An Apple a Day: Mac user stories on UX, productivity, and the Apple ecosystem

This post contains content for We Got Your Mac podcast, presented by SHI.

With this podcast, our aim was to help business leaders decide whether to adopt the Mac platform. We’ve heard from experts across the IT field about the potential benefits of this decision, but with this episode, we wanted to hear from the people it affects the most: the users.

We gathered a group of SHI employees who have chosen the Mac at work to hear why they prefer the platform, how it makes them more effective in their jobs, and to illustrate why employee choice matters.

Making it personal

Apple’s push into the enterprise has gained momentum partly because so many people love using Apple devices in their personal lives. There has been a lot of commentary around the Apple “halo effect,” and for good reason. If someone enjoys using an iPhone, getting a Mac or an iPad makes sense because they work seamlessly together.

Every Mac user has a story about what ignited their interest in Apple products. For guest Michael Brown, Senior Product Marketing Manager, it was being issued a BlackBerry just before seeing the first iPhone in action.

“I remember that iPhone came out … and I found that I was very obsolete,” Michael says. “That’s when I really started diving into it further and started becoming that Apple fan guy…looking at what that technology was doing because it was doing something that was very turnkey, it was easy to use, and it just had wow-appeal.”

Benefits of the ecosystem

We can’t talk about Mac without acknowledging the benefits of the wider Apple ecosystem. Each of our guests commented on how they use various Apple products to help them with things like focus, multi-tasking, and continuing tasks even when they’re away from their Macs.

For Michael Brown, AirPods Pro are important in an office setting. “They come in very handy in the office because sometimes it’s a very noisy background because we’re in an open environment, so I can just put it in noise-canceling mode, and I’m just in a world of my own. I can just really zone in.”

Bill Norris, Senior Business Development Manager, regularly leverages Apple’s Continuity feature. It allows him to start an email on a Mac, continue composing that same email on an iPad, and finalize and send it from his iPhone. Using Apple’s productivity applications like Keynote and Numbers lets Bill and his team share documents through the Messages app and work on them simultaneously. The freedom to use the most convenient device in a given situation and collaborate seamlessly with his team has become integral to getting work done, especially when he’s on the road.

More than a feeling

There are those who consider themselves die-hard Apple fans, but not every Mac user falls into that category. For Bill Norris, it isn’t an unwavering loyalty to Apple, but positive experiences in his personal and professional lives that keep him in the ecosystem.

“While I’m a tremendous advocate of all Apple products…it’s not necessarily me being a ‘fanboy’ with blinders on,” Bill says. “It’s really the personal experience that I’ve had from a productivity standpoint both personally and professionally that makes me an advocate.”

Give them something to talk about

The Mac is more than a great tool for getting work done. For Josh Dunsky, Senior Director of Strategic Partner Marketing, the Mac has been an icebreaker in partner meetings, opening the door to conversations about how the Mac might fit into their workflows.

“A lot of it was, ‘How do you get support for that? … You’re not in marketing, you’re not a creative, you’re not in the typical use cases,’” Josh says. “It was also at the time where the Apple portfolio was expanding, too. So, going in there with an iPad and taking handwritten notes and all of those things. It became a conversation starter where people wanted to know how I used it.”

The choice is yours

As we learned from Steven Weiner and Henry Patel in episode 9 and episode 10, embracing Mac in the enterprise requires proper management and support. As Josh Dunsky recounts, using a Mac at work before it was fully adopted by the company involved jumping through hoops to get things working properly. Now that Mac is fully integrated and managed like any other device, it just works.

“There were some workarounds and limitations and things that were a little bit more difficult…All that now has gone away. We’ve now adopted it as a platform of choice. It’s integrated into all of the other tools we have. It’s managed the same way so it’s become even a better experience than it was before,” Josh says. “As we adopted M365 and Teams and all those platforms upgraded to become macOS native, the experience is great. I log on and do my job just like everybody else.”

For more episodes of We Got Your Mac, including additional resources to help you decide whether adopting Mac at scale is right for your organization, go to WeGotYourMac.com.