What's new in managing apple devices?

What's New in Managing Apple Devices?

Apple introduced several updates and enhancements for managing Apple devices at WWDC 2024. Here are the key highlights:

1. Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager:

   • These web-based portals for IT administrators now support automated device enrollment for the new Apple Vision Pro, in addition to Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. This allows IT teams to ship devices directly to users and enroll them into MDM without physical interaction.
   • New features include easier deployment of managed Apple accounts and new activation lock features to recover devices with activation lock inadvertently left on.
   • Enhanced software update controls allow for phased rollouts starting from the first beta release.

2. Software Update Management:

   • A new software update settings configuration replaces legacy MDM commands, profiles, and restrictions. This can be used on supervised devices with iOS and iPadOS 18 and macOS 15 or later.
   • Organizations can now manage and enable Safari extensions directly from MDM, customizing Safari for their users.

3. Apple Vision Pro Management:

   • VisionOS 2.0 brings extensive MDM support, including new configurations, payloads, commands, and restrictions. This makes managing Vision Pro as straightforward as managing an iPhone or iPad.
   • New MDM commands include device lock and various settings sub-commands, along with popular restrictions like managed open-in, account modification, and camera usage.

4. Beta Program Management:

   • Organizations can now remotely enroll devices into different beta programs and defer beta and production releases, implementing a phased testing and rollout approach.
   • Detailed software update management documentation is available from Appleseed for IT.

5. Mac Management:

   • Support for installing service configuration files such as Sudo, PAM, and SSH has been expanded.
   • New features include the ability to manage public or Appleseed for IT beta program participation without requiring users to sign in with an Apple account.

For more detailed information, you can watch the session What’s new in device management starting at the "Apple Services" chapter.

Relevant Sessions

• What’s new in device management

If you have any specific questions or need timestamps for particular topics, feel free to ask!