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Comment by KptMarchewa | Hacker News Reader

I just don't understand why Apple won't offer their own cloud offerings or just straightforward partner with some public clouds and offer servers more suitable for developers than forcing people to use desktops as servers.

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They tried, but it's just not their DNA. Apple isn't a B2B enterprise company, they're a B2C consumer company that, as a side effect of their consumer success, ended up with a decent number of devices in enterprises. But they know they can't, and don't want to try, to win against the big entrenched enterprise players.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-apple-had-to-kill-the-xser...

Yeah, they certainly don't have the right DNA on the hardware side. On the software side, they've been working a lot more closely with JAMF recently, and there's quite a bit of enterprise support in the MDM space there.

Can confirm with this, when we approached Apple on MDM they all but opened an account for us with JAMF.

They also bought Fleetsmith recently

Apple Remote Desktop is a pretty neglected app but it’s fantastically good. It’s got so many features that make remote administration so very good.

Am I wrong to think there are workloads that can only be run on Mac? Seems like a competitive advantage.

The only workloads that can only be run on a mac are those which are Apple specific, such as building/testing iOS apps.

Anything that requires Xcode to build. Depending on what's being built, if you're developing a cross-platform or Mac app, you might need a Mac somewhere in your pipeline.

Unfortunately, Apple makes it somewhat uneconomical to use Macs in small bursts, as their license requires that Macs are leased for at least 24 hours.

Tldr, they live on expensive hardware that is well marketed and has polished software attractive to consumers.

Neither hardware costs nor marketing is an issue for Apple in the B2B space. Plenty of successful B2B hardware costs more and has tons of marketing fluff.

The reason Apple doesn't do well B2B is nothing about their technology or marketing, it is likely all about their business operations. Apple is notorious for driving their own product-development lifecycle with heavy priority on their own design language. This is completely the opposite of how B2B sales work, where it is not uncommon for some development cycles to be dictated directly by a few (or even one) customer. I can't see Apple playing well with these expectations.

> This is completely the opposite of how B2B sales work, where it is not uncommon for some development cycles to be dictated directly by a few (or even one) customer.

Development and sales (and support). Look at how many SKUs competing laptop manufacturers have because enterprises will specify some combination of ports and memory and CPU, and if the manufacturer doesn't have that particular combination, there will be no sale.

(Having said that: it's not obvious to me whether this is still as much of an issue as it used to be.)

Interestingly, AWS and Google weren't really B2B plays initially either. But AWS in particular recognized that if AWS was to be as successful as they had ambitions for, the were going to have to hire an enterprise sales force and do other things related to supporting enterprises.

Apple toyed with becoming more enterprisey at various times but their ultimate success came mostly from BYOD and enterprises proving Mac options because that's what many of their employees wanted. They do have business sales but it's still more of a pull than a push thing.

Apple is still a very small and (relatively) focused company compared to the others.

That is also true. Buy I think they also recognized that they didn't really need to cater to enterprises to any significant degree in order to sell to them directly or indirectly. And in a way that probably wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago when probably most employees took the IT-managed PC they were given and lived with it.

Exactly. Apple benefited tremendously, especially after the Intel transition, from executives and younger employees showing up to the workplace with a shiny new MacBook Pro and just expecting it to work on the network. It started with those two groups and once IT found a way to support turn systems — or at least get them on the network/give them access to the file share — Apple didn’t need to do a lot of the glad handing for enterprise sales. If the CEO wants to use his Mac at work, IT will capitulate. And that in turn dovetailed with the broader BYOD movement with computers and phones.

Now, Xserve didn’t work for a lot of reasons, but Apple exited the server market, and even stopped making the Server variant of macOS (even though it was just a handful of utilities at the end), largely because I think it realized two things:

1. It could never truly compete with Linux (and to a lesser degree, IIS) without making significant tradeoffs that are anathema to Apple (lowering prices significantly, giving up usage control, and decoupling vertically integrated hardware/software).

2. The cost of truly making a B2B play would require resource investments and commitments into an area Apple doesn’t need to care about and that would come at the expense of areas that are both more profitable and less of a PITA.

Apple is the richest company in the world and amongst the most profitable tech companies, why would they bother with enterprise when they can allow partners to deal with the integration side and focus on doing their stuff their way.

(There is one notable instance where Apple embraced enterprise, and that was when Apple added Exchange support in iPhone OS and admittedly, this was a huge deal and was ultimately a fatal blow to Blackberry. But it’s the exception that almost proves the rule. Apple added support for Exchange but left it up to others to figure out the broader MDM situations.)

