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Apple doesn't want to be in the server market and I don't think that will change any time soon. They would have to either build a whole new organisation for that or use resources that go into their consumer products like the iPhone to build servers.

> They could reuse the high-end Mac Studio or similar chips and only have a custom board and chassis suitable for server use, with additional IO and redundancy.

Also what would be the benefit of running Xcode cloud on Apple Silicon? Today cross compilation is the norm so the architecture doesn't matter. They would have to make a new datacenter version of their chips without the GPU and accelerators that aren't used for CPU heavy tasks.

> they literally make the Mac Pro in rackmount form for render farms and so forth.

The Mac Pro has a rack mount version is not for the server room. People use racks in audio and video production too and that's where you will probably find most of the rack mounted Mac Pros. You can probably fit 2 CPUs and 4 - 8 GPUs in the space a Mac Pro takes in your datacenter. So why would you choose a Mac Pro over that?

If you need macOS on the server for whatever reason, your only option is the Mac.

I have four Mac minis racked up for this, with two use cases: 1) iOS CI/CD and 2) some computer vision stuff using Apple’s Vision framework.

No complaints, but I obviously wouldn’t run anything that didn’t need to be on a Mac on these systems.

BTW, you can rack mount twenty Mac minis in the footprint of a single rack mounted Mac Pro (there’s a 1U mount that takes two and they’re small enough to mount on both the front and the back of the rack). So 20 M2 Pros per 5U.

They’re of course not a sysadmin’s dream but they do tend to stay up and Ansible works fine.

> Apple doesn't want to be in the server market and I don't think that will change any time soon.

It might. Mac sales have been declining for several years now.

> Mac sales have been declining for several years now.

I’m not so sure about that. I think the Apple Silicon thing added a big boost.

But I’m often wrong. I’m sure there’s numbers, somewhere.

In their SEC filings. Less boring version:

https://www.macworld.com/article/2130070/mac-sales-slump-rev...

Fair ‘nuff. Time will tell.

But I never found Mac servers particularly compelling. We used to have a couple of XServes (and the overpriced RAID disks), for years in our rack, where I worked. We never bothered using distributed builds, which was probably the only unique service they offered.

After the pandemic purchasing spike for both home schooling and work from home, every computer manufacturer's sales declined.

In Apple's case you also have the people who upgraded early for the M1 performance boost, and they aren't likely to toss out a new computer unless they are doing cutting edge tasks.

Yeah, Covid will probably result in waves of refresh.

Anecdote wise, my corp forced a refresh in Q4 so I expect a crest is coming in 2024.

I think you're completely wrong.. My reasoning:

- Highly energy efficient non-mobile computers (mini, pro, etc).

- They already run a huuuuuuuge server park on AWS for themselves

- They've been (successfully) transitioning their revenue towards "services" for almost a decade

- I suspect they want a piece of the LLM market as well.

- They acquired Fleetsmith for device management in the enterprise

- They implemented nested virtualization in the M2+

- The cloud is highly profitable, and I suspect they want a piece of that cake

- They spent a lot of resources creating a boot policy that allows booting other/unsigned operating systems on Apple Silicon. (asahi). This is not present on iOS

- They already offer "cloud runners" for XCode (cloud). This is a very contained service, to start offering cloud services

- The timeline for iCloud platform:

- 2016: Azure -> Google. 2018/2019: Google -> AWS. This $1.5B contract will end this year. It seems like a prefect moment to switch from AWS to their own platform and later-on offer more generic services to companies.

- They need to 4T or 5T marketcap somehow. Options are - LLMs, Cloud servers, the Enterprise, (Vision), or something completely new, but the Vision Pro is the last major category under Tim Cook, so I don't think anything new will happen for consumers.

All in all, it seems like Apple will go back in the (cloud) server business.

They're wrong, for a simple reason: my build jobs that can run on a Mac finish faster on a Mac.

As far as the complex list of reasons:

- Correct.

- Do they run the server park, or AWS?

- "Services" is a word Apple uses as shorthand for Wall Street types to mean "monthly subscriptions to consumers", it doesn't mean "things we charge for", because at that point it has 0 meaning

- Why would anyone run an LLM on an M-series server?

- Why would Fleetsmith help manage servers? It's MDM. You don't need or want provisioning profiles on servers.

- Nested virtualization makes sense.

- Cloud isn't highly profitable, it's highly revenue-able. Profits are declining as the titans bash it out.

- They didn't spend a "lot of resources"

- Xcode Cloud is in the cloud - but they're already offering it.

- The timeline for iCloud elides a whole lot of time.

- They don't need a 4T or 5T marketcap and those aren't the only options.

You know too much about Apple and it's blinding you because you can connect all the info you know about it to any other arbitrary trend. Been there, that's why I'm comfortable being overly concise about it.

AWS for "iCloud", not sure what else they run. I meant a "cloud server park"

Services is anything software as far as I know.

If they run their own servers, they'll have a large number of gpu core which could be used for LLMs. From what I understood is that M* is pretty good at them. That way they're not helping NVIDIA grow more as a competitor.

My point with Fleetsmith is that they're looking at corporate use.

Maybe not a lot of resources for them (boot loader), but they deliberately allow booting other operating systems.

I firmly disagree about cloud profitability. I read numbers between 30% and 60%, although I also found 2.6% for GCP and -8% for Azure. Not sure why they're so far apart. Amortization shouldn't be the issue. Perhaps "R&D"

Last part, you might be right ;-)

Counterpoint; Apple is still just as greedy as they were when Xserve failed the first time.

