Commissioned, Curated and Published by Russ. Researched and written with AI.
What’s New This Week
Apple announced Apple Business on March 24, 2026. It launches April 14. This article covers what it includes, what it replaces, how the pricing compares, and what it means for engineering and IT teams at Apple-heavy organisations.
Changelog
| Date | Summary |
|---|---|
| 25 Mar 2026 | Initial publication. |
Apple has been quietly building enterprise infrastructure for years. Three separate products, three separate portals, three separate billing relationships. Business Manager handled device deployment and app distribution. Business Essentials added device management for small businesses at $2.99 to $9.99 per user per month. Business Connect let companies manage how they appeared in Apple Maps and Siri search results.
On April 14, those three products disappear. They become one thing: Apple Business. And the core features are free.
Three Products, One Platform
Apple Business Manager was the foundation. IT teams used it for zero-touch device deployment – buy a Mac or iPhone through Apple or an authorised reseller, and it arrives pre-enrolled in your organisation’s MDM without a technician ever touching it. It also handled Volume Purchase Program app distribution, letting businesses acquire and push App Store apps to employee devices at scale.
Apple Business Essentials added device management on top: MDM policies, security configurations, app deployment to specific user groups, and 24/7 Apple Support access. It was the small-business-friendly version of Jamf or Mosyle, at a price that made sense for teams that didn’t need the complexity of a dedicated MDM platform.
Apple Business Connect was the odd one out – a marketing tool rather than an IT tool. It let businesses claim and manage their listings across Apple Maps, Wallet, Siri, and Safari, controlling how a brand name, logo, address, and hours appeared to iPhone users searching nearby.
All three are being discontinued on April 14. Existing data and settings migrate automatically to Apple Business.
What Apple Business Actually Includes
The unified platform covers four areas.
Device management. Built-in MDM is now free. Blueprints let admins preconfigure device settings, security policies, and app layouts that apply immediately on first boot, enabling zero-touch deployment. User groups can be created by function or team. A new Admin API provides programmatic access to device, user, audit, and MDM service data for larger organisations running automated workflows.
People management. Managed Apple Accounts provide cryptographic separation of work and personal data on shared devices. Employee accounts can be provisioned automatically through identity providers including Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra ID. Custom roles allow granular admin access – not everyone needs full administrator rights to assign a device or distribute an app.
Business email and communication. This is the new addition. Apple Business includes hosted email, calendar, and directory services tied to custom domains. Companies can bring an existing domain or purchase one through the platform. Calendar delegation and a company directory with contact cards are included. The companion Apple Business app, available later this year, allows employees to install work apps, view the company directory, and request support from a mobile device. That app requires iOS 26, iPadOS 26, or macOS 26.
Customer outreach and brand management. The Business Connect features carry over: brand profiles, customisable place cards in Apple Maps with photos, hours, and actions like “Order” or “Reserve,” and location analytics showing how customers discover and interact with a business. Branded communications extend to the Mail app and iCloud Mail. Tap to Pay on iPhone will display a brand logo during transactions. Later this summer, Apple Maps will support paid ads for businesses in the US and Canada – sponsored placements at the top of search results and in a new Suggested Places experience.
The Pricing Comparison
Google Workspace Starter costs £5.90 per user per month on the annual plan. That buys custom email, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Meet, and the Gemini AI assistant integrated across the suite.
Microsoft 365 Business Basic is available at approximately £4.60 per user per month. That gets you web and mobile Office apps, Teams, SharePoint, and 1TB of OneDrive per user. Note: Microsoft has announced price increases effective July 2026, so that figure will rise.
Apple Business is free. The core platform – device management, business email, brand management, directory services – costs nothing. Optional paid add-ons exist: additional iCloud storage beyond the included 5GB is available from $0.99 per user per month (US pricing; UK pricing to be confirmed), and AppleCare+ for Business starts at $6.99 per month per device or $13.99 per month per user for coverage across up to three devices.
For a 50-person organisation currently paying for Google Workspace Starter, that is roughly £3,540 per year returning to zero – assuming Apple Business email covers what they need.
The Gap: No Collaboration Suite
That assumption is the problem. Apple Business includes email and calendar. It does not include a word processor, a spreadsheet tool, a presentation app, or a shared document editor. There is no Google Docs equivalent. No Sheets. No collaborative editing in real time.
Apple has iWork – Pages, Numbers, Keynote – but it is not positioned as an enterprise collaboration product, and it is not part of Apple Business. iCloud Drive exists, but it is not a SharePoint or Google Drive with the team-management features enterprise IT teams depend on.
This is a real constraint. For a team that runs entirely on email, device management, and the App Store, Apple Business may genuinely replace their Google or Microsoft spend. But most organisations use Google Docs or Microsoft Word for daily work. Removing that collaboration layer is a migration problem, not just a cost calculation.
The realistic near-term scenario is that Apple Business handles MDM and email, while teams keep a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 subscription for collaboration. The net effect is reduced Microsoft or Google licensing scope – fewer users on full Workspace plans if email is handled elsewhere – rather than complete displacement.
Who Should Pay Attention
Apple-heavy organisations where Windows is not the default. Creative agencies, design studios, most startups, and a large proportion of tech companies run predominantly on Macs and iPhones. These organisations already use Business Manager for deployment. Adding free email and brand management on top requires no hardware change.
Small and medium businesses currently paying for Business Essentials. Apple’s announcement confirms that Business Essentials customers will not be charged their monthly subscription fee after April 14. If you are paying for Business Essentials, that line item disappears automatically.
IT teams at growing companies. Setting up MDM for a new hire currently means either a third-party tool or a Business Essentials subscription. Apple Business makes zero-touch deployment available for free from day one, which meaningfully reduces the operational overhead of onboarding new Apple hardware.
Mixed-device enterprises where Windows dominates. Less immediately relevant. If your organisation runs Microsoft Intune and the majority of endpoints are Windows machines, Apple Business is a supplementary tool at best. The lack of Windows or Android MDM support means it cannot replace your existing device management infrastructure.
The Strategic Read
Apple is not trying to win the enterprise overnight. They are doing something more targeted: removing the friction that stops Apple-heavy organisations from going deeper into the Apple stack.
The three original products had the same problem. Each required a separate login, separate management interface, and for Business Essentials, a separate payment. IT admins at small companies found it unnecessarily complicated. The unified platform removes that complexity.
Free MDM also changes the conversation with finance. Previously, “manage our Macs properly” had a line item cost attached to it – Business Essentials subscriptions, or Jamf licensing for larger deployments. Now the baseline is free. That makes the decision to enforce policies, deploy apps consistently, and separate work and personal data on company devices significantly easier to justify internally.
The business email addition is the most aggressive move. Every company that migrates its custom domain email to Apple Business is a company that has one fewer reason to pay Google or Microsoft. It is not a full replacement today – the collaboration suite gap is real – but it establishes Apple as a credible provider of business communication infrastructure rather than a hardware vendor that ships a portal.
The Maps advertising announcement, scheduled for summer in the US and Canada, signals where some of the revenue model sits. The platform is free; the premium discovery placement in Maps is not. That is a sustainable approach: get organisations onto the platform for free, then monetise reach to their customers.
Apple has been an enterprise bystander for most of its history, content to sell hardware and let Microsoft and Google handle the software stack. April 14 is not a complete reversal of that. But it is the clearest signal yet that Apple intends to compete for the software relationship too – and it is starting with the one lever it controls most directly: the price.