From running macOS development pipelines to managing remote Mac desktops to powering AI on the edge, MacOps enables large organizations to seamlessly integrate the Apple platform into their daily operations. In this session from MacAD.UK 2025, Chris Chapman, CTO of MacStadium, shared how companies are modernizing business-critical operations leveraging Mac at speed and at scale to unlock the power of Apple across the enterprise.

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Read the transcript from Chris Chapman's session at MacAD.UK:

Hello everyone! I'm going to talk about macOS and MacOps in the enterprise, and I'm going to kind of help explain what I mean by that.



So a bit about me. I'm Chris Chapman, many of you know me but I lead the technology organization at MacStadium. I've developed a product called Orka, it's virtualization and orchestration that uses all Apple hardware. Prior to that I've been in many Mac affiliated businesses since as far back as 2004. So for better or worse I'm in the Mac ecosystem.



Here's a little bit about MacStadium. We've been around for 13 plus years, we're an enterprise technology provider. We started out as a hosting provider and have evolved heavily more

into software solutions and scale. We believe that Apple is a first class citizen for enterprise. We want to make it easier for Mac business users to use Mac at scale and we do solutions for Mac on Mac exclusively with Mac. So we're not leveraging alternate compute, we're not leveraging any other things. We're the builders of the Orka software. From a company perspective, we have one of the world's leading Mac-only data centers, and by that I mean all Mac inside racks and racks and racks of just Macs. We specialize in those solutions and we make sure they're

enterprise-grade and we're highly secure.



So let's get to the meat of the talk today. What I want to talk to you about, it's going to be a bit of a an inside out view for some of you who might be more akin to working in labs or desktops or local IT environments. The way I see the world is more from the data center out and the cloud out. And we're starting to recognize some interesting emerging trends with the technologies that are being applied to Apple hardware and Apple software these days. So from our view, we're seeing an expanded use case of Mac.



The reality of enterprises today, broadly from a technology perspective, is that 50% or more of them are struggling with IT projects. This is just a forever fact. It is complicated. Projects are hard. Budgets go big. Projects take long or fail. It's just the way of things. And in a device-heavy world where we all have phones and watches and smart glasses and iPads and laptops, the device count for users is expanding and extending. The reach of the capability of those devices is expanding and extending. And then what that adds up to is an extensive increase in cost per

employee per year. Depending on the lightness or heaviness of your organization and you're counting here the hardware, the software, the IT support, the all-in cost of an employee per year,

you can spend anywhere between $5,000 to $10,000 per employee per year on stuff.



It's an interesting world that Apple has built because they really do cover holistically edge-to-cloud ecosystems. So again watches and iPhones and vision OS is becoming a pretty common data collection and user interface source for all your users. Local devices of course. We're always

using MacBooks and desktops. That's common. But Mac as a choice is becoming more prevalent as the generations that grew up on it are demanding it in their work environment.



And then my sweet spot is cloud. We believe Mac minis, Mac studios, and Mac hardware is a very capable and scalable architecture that you can run in a data center and create a cloud. What's

interesting is people are finding that this is true on-prem. So suddenly a really efficient M4 in the closet makes a lot of sense from an energy perspective and from a compute power perspective. So what does this mean? Well, it means from my world, the world that I came from was we provided some enterprise infrastructure, and it was Mac and was primarily used for development.

But suddenly, we're being dragged into virtual desktops with Citrix, which I'll talk about. Suddenly we're being dragged into edge computing and edge computing to drive AI processing. Apple has

inadvertently or maybe advertently created a completely capable and powerful AI processing platform that speaks to the energy demand the privacy and the security that people are demanding around AI.



So let me take a step back and talk to you about where I got to this conclusion. Orka is where we started. Orka is a software that we've developed. It's a way for MacStadium to basically cloud enable Mac compute. It virtualizes and orchestrates workloads across Apple infrastructure and that's any Apple device that can support the virtualization framework. So typically in a use case we would use it for CI/CD. Anybody that builds or runs an application on Mac has to build it on Apple hardware and compile it with Apple methods. So we've created this software and integrated it to CI/CD plugins so that you can target, build, and test across Mac infrastructure. As that evolved along we built it in our cloud. We started to see demand for it everywhere else. We partnered with our friends at AWS and now we have it available on AWS as well. They have a

wonderful fleet of EC2 Macs. We like to blend that with EKS because it's a Kubernetes-based product. So again, it sort of brings Apple into the standardized development world as a full end-to-end development and ephemeral build platform. It comes in other flavors too though, because as we got into software development and testing we saw a need for local desktop use. I believe our friends at Jamf are going to give a pretty cool talk tomorrow around a lot of different tools. There's Tarte, there's a bunch of other ones. Orka has an extension product that runs for free on your desktop. Igave a talk about it last year but there's a lot of interesting workflows from just having the developer be able to package and use their tooling to push up into the cloud and scale but also for IT and testing where you can actually use local and semi-local workflows to build and test and develop on your Mac.



