I guess they could sell servers to customers who want to run the latest Apple Intelligence models on-prem, even though that probably wouldn't make much of a difference, since you probably still have to trust Apple.
> Apple said that it, together with Foxconn Technology Group, will later this year begin producing the servers that power the cloud component of Apple Intelligence — a system called Private Cloud Compute — in Houston. That marks a relocation, at least for some production, from overseas. Next year, it says a 250,000-square-foot facility for such manufacturing will open in the city.
[...]
> Apple will also expand data center capacity in Arizona, Oregon, Iowa, Nevada and North Carolina, all states with existing Apple capacity. The company confirmed that mass production of chips started at a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. facility in Arizona last month. Bloomberg News recently reported that plant is building chips for some Apple Watches and iPads.
Makes sense from a business perspective - there's significant growth potential for them as their presence in web tech is approximately nil.
Apple now offers access to Apple Intelligence Pro at 9.99$ a month.
Combined with a properly headless fork of their OS stack (think Darwin, not OS X Server) they could spin up a highly competitive solution using entirely "B-team" resources.
A modern version of the Xserve RAID for high speed flash storage could be very interesting.
The Mac Mini could be used as small blades.
or they could do something really wild, like take the Oxide rack scale approach and make something big for DCs.
But they might also want to get a piece of the prosumer homelab market that Ubiquiti is in?
That's along the lines of how it usually rolls whenever Apple tries to make something purely utilitarian, it's the most considerate and "fresh" look at a product, but ultimately designed to be used and then disposed when finished.
A purely utilitarian IT-appliance without a individual end-user doesn't seem to be possible in their product pipeline, you usually end up with something "Prosumer": Impressive on its own, yet of degraded maintainability and scalability.
It's like asking Bugatti to design a public transport bus. It would surely be an impressive bus, but not one you would want to maintain over years at a scale of hundreds.