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clopez

And the question is... Do this "Apple certified server-side network appliances" run on Mac or Linux?

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Obviously Linux since no one uses mac server side, Even Apple doesn't use mac for their online services.

Almost no one.

For example IMGX uses Macs in its data center for image processing.

https://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros

I remember reading somewhere the performance they got with CoreImage was worth the extra hardware cost.

You have to imagine that the design work done for that was based on an assumption that Apple would stick with the trashcan form factor long term, and that the first gen unit would at least get regular bumps to newer CPU and GPU options.

Must have been a heartbreaker sitting on all that infrastructure in July 2019 when the cheese grater was announced and the newest trashcans were still selling for full price with a six-year-old processor.

(Here's a comment from 2015 which expresses these concerns in the future tense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9500301)

Apple gathered a few people from the press to tell them the trashcan wasn't working out in April 2017, and that a redesign was coming. Everyone who cared about the Mac Pro knew then.

the new designs fit in a standard rack so I don't think it's that big of a deal.

Sure, but still a huge sunk cost to have designed and fabbed a bunch of the previous ones.

And? Technology changes over time - not just with Mac's.

Regular server racks have not, though. 1U has been 1U for a very long time... Didn't matter if it was an IBM server, Dell, HP, or custom built. This is why we have standards.

These poor saps bet BIG on a non-standard, and seem to have discovered why we like standards after all.

What are they using to run WebObjects then? AFAIK, iTunes and the App Store still run on WO.

The Java implementation of WebObjects runs on Linux.

https://wiki.wocommunity.org/display/documentation/Deploying...

RHEL

I think the better question is whether they run Linux or some BSD.

Exactly, since Netflix is using highly optimized FreeBSD servers for video streaming[1]:

> In the end they are now effectively at 200Gb/s encrypted video streaming from FreeBSD per server.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Netflix-...

200Gbps per _socket_.

I used "nmap -A" on Apple servers that my iPhone downloaded the last OS update from. They were all Linux servers.

They was used Akamai infrastructure in past.

They bought a bunch of Akamai early on

Probably Linux, but don’t forget Airports ran NetBSD so that’s something else they have internal experience with.

Last I heard most of Apple still runs on Solaris.

I heard Solaris for email, calendaring, etc.

RHEL for WebObjects and other servers.

Why is this an obvious question about an edge cache?

Because some of us have hope that Apple might be using high-performance commodity hardware with OS X and maybe they’ll let us do that one day too, so we don’t have spend $6000 for a Mac tower.

Alas, it is but a dream.

That’s irrelevant though. I run OS X on kvm, people run hackintoshes. There’s no technical limitation here, never has been, it’s a business decision.

Apple obviously isn’t beholden to the licensing terms that they release OS X to their consumers under.

If they want to run OS X on commodity hardware they can, and moreover it doesn’t change their positioning to the outside at all.

If Apple uses Apple hardware to host this they pay the manufacturing cost, not the retail price you pay.

It probably wouldn’t look good if they hosted this on third party machines running Mac OS.

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