So that started to take Orka from inside the walls of MacStadium to a hyperscaler like AWS to on- prem. That's one of the flows in this MacOps use case that first started pulling us

outside the walls a little. Like I said, the deployments we see come in different flavors and they come in different flavors for different reasons. If you're going to use a hyperscaler cloud like AWS or in some cases we have customers who want to run on premise but they still want to control it elsewhere, they lean into the hyperscaler of choice to run the control plane and that's because they get elastic scaling, they get global availability, they get more of a pay as you go pricing, but a lot of times they want to put it in our data center for dedicated infrastructure for consistent compliant performance that's secure. We control all of sort of needs and then sometimes they are in industries or regulated groups where it's simply not an option but to be on-prem. We have our own data center, we have our own security fintech. There are other geographies and regions where data sovereignty matters.



So in those cases, you see premise based clouds. One of our customer examples with Orka for example is Glovo. They found an easy way to migrate with CI/CD. They had massive buildtime increase and they were able to scale. But there are reasons for people to go from sort of traditional Mac setups to these virtualized cloud infrastructures.



The next piece of the puzzle is when we started getting into remote access And I love the Apple

experience as much as anyone else And so I think for us it was less about finding a way to replace Mac on my desktop or get around Mac on my desktop. It's quite the opposite It's a way to

expand Mac and macOS usage everywhere. A lot of times companies, especially in development cases, have offshore teams. They have needs in geographies where it's difficult to rapidly shift and retrieve the hardware. They have security and compliance concerns, and they have different groups who have different desktop demands. They have creatives who want something almost as powerful as a Mac studio that can do massive graphics and intense memory capabilities. They have standard developers who are coming in to do mobile application development. They have remote knowledge workers who need access to secure and compliant desktops with a specific set of tooling in a specific set of ways. And then they have the IT folks who also are tired of having desktops cluttered full of Macs that they're going to brick on a daily basis to try to patch and improve and secure the processes of it. So there's a lot of different drivers for the need for a virtual desktop. Again, it's expanding the choice and need for macOS, not supplanting it.



We've partnered with Citrix in this case and we're able to deliver Mac environments anywhere. It provides strong user authentication for the security piece. There's an optimized global network for network connectivity. It gives you a Mac desktop of different type and different choice and different OS. So you have flexibility and capability and it gives you resource access so you can

seamlessly connect to those desktops from a number of devices in a number of places.



Delta was a perfect example of a customer who you all are probably familiar with, the giant airline. Massive amounts of contracting teams, massive amounts of demand for development. I actually know one of the subcontracting groups that ended up coming through Delta and one of their challenges when they first got to them was they were a web-based development shop who worked exclusively on Mac for design and struggled and struggled and struggled when they first got onboarded to get the system of choice to do the job that they needed to do. So they spent months sort of floundering on a platform that wasn't native to them while Delta paid them to do the work for them when they could have just given them the desktop in the first place. So enter a Citrix solution. Enter a way to give your contractors the tools that they can do the job the best and fastest with to provide you the best services.



The last piece of the puzzle that's really started dragging this in is AI. AI is everywhere. AI is driving the world right now and AI is becoming a very interesting opportunity for the Apple

ecosystem. I'm going to talk to you now about a partner of ours WebAI. They're a commercial AI application built exclusively around Mac. So the reason for us getting together is that they're Apple focused. They're not Nvidia based, they're not cloud-based. So one of the things they start with is you know why AI on Mac. Well, we've got local data storage. We've got LLM on the edge. We've got Apple silicon processing. You can do massive amounts of inference with Apple with unprecedented power savings and unprecedented capability. And there's very interesting

ways to integrate localized API so that you can have a truly dedicated private customized data secure system.



So with that solution in place, you're going to gain data sovereignty. All your data stays where you want it, when you want it. You're going to capture the power of Apple Silicon. I'm going to

show you in a minute how that actually scales believe it or not. There's also an ability to do a hybrid architecture so you're not trapped in anyone provider's cloud. You're not trapped in any one ecosystem of AI. It is your AI that you control and we throw in our orchestration to make that possible. So in a hybrid architecture, and this is an example sterilized for this talk, but say a large financial institution wants to keep their data and their information secure on site but they want to have continuous scale and continuous training outside the data set. What we're able to do with this is provide controller nodes on site with many hosts. We can cluster the many hosts so they can serve multiple models at the same time or one giant model across the Mac and actually scale across Macs. It is possible. There's a couple of different groups out in the wild that have shown

you things connected with thunderbolts, but believe it or not you can do this with just regular networking dynamic quantitization and some scaling.



In addition to that, you can link that into cloud architectures. Those cloud architectures basically represent what's on site but at a larger scale, and so as the model needs to grow to serve the user demand or whatever you can scale and grow with the web AI solution, it's very apple centric so it's a very friendly way to take in any kind of model of your choice, sanitize it, connect pipelines of workflows, and build something that Apple's uniquely positioned to deliver which is stuff like multimodal interfaces. We're talking now about a local AI that uses my Apple Edge devices to create a visual interface where I can start identifying people and dogs and things

and products and all the things you could potentially want to do with a model. So more than a chatbot and I think that's where Apple's going to shine in this ecosystem.



