Should You Use Apple Products In Your Business?

welcome back to another episode of cappuccino chat this time we're changing things up a little bit with look and feel plus we're talking apple products and should you use them in your business all right welcome back to another episode and this time we're talking about apple products a lot of times when i'm meeting with clients and prospects i often get asked you know hey can i use my apple computer can i use my ipad you know to do mobile things can i use my iphone to do different things and the answer is yes but it's a little more complicated than that so we've got a couple of questions we need to answer first is one should you and that's an easy answer the answer is yes why well for the most part apple products are a lot more reliable than say a windows pc or a windows device is and why is that well apple controls it all right so the hard you can't go out and buy an iphone from samsung or whomever and then put the apple os on it right it's custom designed to work for this hardware and this hardware only that they control same thing with the ipads and with their macbook pros and minis and other computers i'm actually recording this right now my macbook pro so we use the macs here in-house a lot of our help desk staff use them so we we do a mix of both mac and pc so one of the big things that come up is people have a fallacy of you know yeah hey i need to use apple because they're more secure or they're i don't need securities what how they normally word it to me and the fact is yes they are more secure but they're nothing is perfectly secure even this last week uh multiple times apple came out and had zero day vulnerabilities found in the wild that they had to patch without getting too technical a zero day is basically a new attack that no one's ever seen before so it's on the zero day and they're noticing these so people do find ways to get around even the security on an apple um apples can get viruses malware ransomware just like a windows computer can it's just not as frequent why is that well there's not as many apples out there as there are windows devices so again they go after the bigger target to make things easier but a lot more things are going after everybody especially with the move to the cloud so that's kind of a negative right so it doesn't matter what kind of device you're using to to connect to the cloud it could be your phone your ipad your computer once it's in the cloud it really doesn't matter and it makes it so that you're actually easier to be hacked not in my mind at least because again from anywhere they can get to your cloud stuff so a lot of it depends on your users right so um again they're more reliable they they last longer getting five years out of an apple product is not unheard of typically people with their phones and ipads though they go through those a little bit faster a lot of people like the latest greatest devices other people you know you can wait for five years on a iphone if it's working just fine for you same thing with an ipad typically it comes down to the batteries on the mobile devices that they stop holding a long enough charge for you and that kind of stuff so should you consider using apple products absolutely yes again for those very reasons now the other negative to it is i hear a lot of times is well apple products cost more and that may be true up front but in the long term apple products probably are cheaper and definitely not more expensive than a windows pc you're just going to pay for it up front you're just not going to have as many issues and problems with you know different patches and updates and programming compatibilities that you do on a windows on an apple so that frustration level maybe that support level that downtime you're not going to have that with an apple where you'll have that with a windows pc so those are your trade-offs right now the question of can you go and use apple products again that all depends there's a lot of variables there but the more and more we move to the cloud the easier it is your office products you know email outlook word excel all that works great on no matter what device you use you can get word in excel for your iphone your ipad your mac doesn't matter boom those are easy anything you log into via a web browser it's going to work on the mac where we start to run into problems is any programs that are specifically designed to only run on windows so there's a lot of core packages that only run in a windows environment i.e quickbooks so quickbooks doesn't have a locally installed version right that will run on a mac they have the cloud version and then again that'll run anything your core applications maybe your accounting package maybe your point of sale system any special other core systems that you might have they may or may not offer in a cloud version now if they do you could certainly look at making that change a lot of people think moving to the cloud is going to save them money again it it's not going to save you money it may actually even cost you more money it's just now all the burden is on the other people to keep things up and running and going downside is is when there are issues what's your recourse your people just can't work so you have no no control you kind of give up the keys a little bit when you're doing going to the cloud so it all depends on with the apple sharing files um printing scanning there's not a problem between you can have a mix of pcs and apple products on your network and it's not an issue it's just different right people have to get used to the differences between the operating systems again we use them here so our technicians are very familiar with both the windows environment and the mac apple environment they're just different you just got to know the differences but word excel that all pretty much works the same outlook it may just look a little bit different but it's all all the same so your users aren't going to have a lot of that so if your users are just you know the standard office suite word excel outlook some email web browsing um maybe one or two cloud apps moving to apple products is is a good choice um it's a lot easier to maintain they are more secure they are not perfectly secure we still have to take precautions we still have to get security on the device we need to encrypt them we need to protect them from ransomwares malware viruses those kinds of things we still need perimeter security firewalls all that good stuff just like we do in the windows environment it's just again the your odds of something specifically being targeted to apple go down doesn't mean it doesn't happen if you google you know apple malware apple ransomware apple zero day threat you will see in the headlines it happens to apple too it's just not as much again because that target isn't as big and rich so getting back to it should you use apple products in your business again absolutely yes if you can and you may not be able to get everybody to go over to apple products if you'd like to talk about a little more and see what we might be able to do to help you transition to apple in your business uh either part of the way or all the way please reach out and give us a call at the office 760-770-5200 thank you you