Using a corporate controlled computer comes with a lot of small annoyances and indignities. I get it, I work somewhere that handles a lot of sensitive, confidential data. That has been true for me my entire career– I’ve never not had access to individual student level records or employee records. But Powerschool is much more serious about device management.

The two things that are most difficult for me are separating out my Apple ID and not having access to (fairly benign) applications. Without my Apple ID, I am looking at my phone much more during the day for iMessages. I also have to use my phone and headphones to play music, since I can’t access my Apple Music library. And without my iCloud Photo Library, it’s much harder to share pictures of my family or from my life in Slack, which is kind of demoralizing. I can’t use SetApp or several of the applications I like to use for work on my machine– no CleanShot X, Yoink, TablePlus (DBeaver is fine, but TablePlus is better). I am not allowed to use the Elgato Stream Deck software, so I lost access to a lot of handy Zoom controls and Slack shortcuts.

It’s not a completely locked down hellscape. I am able to use quite a few tools that are valuable to me like Transmit, Alfred, iTerm2, RStudio, neovim, VS Code, etc. And although they made me swap out my old machine that was perfectly fine, they bought me a 16" MBP with M3 Pro and 36GB of RAM and 500 GB SSD – it is no slouch.

I actually end up Screen Sharing onto my Mac mini at various points in the day, but they’ve blocked the port that allows for high quality screen sharing somewhat recently. So while I used to get fast, retina or near retina level resolution, the experience now is… subpar.

None of these things are the end of the world, but the paper cuts are real.