So what does all this mean? This is driving to what the point of this talk was for me. At MacStadium, we're starting to see an emerging category. You know DevOps was always our big push. We always talked about Mac DevOps and how that was important and we still believe that to be true. But we took a step back and said you know what? Mac is starting to become more than a nice desktop or a specific application development tool for mobile apps for the Mac ecosystem. There's a larger MacOps picture emerging here. So what does that mean? It means we're going beyond the developer. We've long been set with traditional Mac. MDM has thrived. Many of you are MDM providers here and you're killing it. Device management security policy is

ever evolving. But that provides a way to do traditional Mac on the desktop for the end user for the knowledge worker. Traditional DevOps is what MacStadium started on. Again, that was how to serve the developer, how to serve application development, how to really optimize infrastructure as code and API-driven workflows, but on Mac so that Apple developers could sort of catch up with the rest of the development world. What we're seeing now is larger enterprise workloads. We're seeing that media and entertainment use case. We're seeing that remote access for a server backend. We're also starting to see AI drive a lot of that as well. AI wants to scale. And when you get into that Mac's no longer a build server in the cloud that can go down, it is mission-critical information source that is directly linked to how you do business every day If you're scanning inventory on a conveyor belt and your AI drops out, your business is down. So Mac suddenly takes a more Linux-like, Windows-like role in your business and it becomes the platform of choice.



MacOps is becoming an ecosystem that serves all of these things. But what does that mean? It means we're going to have to all start to pull together and do a little bit different work. Infrastructure now needs intelligence. Again, some of these things not being visionary but more peripheral visionary. Here are things that have long been present in enterprise Linux and enterprise Windows, but it's stuff that's fragmented and not really holistically managed in a Mac

infrastructure. You need predictive scaling, you need anomaly detection, you need self-healing systems that can react to downtime to changes in load to different systems conditions, and you need optimizations and recommendations. This is sort of where a snake eating its tail feedback loop can happen because you can now inject AI into these systems and have them intelligently react to the workloads you're actually giving them.



Observability is another key factor in the Mac ecosystem. MDM has logging and centralized logging. There's some really cool tools that are emerging but I don't know that beyond just what users are doing on desktops. We've really leaned into how these can manage a business at scale. And that's again centralizing this looking and analyzing for trends, making sure they're real time metrics making sure there's proactive alerting so when a threshold hits that the infrastructure

itself can adapt to what's going to happen. Because again, it's not just one person on a desktop at this point. It's the center of the business.



So what are MacOps capabilities at large? What we think they are is putting a chain of tooling together in a standardized way across the ecosystem of your Macs again all the way from the watch to the data center that help you manage the infrastructure, that help you handle AI, that help you secure and control the device itself, to help you watch what's happening on there to be able to put a continuous feedback loop of improvement and development across that ecosystem,

and to provide the workspaces from a virtual perspective or a physical perspective as well as a robust security framework around all of it. It's going to take the collective chain of tooling there and that's everything from group policy to application workload shifting to networking to really pull a sort of single pane of glass. MacOps solution together and again in the center of the world we see you know things connecting around virtual workspaces, around AI, around DevOps, around security, around device management. So I I know MacStadium is lodged in the middle there but we don't see ourselves as the center of that universe per se. We're just saying in the middle of that universe you can connect many things. But device management, there's so many wonderful and amazing MDM providers here that provide best-in-class tooling. There's so many

amazing security companies and it's going to be the collective integration of that tool set that creates a true MacOps platform.



So in conclusion, I just wanted to give you a couple of takeaways that go like this. There are some strategic advantages to Apple as a platform. We talked about how it's one of the few hardware

platforms that goes from edge to cloud. I mean, if you think about Linux, if you think about Windows, if you think about any other computing platform out there, it is a litany of vendors and it's a litany of devices. It's a litany of softwares and they're not cohesive. Apple is the problem, Apple has been consumer in instead of enterprise. We're now reaching sort of an inflection point with the technologies, with AI, with VDI, that's driving that to be different. Apple is a viable choice as an actual enterprise platform to run the whole companies, and there's no reason it shouldn't be. Its power is amazing. Its power consumption is amazing. There's just advantages around that you need to figure out how to create an edge-to-cloud ecosystem of tooling. And again, MacStadium aside, there's folks like AWS hyperscalers and other cloud capabilities now where there's enough choice where you really can create cloud solutions with Mac ground solutions with Mac and end-to-end solutions with Mac.



And, if anything, I'm trying to encourage this group of people who know Mac best of all to start shaking up your use cases for Mac in your companies. Start asking why you can't use a Mac in the server closet. Why can't you use a Mac in the cloud, why can't you use a Mac for this application, is there a real app gap, if there's an app gap can you convert it, can you develop it or is it just people don't know how to do it and they're wary of it and then get started with a complete solution stack? If you really really intensely want to pursue this, let's look at that through line I drew. What is your security solution? What is your MDM solution? What's your observability stack? What's your cloud stack? How do they all interoperate? Interoperability is going to be the key there. But I think if you put this together right it's going to expand the use and the ability and the scale and scope of Apple in the enterprise for

years to come in ways we haven't even seen yet. And again, I think it's one of the more powerful computing platforms we have and it's super underutilized.

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