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Comment by nvx736 | Hacker News Reader

I see this as Apple eyeing a server market segment. Unless Linux is fully ported on m1 cpus it can’t be achieved.

Do you really think that Apple couldn’t port Linux to an M1 chip without outside help? If Apple wanted a server product, they wouldn’t need to rely on outside volunteers and they would be more actively helping. Apple used to make servers, and hardware wise, they were great. Software wise, it was more of a mixed bag.

If Apple wanted to help push a server or cloud product, do you think AWS would be racking retail Mac Minis?

This has informal geek cred motivation written all over it. More of a good-will measure than anything else. If this was an explicit market/new product motivation, any assistance would look very different and be more formal.

> Do you really think that Apple couldn’t port Linux to an M1 chip without outside help?

It could be that they work on it internally and naturally want to keep it a secret for as long as possible. However, in that case, they would absolutely also want the community to advance "independently" so that Linux software on Apple Silicon has most of the practical issues ironed out by the time Apple is ready to announce their stuff. Think of it as having a free alpha/beta testing even before your product is publicly announced. A pure win-win.

This, at least, is how I would do it if I was pulling the strings at Apple.

I think you answered your own question they had server hardware with bad software , with community and ecosystem enablement they could get into it . Why they can’t release a server rack with m1 macs ??

Because the server business has lower margins than they’d like? Trying to sell Mac laptops vs Windows laptops is very different than selling ARM servers vs x86 servers (all running Linux). The margins and support costs would be very high for not very many unit sales. And I doubt they would want to sell chips to someone like Supermicro for them to integrate into servers. I can’t imagine Apple trying to sell to OEMs and reducing their own relative fab capacity to sell chips to someone else.

If you want a rack of M1 servers, buy a couple of Mac Minis. But if you want them to also run Linux, that’s going to be a bit more difficult. macOS is compatible enough for many (most? all?) *nix server software, so why would Apple need to have a separate product?

More of a good-will measure than anything else.

Or maybe as a preparation for Boot Camp for ARM64 Windows? Rumors are that Qualcomm's exclusivity deal is soon over.

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471812619380326408

Apple does bringup of their chips with Linux. I've heard that they run that before they ever boot Darwin.

Yup.. Apple needs to grow somewhere. Cars? Maybe in terms of software.. The real margin currently is in cloud hosting. Even more than in appstore fees.

They've learned enough from using azure, gcp and aws. Their multi-billion contract with aws will end soon..

They will offer a fast energy efficient public cloud. First the xcode cloud, then their own hosting, and later it'll become public

Apple currently uses commodity PC hardware, from vendors including HP, and Linux as their standard data centre platform. I suppose it's possible they might start experimenting with Apple silicon servers in their data centres, but I doubt it mainly for supply reasons. They need all the 5nm TSMC fab capacity they can get for their consumer products. There's no way there's enough spare capacity to start diverting significant numbers of these chips into their data centres. Maybe one day.

But that's more of a short term blocker, isn't it? Fab capacity shouldn't be a roadblock to pursuing it long term. I could definitely see a desire to take all of the security and efficiency features and use them in the datacenter. E.g. it seems a bit silly that my Mac is encrypted with special hardware etc, but as soon as I sync my data to iCloud that security disappears.

> I suppose it's possible they might start experimenting with Apple silicon servers in their data centres, but I doubt it mainly for supply reasons.

I strongly believe they will, and that it's a natural progression.

Mac hardware is extremely popular with developers. M1 on Macbooks has lead to ARM platform Docker containers, which in turn will lead to a much increased demand for ARM platform Docker hosting. Meanwhile, ARM is much more power efficient than x86, and who has by far the best ARM CPUs for the foreseeable future? Apple.

I wouldn’t mind a cloud computing offering from Apple that allows you to keep your hands clean of customer data like CloudKit does.

There is 100% certainty that Apple has compiled Linux on their M1 chips. At the bare minimum, they are using it for testing.

Sure. That shouldn't be too hard. But it also has nothing to do with running Linux on the M1, which is what Asahi and this whole thread are about.

With their super low-power/high-perf chip architecture, this actually makes a lot of sense. I don't think we'd see anything for a really long time, but Apple actually needs to expand into new verticals if they want to continue providing value for the shareholders.

I don’t give a fuck about apple providing value to shareholders.

Following that path is how companies lose their way.

I think if Apple was seriously eyeing a server market, Linux would not be the target OS. Apple already relies on quiet a bit from the BSD sphere, I think it would be more likely they have an internal port of FreeBSD or NetBSD. The advantage here is, it would already share some common traits with MacOS and because of licensing, Apple can rebrand it and make modifications without opening the source. Apple has done this before as their Apple AirPorts way back when ran a version of NetBSD.

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