Apple Reportedly Using Chinese Server Supplier to Migrate iCloud Service | Hacker News Reader

Apple Reportedly Using Chinese Server Supplier to Migrate iCloud Service

macrumors.com

40 pointsdoener18 comments

This is odd, given the recent news that Apple and Google just struck a rather large deal to move iCloud onto Google Cloud[1].

http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/300080062/cloud-makes-for-stra...

Not odd, would be dumb of Apple won't to rely on a single provider.

Are there any motherboards that are not made in China (or Taiwan)? Serious question.

I think Supermicro makes motherboards in the United States, and I believe at least some of Intel's boards are made here as well.

As far as I've seen the motherboards are made in China. The final assembly of the server is in the USA.

Here is a fun fact. Apple and Inspur are both UNIX vendors.

It is not news that Apple has given up on Mac OS X as a UNIX server platform, but seeing one UNIX vendor outsource to another UNIX vendor at this level is still weird.

> It is not news that Apple has given up on Mac OS X as a UNIX server platform.

Indeed. Having wasted many a weekend trying to get OS X Server working with portable homes, MCX preferences or the so called Golden Triangle of Active Directory and Open Directory I was left with the distinct impression that OS X Server is most definitely the most neglected product in the Apple stable.

I guess Steve Jobs' famous mantra, to say 'no' to a hundred things so Apple can say 'yes' to the one is very much apparent in this case. It's admirable in a way - that unlike Microsoft, Apple won't dogfood their server product if there's something which better meets their needs already out there.

A narrow vision. Eggs in one basket. But, Apple has used RHEL and Solaris in the recent past much more than OS X. So they weren't even eating their own dog food.

I think what killed Server is the lack of hardware options. It was a goner even with the amazing Xserve. It was never going to be allowed on commodity hardware, Apple didn't sign on to Open Compute, and so on. So the writing was on the wall, and developers saw that.

Which makes me sad because I have masochistic dreams of writing Objective-C for backends. And WebObjects aside, as I was writing iPhone apps and the ecosystem kept leveling up with GCD and ARC and the like, I always dreamed of having that power on the server-side.

Also I love the language, but I'm of a dying breed with that...

Pretty sure you can run the ObjC runtime on Linux quite easily. You just won't have the Cocoa libraries. Foundation would be useful for sure, though.

>It is not news that Apple has given up on Mac OS X as a UNIX server platform, but seeing one UNIX vendor outsource to another UNIX vendor at this level is still weird.

Had Apple ever used OS X for iCloud?

Just because the hardware is made there does not mean data is not encrypted in transit and at rest.

Why is this a problem?

Some people think some countries shouldn't handle their information at all. They really shouldn't store their data in the cloud if they're concerned about state sponsored spying though.

They say security is only for the paranoid. But wow, I never thought it would come to this level!

I'm curious, why isn't apple producing their own servers? They had XServe back in the good old days...

x86 servers are a commodity. There is no way for a company like Apple to get the margins they want on manufacturing that kind of hardware. Data center buyers don't care about brushed aluminum cases with no visible fasteners.

I'm tagging on to this, not being from the US or china, I can't see how one is worse than the other. The idea that china is a bad guy while the us is a good guy doesn't really make sense to me, they both does what is in the best interest of themselves.

What could possibly go wrong? ;)

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