Cloud customers want good prices and well-supported hardware. On the server, Mac is neither of those really. Apple's hardware pricing would need a complete revision to stay competitive, and their software policy would need to open up even more to enable better API coverage, proper virtualization and compelling hardware compatibility. Even if Apple did that, it would merely be enough to keep MacOS a second-class citizen in the world of server OSes. The existence of OpenBSD and Linux almost obsoletes any real-world application of a licensed server OS.

Apple can go back into the server business if they want, but the server business isn't begging for more overhead or grudge matches between vendors. Apple cannot turn the server industry into a trillion-dollar opportunity without reversing policy entirely, on both the hardware and software side of things.

Apple could always license out their A chips and OSX to some preferred vendors if they don’t want to be in the business themselves.

Apple tried licensing once before, and it did not work out very well for them (e.g.: I owned a PowerComputer PowerTower back in that time). I understand how it would benefit a number of people, but Apple is a consumer company. How would this benefit Apple in a meaningful way?

> Also what would be the benefit of running Xcode cloud on Apple Silicon? Today cross compilation is the norm so the architecture doesn't matter. They would have to make a new datacenter version of their chips without the GPU and accelerators that aren't used for CPU heavy tasks.

ARM builds can be done on x86, but what about the automated tests after? Those have to be run on ARM when you target AS and everyone including Apple themselves needs something to do that.

> they literally make the Mac Pro in rackmount form for render farms and so forth

The rackmounted Mac Pro is actually intended to be used amongst other rackmounted audio equipment in Studios. FWIW.

That it can be used for both is a nice accident, but it's not well optimised for a render farm. Not that this matters really as it can be used this way so they can still get access to this market.

My understanding was that Xserve, and the corresponding OS X Server, were discontinued because performance for Apple-rolled server software sucked ass.

There were at least a few threads on Apple’s forums where people were redirected to community-supported software.

There is a fairly strong use-case now with robust software, but I feel like Apple wants to maintain an illusion that their developers are small mom-and-pop shops with a Mac Mini in corner of their farmhouse.

macOS also lacks some fairly basic server features. Last time I looked the kernel didn't do SYN cookies for example.

I wonder if the system on a chip design of Apple Silicon would work for servers. Would it just be a special packaging that crammed several Mac mini boards into a rack mounted chassis? If so, then they would just be repeating what others are already doing.

The RAM being part of the chip seems like a limiter to scaling up to a server model with a lot of cores and RAM in a single blade.

Not saying this is not all doable just that it probably requires design and investment they otherwise do not have any desire to do.

Even if they just replicate what these companies are doing I think there's two main benefits:

  1. less waste. The entire case is being thrown away immediately by these volume consumers. All the packaging and what not is also wasted.
  2. easier/cheaper deployment. Companies are already paying their employees to design replacement cases, control boards, etc. and getting them built at relatively small scales. Then they're paying them to shuck and transplant from the Mac Minis. Apple could probably charge a >50% premium for their solution vs the equivalent number of Mac Minis and companies would jump on it.

Additionally, at least in my experience, the headaches and fixed costs of deploying these machines means companies refresh them far less often than other hardware. It's totally possible that companies would refresh more frequently if Apple just sold something easier to deploy.

> in the future Apple likely will stop supporting x86 altogether and it makes sense to run it on AS

Nearly all of that backend Apple infra runs on Linux and (formerly?) Solaris.

As of a few years ago, an Apple employee told me they were primarily running on OEL (Oracle's Red Hat-based Linux).

As for why Oracle: I think they said something along the lines of Oracle indemnifying them -- or being best equipped to mount a defense -- in a software licensing lawsuit.

Apple just needs to make it easier to install Linux on these machines. Or, make their own server software that's "good enough". Like OS X server but actually good.

But I doubt they would do this well. It would be way, way too expensive and probably not have upgradeable RAM.

Apple already books all of TSMC's bleeding edge nodes for the consumer market. How can they possibly start selling equivalent server hardware?

A slightly tweaked “server” version (more ram in the package) of their chip from the previous TSMC node could be an interesting way to use up some non-bleeding-edge capacity.

They don't have the bandwidth to do it. They can't keep up in hardware design, CPU manufacturing (TSMC throughput), software, anything. They're running on all cylinders just trying to release a new phone, new OSes every year and in addition to that chasing the dream of creating some kind of new category (TV, watch, cars, VR headset) that they can't afford to assign engineers to something mundane that they can silently outsource.

Unlike companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft they are institutionally afraid of over-hiring and losing their culture. This is a conservative tradeoff where they may lose the ability to grow seemingly "small" markets (small=anything smaller than the iPhone) in favor of not losing their culture (becoming a Google or Meta which just squanders every opportunity)

A trillion dollars makes many things possible.

Tim Cook's Apple is a consumer electronics company, so forget it.

I wonder how much power they would save in their own data centres by switching to Apple Silicon. Surely it would be astronomical

I'm wondering when Apple is going to publicly release it's Cloud offering to compete with Azure, AWS, etc! :)

That is what they kind of do with XClound and iCloud based services.

What is xcloud?

A typo, I should have written Xcode Cloud,

https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/

> rather than buying Dell/HP servers like they currently do

I wonder what kind of software/OS they run on those machines.

AFAIK it's simple virtualized x86 MacOS. Their EULA doesn't apply to them of course so they can run it on whatever they like.

EULA for thee, but not for me!