Market Focus, macOS hits all the marks

Who would've thought back in the 80s that the friendly little Mac would evolve to the point where you control it only with your voice and it could set the scene for your entire home or business without even a screen provided for feedback. macOS has so much to offer that we frequently forget that iOS and its variants are at their heart essentially derived from the same thing and in the case of HomePod without even a screen provided for feedback. 

But there it is, Apple made the best decision a company could possibly make when they purchased NEXT and got Steve Jobs in the bargain. The resulting path of software and operating system development could not have happened with any other base OS. 

Today a HomePod with a voice only interface can be the hub of an entire home, securely connecting and controlling everything from light bulbs to blinds and cameras and door locks and a myriad other innovative products not even imagined or manufactured by Apple directly, but easily controlled by Apple's home hub.

Add to that the idea that this simple voice controlled interface can also be used to control smart devices in a business and you begin to see the future of consumer and business interfaces. We have all been training Siri quietly in the background for years so Apple could get to this point. Our collective effort has resulted in a Siri that cannot only understand what you're saying but knows who you are and which person in the household is making a request. This voice and identity recognition empowers the user in a way that wouldn't have been possible even one year ago in the quality or style provided by Apple.

Knowing the history of macOS is not just an academic exercise, but instead is a fundamental pursuit for anyone who wants to understand how all of the remaining underlying technologies work. Knowing where macOS is today will inform your knowledge of the underpinnings of what is to come. It gives you a sandbox to play in where you have far greater visibility into how the innards function so you can take them apart and learn from them. Todays macOS is more secure and feature rich than any macOS that has come before. The power of macOS benefits users at home just as much as it benefits large enterprise IT departments striving to provide the best possible experience for users. Take macOS and combine it with a gold standard MDM solution like JAMF Pro and you get a desktop or mobile productivity solution that makes both end users and IT Departments happy. Efficiencies like centralized application purchasing and deployment through Apple Business Manager, theft deterrence through Activation Lock, built in protection against malware and viruses and user protections that notify a user if a program is watching keyboard entries or trying to access the camera or microphone before anything bad can happen. There is so much security and functionality built into macOS it can hardly be covered in an article or even a series of articles, but that it what I am going to try to do in a series of articles over the coming weeks.

Tomorrow my next course on LinkedIn Learning and Lynda.com will be released. The IT Admin Guide to macOS is back, and in it we have some amazing animations and explanations of fundamental technologies that any IT administrator tasked with the care of a fleet or even just a few macOS Systems should know. I'll have a link posted to my profile tomorrow, so come back tomorrow for more!