I genuinely think that I haven’t used sms outside of recieving the very occasional otp since the nineties.

It’s a protocol that implements modern text messaging features for sms, similar to imessage on ios. Since nobody has used sms since the nineties it’s probably useless for most of us but it’s interesting to see what tech giants fight about.

If you want to register a laptop with the apple business manager you have to use the configurator mobile app, so not even having another apple pc is sufficient, to set up a mobile device you have to use the configurator desktop app.

https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-business-manager/add-devices-from-apple-configurator-axm200a54d59/web