Having said all that, I have always been surprised Apple hasn’t offered some sort of build/test service themselves and integrated it into TestFlight. It could be a driver for the all-important services revenue (in my imagination, the annual developer fee would cover a certain number of build minutes a month and then additional minutes would cost money). I have to think that such a solution is either in the works or that Apple looked at the support challenges and just decided to let other people do it at scale for them.

The thing is that much of the cloud is very much a commodity and Apple has successfully made its products and services anything but a commodity.

>(There is one notable instance where Apple embraced enterprise, and that was when Apple added Exchange support in iPhone OS and admittedly, this was a huge deal and was ultimately a fatal blow to Blackberry. But it’s the exception that almost proves the rule. Apple added support for Exchange but left it up to others to figure out the broader MDM situations.)

Yep. There have been a couple of specific things. Exchange and now MDM profiles. Probably a few others. But minor tweaks to remove major enterprise blockers. Small investments to remove complete showstoppers is just common sense.

>Apple hasn’t offered some sort of build/test service themselves and integrated it into TestFlight

Seems pretty logical. Who knows? It's certainly the trend with container platforms generally.

>Interestingly, AWS and Google weren't really B2B plays initially either

AWS was nothing if not a "B2B play" from the beginning. Having developed their own expertise with data centers and distributed computing, Amazon proceeded to sell that to other businesses.

AWS is a company that Amazon bought, which was already providing the S3 service. Unlike what most people think, Amazon did not take the stuff they were doing internally and spin that out as a separate service.

In fact, as far as AWS is concerned, Amazon is just another big customer — and not even the biggest.

That is untrue... did you just make all of this up?

What I was saying (poorly) is that they were not a sale to enterprise IT business.

Enterprise != B2B. The only customers for AWS are businesses and always have been, end-users don't rent VMs.

I am an end user. And I rent VMs on AWS.

I may not be the typical end user, but I’m also not a business.

I think their cloud play _will_ be B2C driven.

I predict they will build customer-facing 'cloud-powered features' where 'third party app code' can run on the apple cloud infrastructure 'on behalf' of a particular apple customer.

They will present a utility computing model to customers -- where each customer sees 'cloud-computing usage charges' displayed by app.

Ultimately, the cloud-compute/cloud-storage charges will tie back to the customer associated usage costs for storage or some other abstract usage based model of for cloud resource costs.

"Apple Cloud: build features for apple customers using usage-metered cloud resources -- with the customer paying for the usage charges they incur."

I could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud Computing platform within the next 2 years.

- They would be vertically integrated with Apple Silicon

  - Apple themselves are increasingly depending on cloud services

  - Async/Await in Swift will likely land next year, making Server-Side Swift much more appealing

  - Apple is greatly increasing cloud / Kubernetes hires

  - Could share a single Apple Silicon ARM architecture from client(ios) to dev(mac) to cloud

I’m dubious. The only way I could see this happening is if it was some companion platform for iCloud/iOS apps. I just don’t understand what anyone has to gain from Apple making an “open” cloud platform.

> I could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud Computing platform within the next 2 years.

Apple, as a company, does not "do" long-term support; they're the anti-Microsoft when it comes to backwards compatibility. As soon as you start being an infrastructure service provider that means you HAVE to offer an LTSB branch of your OS, and Apple does not want to do that (and macOS has stagnated a lot since Apple devoted most of their OS engineering efforts to iOS). Apple doesn't offer a "real" server OS SKU at all (the "macOS Server" app package is for SOHO management, not for use as a high-availability application server OS).

...which means that Apple would have to provide an offering using Linux or BSD - such as a "naked" Darwin distro - but again, Apple does not want to have to support that, and I'm sure devs don't want to see the IaaS OS scene fragment further, and Darwin is far, far removed from being yet another Linux distro.

Amazon offers ARM cloud systems - why should Apple risk their profitability by competing in an arena that doesn't pose any risk to their bottom-line? And what do they have to gain?

This is the fly in the oinment.

I would love to see Apple have an LTS branch of macOS, but I just don't see this happening. Too much would need to change in the company for that to happen.

From a macOS developer's standpoint, it's really a huge PITA there is no LTS. But, we adjust. Because we have a low-level product (compiler), we sometimes get into a situation where we need to sunset a product before we would normally do that, just because the older product doesn't run on the supported macOS versions. Doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

Makes sense if they start auditing / security reviewing of what gets pushed to their platform. Would be yet another Apple's security & privacy play.

