What software do they need to compete with chromebooks? It has a browser (it could have several browsers, if you want). I personally prefer all their productivity software to Google’s or Microsoft’s, and it’s not a close race, but you can use those on it too. Accessibility, I was shocked to find is kinda awful on Chromebooks when I had to try to configure it, considering their target markets are kids and the elderly, while Apple’s the gold standard at that.
You misunderstand the market. Chromebooks are bought by bureaucrats. They want provisioning, deployment, management. They want a kid to be able to throw a broken Chromebook into a big garbage bin and grab another one off the shelf and be up and running in 5 seconds.
Just think about the overall platform. How does MacOS update? It interrupts the user with demands, requires an administrator's password under some circumstances, and takes 20-30 minutes. Now consider how ChromeOS updates: silently and instantly.
I wonder why no enterprise where I've worked is aware of this fact, including technically sophisticated ones from Dropbox to Goldman Sachs. When I asked my favorite LLM whether Jamf Pro—which I should stress does not come in the box with MacOS—is capable of this level of zero-touch OS updates, it responded affirmatively then spent 95% of the rest of the response telling me about well-known workarounds for when such updates hang.
Because a technically-sophisticated enterprise generally wouldn't pick Jamf unless they were an exclusive Apple house - they'd consider something like VMware's Workspace One (now Omnissa) that works across windows, mac, and linux.
And no need to ask an LLM - we can read the doc and notice there are 6 different deployment methods that work (out of the box) for the built-in MacOS MDM, several of which allow transparent, mandatory updates to user environments without requiring user interaction.
