apple, Red Hat, Canonical, etc.

Depend in any way on a Google Account for anything critical? That's something I oppose with all my will.

In a business context a google account requirement would be fine. Microsoft is basically going there to get folks to move AD into the Azure cloud. We're feeling a ton of a pressure towards that, and entitlements for Office etc are being delivered that way (so you end up with a mini AD instance in cloud already).

Virtualizing macOS for enterprise is a good point. I wonder IBM/Apple want to do this.