Obviously would work as FaaS or PaaS.

Apple however doesnt run on their own OS for their webservices though. Nothing in the way here, but just a note.

One of the rules on these Macs in AWS is that you have to rent them for a minimum of 24 hours at a time and you have to rent the whole machine.

I think they don't want to cannibalize Mac sales. If you want to make an iPhone app, you have to buy a Mac to do it. They don't want to make it easy for you to rent one just to compile the app.

That's the only reason I need them, to compile a binary and submit it. But can apple dictate licensing terms like this? If aws buys a mac, can't they use it however they like? Or are there terms limiting this in the purchase agreement.

Can Microsoft dictate the terms under which you can use their software?

Some companies only charge for commercial use of their products. So the “it’s free” argument doesn’t really hold water.

Yes. Software companies dictate whether their software has to be run on a dedicate host, the allowed number of cores, etc. all of the time.

Companies have tried to “rent DVDs” digitally by playing the DVD on their hardware and streaming it. It got shot down by the courts.

I agree that what you want to do should be possible and cheap, but generally if you build something for a platform you'd also want to test it on that platform, no? What you say implies that you compile the binary and don't test it before submitting?

Automated testing should be done at CI stage, and you can submit a binary to Apple without having to send it live on the AppStore (TestFlight is for that), or you could send it to other beta distribution channels

This works until you have a bug you can't replicate on a developer machine that your CI misses. This is a common thread on open source projects:

> issue opened October 2013

> __ is broken on MacOS

> __ should fix it but I don't have a Mac to test.

An alternative version of the last step:

> I do have a Mac but ___ can’t be replicated on my specific dev-tainted environment, plus I’m using macOS Y and you use macOS Z which is a pain for me to set up a VM for, if at all possible.

The raise of a few free macOS CI mitigated that a bit but the offer is honestly poor (except at CircleCI, props to them), and seems like Apple could care less so much they’re now actively making that harder than ever.

> I’m using macOS Y and you use macOS Z which is a pain for me to set up a VM for, if at all possible

If Apple should be sued for anti-consumer behavior this is why... It costs time and money to fix software with every MacOS release and I'm getting close to suggesting we add a 50% Apple tax on products to pay for the additional support it entails.

He said it was a pain. Not that it can’t be done. If you are running on a Mac, you can set up a VM for an older version of MacOS on it. It’s allowed in the EULA.

Precisely.

As a matter of fact I went through the trouble to set up 10.9 through 10.14 in VirtualBox, driven by gitlab-runner via the virtualbox executor[0] (which is pure genius: it uses linked VM clones from a reference VM to spawn parallel runners, as well as using snapshots once SSH is ready after first boot for <2s spawn + full state reset).

Given the painful macOS on VirtualBox situation, at the time I wanted to move to VMware Fusion[1] but lacked time to implement an executor. It seems someone took that in their own hands and implemented a specific runner (in Swift!).

[0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/executors/virtualbox.html

[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues/1679

[2]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues/1679#no...

I have an iPhone for testing mobile apps. I only need MacOS for the building and submitting.

Phones/tablets are a good point, haven't thought of that.

AWS can use the Mac any way it wants, but the license terms are part of MacOS.

It's in Apple's EULA: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...

> A "lease period must be for a minimum period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours."

Why not set up the servers in EU where likely this is non enforceable? If you bought a Mac mini you bought it, apple cannot tell you if you can/cannot lease it out. Imagine if Mercedes was trying to tell you that you can only rent your car(which you paid for) for a minimum of 7 days or something equally stupid. It's insane.

I don't know about relevant EU law here, but even if Apple's terms are not enforceable in the EU, when you sell to e.g. US customers you would be subject to US law anyway, and Apple could go after you in the US. It doesn't matter that the servers are located in the EU.

In addition to legal barriers there are also technical ones. You have to run a scrub job to delete all data by prior tenants on a change of tenants. That job neccessarily has to overwrite the entire SSD and thus adds both wear to the device as well as takes time (around 30-60 minutes according to [0]). The SSD is soldered onto the PCB so it would be hard to replace it with something virtualized (or smaller that'd take less time to overwrite).

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562532

So you won't be able to rent out one device to dozens of tenants per day who each use it for ten minutes or so while ensuring inter-tenant isolation.

Last, those Apple rules might as well be non-enforceable legally, but Apple might still retaliate by e.g. removing apps from their store that were uploaded by tenants of those EU companies.

