Apple's ecosystem features make sense for businesses
A walled garden makes for a seamless experience
Much has been said about Apple’s walled garden, but if you have used more than one Apple product together, you know just how good the interactions are between them.
From effortlessly copy-pasting text or images on your iPhone to pasting them immediately on your MacBook, to scanning and signing a document on your iPad that’s immediately reflected in an email on your Mac, these transitions are invisible, and work perfectly in the background.
If you’re a small and medium business owner, this seamless integration, and other features, such as Continuity Camera, where you can use your iPhone as a webcam for your MacBook, make it very attractive to continue using Apple products as they scale their operations.
And then you factor in the powerful performance of Apple’s M4 chip, and how competitively priced the M4 MacBooks are versus the Windows equivalents, and you’ll find that it all starts making sense. For example, a Dell Latitude 5350 would cost roughly S$1,339, while the cheapest HP ProBook costs around S$1,469, which is similar to a MacBook Air M4 (S$1,499). But the HP and Dell laptops do offer more storage.
And if you do get a Windows laptop, you don’t get the seamless integration when using an iPhone. And transferring an image using iPhone mirroring by simply dragging and dropping from the phone to the laptop? Not possible. While Microsoft’s Phone Link can connect your smartphone to a Windows laptop, it’s not as intuitive, and takes a few more steps to do the same task.
Furthermore, Apple Business Manager simplifies company-wide IT device management for firms that only use Apple devices. It makes a lot of sense to me for a business to use Apple’s products. And I can’t help but think it’s something that will start to look more appealing to business owners as well once they realise the benefits.
In our latest reviews, we checked out Asus’ new RTX 50 Series gaming laptop, a retro gaming handheld, and Sony’s latest affordable earbuds.
The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 is not just one of the most powerful gaming laptops you can buy now. It’s arguably the most eye-catching one, with its dot-matrix-like AniMe Vision display on the lid, an RGB light bar around the sides, and of course the RGB backlit keyboard. Enthusiasts will also like the easy tool-free access to the RAM and SSD slots. Everything’s great, except for the hefty S$8,999 price tag.
If you’re looking to get into retro gaming handhelds, the Anbernic RG353VS is a good place to start. This mid-range handheld can run games up to PlayStation Portable level, lasts up to 6 hours on battery, and offers an excellent, tactile user experience. Its 3.5-inch display may be a bit small for some games, but that just means you can probably fit it in your pocket.
The Sony WF-C710N wireless earbuds offer good value for money in the entry-level segment. They pack plenty of features, including wear detection, multipoint connectivity, and both noise cancellation, and transparency mode. Of course, the noise cancellation is merely decent, and won’t be much of a competition for Sony’s premium earbuds.