Don't Drop It

Lose your life if you must, but don't lose your laptop.

At the publicly traded company where I used to work, people said this half-joking, half-serious. Losing a laptop meant more than a write-up. Incident reports circulated. The CSIRT was assembled. Encryption status, remote wipe capability, an inventory of every file stored on the device. Dozens of people, days of work. All for one laptop.

A typhoon flooded my PM's apartment once. When we finally reached him, the first thing IT asked was: "Is the laptop safe?" He was furious. His home was underwater, and that was the opening line. I get it. But they were asking because he was alive. If he weren't, nobody would be asking about the laptop. The order only looks wrong because we know how it ended.

The laptop was fine. The power adapter was waterlogged. A few days later, word came down that he needed to file a damage report for the lost accessory. "You're kidding," he said. A typhoon floods your home, and what they want is paperwork. That's corporate life.

Enterprise device management is mostly Windows. Intune, SCCM, the usual fleet. Thousands of machines under centralized policy control. I don't envy IT.

Now I run my own company. Everyone gets a MacBook Air. Every one of them has SimpleMDM on it. Hook it up to ABM — Apple Business Manager — and a new machine just needs Wi-Fi. Profiles push themselves down. Jamf Pro is the king of the MDM world, but I don't need a king. I need a tool that does what I ask and nothing more.

Recently, a departing employee didn't return their laptop. No response to messages. I was glad I'd set this up. Locked it remotely. The next day, the laptop arrived by mail. We'd just crossed paths. I was the only one who'd broken a sweat.

He's doing fine now. Had a good boss, apparently. Never had to write that report.