Theoretically you don't need scrub entire disk but just drop FDE encryption key in < 1s

That might be entirely unenforceable in the U.S. as well, but I doubt most companies are clamoring to go up against Apple's lawyers to prove it, and those that might (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) so they could include it in their offerings might have to worry about Apple throwing even more resources at the case to make it extremely unprofitable to do so, and also that Apple might specifically do stuff to make it harder afterwards for that company. That applies equally as well to companies in the EU.

I'm not sure if it's accurate, but I and many others see Apple as a fairly vindictive company, from stories about how Jobs operated to how they treat developers that speak out. My impression is that it's part of their DNA now.

The reason why it’s enforceable was because of psystar.

Setting up servers in the EU and using them in the US would introduce a ton of latency.

Besides that, I forgot where it came out about the amount of money Amazon retail makes on it’s dedicated Apple store. Also, Apple and Amazon Video have special deals where you can do in app purchases of video within the app on iOS devices and the purchases are charged directly to your Prime account. No one else can do that for physical goods.

Apple and Amazon have been chummy since Jobs licensed the “one click patent” when the iTunes Music Store opened in 2003.

"...But can apple dictate licensing terms like this? If aws buys a mac, can't they use it however they like? Or are there terms limiting this in the purchase agreement..."

Yes, no, and yes.

what about buying second hand macs? I am not agreeing to any terms there, how can apple still enforce those rules then?

It's not the hardware that's restricted, it's the MacOS usage/license. You agree to that when you install it.

Apple can't practically enforce that against you, an individual using a mac in your home. But then again you're probably not reselling your mac's functionality directly for profit to others. They for sure can seek to enforce it with AWS or others who sell it commercially. It's the reselling of their software and functionality for profit that is covered by the terms of the agreement.

Apple had rack-mount servers. They got rid of them. I don’t know the exact reasons why, but I assume it’s because there weren’t enough people buying them and they couldn’t make enough profit on building and supporting them.

I did find it interesting that Apple took the entire last run of that hardware for themselves, so that they could run their own internal VMware clusters on real Apple hardware for their developers.

There’s no way that Apple could build an AMI to run on hardware designed and built by someone else. Apple has a small number of people who really know what they’re doing, and they get shifted around to whatever project Apple thinks is most important — whether that’s hardware or software.

Apple needs to own the whole enchilada here, for multiple reasons. So, they can sell Apple hardware to AWS for inclusion inside of AWS data centers. But it has to be real-deal Apple hardware, running real-deal Apple OS, even if it is under a hyper visor like VMWare.

I suspect they don't believe there is a market for them or at least not enough of a market to justify the development expense. I know they've tried producing a "server" in the past and even a server version of their operating system, but it didn't seem to go anywhere. Unless they had a way to meaningfully compete with Windows and Linux (really, linux) the only viable market I can see is for build systems, and that's pretty niche.

With Servers you have to maintain a good supply chain and deal with institutional buyers. It's almost a parallels business to the rest of their offering. They won't get support at the genius bar...

Server OS seemed to be targeted at small businesses to run on a Mac Pro or Mac Mini connected to NAS and hosting internal applications. But it wasn't very different from regular OSX.

I think with their recent hiring spree for core K8s contributors and another factor they may well do. It’s something they’ve dipped their toes into in the past for iCloud services.

If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud services where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud, so I could see them extending that model to a time slice of compute as well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the previous model was too limited for most use cases, but it’s not fundamentally broken.

I don’t think the economics of the M1 with 32+ cores make sense unless they go down the route of either build a cloud platform and amortise the cost of the chip design over a larger number of devices (or a chip let approach, but I’m not sure this matches their general design approach).

Also I’m pretty sure they think they have a competitive advantage over traditional x86 and ARM vendors so they’ll likely want to strike while that still holds.

> If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud services where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud, so I could see them extending that model to a time slice of compute as well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the previous model was too limited for most use cases, but it’s not fundamentally broken.

The average Apple consumer customer can make plenty of use of cloud storage. What use does the average user have for cloud compute resources?

Unless Apple starts offloading some processing to the cloud, and gives them some free, I'm not sure how regular users would use this, and offering it for free assuming the majority of people won't use it is just asking for some popular app to come along that takes advantage of that and screws up the economics. Not to mention people probably won't be happy to have a limit and pay for overage use for stuff that is likely provided by free on other platforms (if Google Photos prettifies your photos for free and Apple does it through metered compute with some given free, that's bad optics).

