Assign, reassign, or unassign devices in Apple Business Manager
Your account contains a record of all the orders you have placed directly with Apple after March 1, 2011. Because accounts with participating Apple Authorized Resellers or authorized cellular carriers may not keep records going back to March 1, 2011, consult them for your account’s order timeline.
Before you can assign devices, you need to have entered your appropriate Apple Customer Number and/or communicated your Organization ID to a participating Apple Authorized Reseller or an authorized cellular carrier and added their Reseller Number to your account. See Manage device suppliers.
Note: When entering your Apple Customer Number, omit any leading zeros.
You need to assign a device to a device management service so that Setup Assistant displays the pane to enroll the device in that service.
Make sure sensitive data is secure
During the device configuration process, you can increase the security of sensitive data by ensuring that you have appropriate security measures in place. For example:
Have your users authenticate as part of the initial setup flow in the Apple device’s Setup Assistant during activation.
Provide a preliminary configuration with limited access and require additional device configuration to access sensitive data.
Choose how you want to assign devices
After an order ships, you can search for the order number and use it to assign devices to an authorized device management service. For example, when you place an iPhone order for 5000 units, you can use the order number to assign all, or a specific number of, devices to an existing authorized device management service. There are several ways to assign devices:
Device Management: You can reassign devices from one device management service to another. For example, you may want to spread the load of 10,000 devices from one single service to three or four.
Source: You can assign devices from different sources. For example, you may purchase all iPhone and iPad devices from one source and all Mac computers from another. The sources are:
Apple (Apple Customer Number)
Apple Authorized Reseller or an authorized cellular carrier
AppleCare (for replaced devices)
Apple Configurator (for devices added manually)
Order number: Assigning devices by order number makes sense if you use a single device management service for an entire device deployment (or a single order), and if devices are still in their original packaging and are going directly to the users.
Device type: You can assign devices by type and model to a specific device management service. This method makes sense if the devices you need to assign are all managed in an identical manner. You can search for device types using the search field at the top of the window.
Storage size: You can assign devices based on the amount of storage they have at the time of purchase or manual enrollment. For example, you may want to assign all MacBook Pro computers with 1 terabyte of storage to a device management service that your graphics department uses.
Serial number: You can paste up to 1024 serial numbers from a text file, with each serial number separated by a comma.
Assign, reassign, or unassign devices
In Apple Business Manager
, sign in with a user who has the role of Administrator or Device Enrollment Manager.Select Devices
in the sidebar, search for a device in the search field, then select the device from the list. See How to search.After you search for the devices, select the total number of devices at the top of the list, then select the More button
.Do one of the following:
Select “Assign to service,” then select the device management service you want to assign or reassign the device to.
Select Unassign to unassign the device from a device management service.
Note: If you select a device that is unassigned, you won’t see the unassigned option.
Select Continue.
Carefully read the dialog, then select Continue.
A new activity generates a list of the assigned, reassigned, and unassigned devices for the selected device management service. You can wait for the activity to complete, view the activity, or select Close to close the window.
Set the default device assignment
You can set the default assignment for each device type to the device management service of your choice. Apple Business Manager applies this setting when you add the devices to the organization.
In Apple Business Manager
, sign in with a user who has the role of Administrator or Device Enrollment Manager.Select your name at the bottom of the sidebar, select Preferences
, then do one of the following:Select Device Management Service Assignment
below Your Device Management Services, then select Edit next to Default Device Management Service Assignment.Select an existing service under Device Management Services, then select Change under Default Device Assignment.
If you don’t have any other configured device management services, change all automatic device assignments to the selected service, then select Save.