Also, Apple has quite a lot of effort into specifically running things locally rather than in the cloud. For example, Photos.app does all its facial recognition and 'Memory' creation locally.

I think the developers got some cloud storage for ‘free’.

Makes you wonder what kind of hardware Apple is using for all their own cloud services (web, mail, messaging, icloud etc.).

Don’t they use AWS like everyone else?

They used to rely heavily on AWS and Azure, but they've moved a lot in-house now.

Apple has been using GCP and AWS for years.

My understanding was they ditched Azure.

Big tech companies with large bandwidth requirements don’t use AWS.

Netflix doesn’t use AWS for video, Facebook doesn’t use AWS for most stuff, Google and Microsoft obviously don’t now because of competition but they didn’t before GCP and Azure were things.

Apple has a self host cloud division as well as AWS according to news reports. Unclear if they run on Linux but it seems likely they must, even a bit if using AWS. Theoretically they could probably upload custom AMIs with macOS.

I don't believe its possible to get macOS (or atleast wasn't) onto an AMI in anyway.

I'd say it is possible to run Darwin on AWS, but I have never tried. FreeBSD runs well, so we know that any OS with drivers will boot on AWS.

They're Apple after all, so they can build macOS to boot from a standard environment - UEFI, kernel that doesn't check the copy prevention string on SMBIOS, etc.

Us, mere mortals, are more restricted, as we don't have the keys of the kingdom.

Apple uses GCP as well as AWS.

When I was there, a variety of brands of hardware, mostly running RHEL. In fact running OS-X in datacenters was verboten, and eventually limited to a couple of small racks running on their own network segments where you could put in a mac pro if desperately needed to.

Somewhat surprising since unlike their customers, there's no license restriction to Apple running macOS on different hardware. Maybe they didn't want to maintain a separate fork only for internal use. And having their own OS makes it more challenging to port apps to AWS/Azure.

The real question is how would this be beneficial to them? Almost everyone runs production systems on either Linux or Windows, so they would be an outlier, and the only one debugging and contributing to the operating system/libraries/etc.

I've read before on HN about people using Mac hardware in production, when they needed access to macOS graphics API, but since this only concerns a software implementation, and hardware was standard until M1 processors, it's reasonable to assume that Apple could port that part of OS to Linux, if they needed to use it from servers.

"Running OS-X in datacenters was verboten"

Why?

Maybe they didn't want to run into a tech debt thing of "we can't push this update to consumers even though it would cause no issues for them, because it would break X and Y on our backend servers and the two would have to diverge for some time until we come up with a fix."

I'm not an Apple insider, but I can imagine many reasons.

For one thing, the tcp stack is ancient, and easy to syn flood. (It was forked from FreeBSD in 2001ish, before FreeBSD added syncookies and syncache). Synflooding os x makes the whole network stack unresponsive, including other interfaces like localhost.

There was a time when they made this guys:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve

With their new CPUs maybe it is time to bring them back?

I mean surely they are not going to license Dell to put a M1 chip in a rackspace computer.

Considering how they've been making Mac servers more and more irrelevant, I wouldn't have my hopes up.

I remember when I worked at a startup and we were trying to get a team at Apple to purchase our SaaS product. They wanted the software hosted on a Mac, so we ran it on a Mini to demo. Also strange things like presenting them in Slides instead of Powerpoint. But this was also like 10 years ago.

That’s not strange at all. I use to teach fitness classes part time at Coke’s headquarters. We were told specifically not to bring in drinks or water bottles from competitors.

> We were told specifically not to bring in drinks or water bottles from competitors.

Ridiculous :-))

I was running OSX in a datacenter on campus, so I think you mean the huge server farms like where mesosphere etc were famously in play?

I'm really curious what they use for their CI. Do they compile all of their iOS apps on Apple hardware? Or do they get the luxury of using proper server hardware and software?

Lots of Mac Pros, some virtual machines.

Well there will be a ARM Mac Pro, so hopefully that will be rack mountable. And any Cloud customer can have it hosted.

I do wish they have less restriction on macOS usage timing. And a services for Web Developers to test their site on Safari. Which is currently impossible to do with buying a Mac.

It seems to me that the licensing situation—you have to lease a whole machine for a minimum period of 24 hours—will make the Mac Pro a poor choice in most contexts. The Mac Mini at or near its base configuration may remain the most sensible option.

It would be kind of crazy to imagine, if the M-series processor for the Mac Pro is among the best performing CPUs in the world - which it may turn out to be - that these processors would be virtually inaccessible in the server space in any relevant way. It seems like something which should not result from a free market.

I wonder how "usage" is defined here: for instance, if I run a managed service on a fleet of Macs in the cloud, which serves many end customers from each machine, is this allowed under the terms?

>if I run a managed service on a fleet of Macs in the cloud, which serves many end customers from each machine, is this allowed under the terms?

IANAL (and haven't read the full EULA) but probably. The 24 hour restriction seems to apply to leasing. I would assume that running a multi-tenant managed service (or, for that matter, serving web pages) from a Mac would not be seen as leasing.

> It seems to me that the licensing situation—you have to lease a whole machine for a minimum period of 24 hours—will make the Mac Pro a poor choice in most contexts

Not necessarily. A Mac Pro would work well for single-tenant usage where you want to run a series of applications that can each burst to the whole machine but not take long to finish.

They will...

Because Apple really doesn't care about anything to do with developers. It's too tiny a percentage of their user base.

It's a large part of their Mac user base.

That being said, I don't think Apple has enough people who would be interested in hosting on MacOS to justify an Apple cloud offering. I think they know that.

> It's a large part of their Mac user base.

Is it really? Lots of devs use Macs, yes. But compared to the sheer number of regular, non-dev users, that has to be tiiiiny.

I found lots of stats on the internet about what percentage of developers use Macs, but none about how just many Mac users are developers, so it'd be fascinating to see that number of anyone can find it.

It's not about the percentage of users.

Developers fuel their platform. Without developers MacOS and iOS are nothing. Apple knows this.

They definitely care about devs less than Microsoft. They know that they have a relatively captive rich user base and devs will kowtow to them in order to develop stuff they can sell to that user base.

That's the real target.

And you can see it by how they treat the development tools (stuff like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25563276 or the many deprecations, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562604). Or CI/CD setups using their tools.

Why do you think people buy iPhones? Because the Apple logo on the back? Once you put a case on your phone, most people can't tell the difference between one brand and another.

People like iOS because of the software, both the OS, and the software which runs atop it. This is why WWDC is Apple's single biggest event of the year.

Likewise, people don't buy Macs because they are metal and have a shiny fruit on the backside. Developers were among the first to migrate to Apple back in the 00s when they discovered its Unix underpinnings made it great for doing web development.

This idea that Apple doesn't care about developers doesn't hold water. If they didn't care, they wouldn't have bothered to add Hypervisor support into the M series CPUs. This is a feature which has almost no purpose outside of software development or as a server platform and Apple doesn't make dedicated server hardware so where does that leave us?

But they make the software the other 99% use. That's what makes them important.

Apple claims there are 20m registered developers on the App Store [1]. If each of them buys a Mac once every 4 years, that's 5m Macs per year. IDC estimates that Apple shipped 18m Macs in 2019 [2]. So 28% of all Macs would have gone to developers. If developers buy more expensive machines (or more machines) than the average customer, their share of sales could be significantly higher.

However, I don't quite believe that there really are 20m active developers on the Apple platform. Evans Data estimates that there is a total of 27m developers worldwide [3]. It's not plausible that 74% of them should be writing software for Apple platforms. On the other hand, not all developers using a Mac are developing for the App Store. A lot of them will be Web developers.

I wouldn't be surprised if developers' share of Mac sales is 30%. Maybe it's just 20%. I don't know, but it's definitely not tiny.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/04/app-store-hits-20m-registe...

[2] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/01/13/apple-mac-shipments-dow...

[3] https://www.future-processing.com/blog/how-many-developers-a...

> Because Apple really doesn't care about anything to do with developers.

Are you serious?

Apple's single biggest event of the year is a developer conference. They aren't putting on week-long events for video editors.

They also provided a bunch of Mac minis to Mac Stadium for OSS developers to build on.

They added virtualization to the M1 (it isn't on the A series) and have HyperKit built into the OS is all specifically for developers.

> They also provided a bunch of Mac minis to Mac Stadium for OSS developers to build on.

Well, Apple isn't giving them away, but they do indeed sell them to Mac Stadium.

It's my understanding that Apple donated hardware to multiple projects. That said, I can't track down a link right now either so it's just my recollection.

Virtualization is available on A14 but not made available to developers. (In fact, all of XNU runs in EL2.)

Isn't computer users a tiny part of all Apple users?

They could probably just kill that part and make enough money on iOS anyway.

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