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Comment by YooLi | Hacker News Reader

Any idea of what the server platform is? Linux?

It runs on Linux-based infrastructure. We've updated the blog post to clarify this. Thanks!

Which Linux?

It's well-known Apple is a big RHEL customer, including Linux on Azure, lending credence to the saying that every Mac is built upon Windows (Hyper-V).

Fairly certain the iTunes store, their web store, etc. are all built upon enterprise Linux as well.

And there's nothing wrong with that. Use the best tool for the job. Most car owners have never looked in the engine compartment.

I don’t think many azure services are Linux on hyper-v, are they? Azure (afaik) is quite heavy on bare metal Linux.

Many of their SaaS offerings are, but many infrastructure offerings are running Windows Server underneath. Rent out any Azure VM, and regardless of guest OS, it's using Hyper-v underneath as the hypervisor.

Ah cool, I didn't realize that even their linux VMs are being powered by Hyper-V

The OS powering Azure is Windows, even if about 60% of the VMs run Linux workloads, as per official numbers.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsosplatform/a...

> including Linux on Azure

Are you sure about this?

In this case probably Linux, but Apple also uses custom M-series based servers running a hardened Darwin-based OS for LLM processing of user data.

I really really want some kind of write up on that custom m-series hardware. Not very much has even leaked out.

I’m not even sure those have been turned on tbh

Almost certainly

Can't really imagine what else it would be.

Apple is known to use Linux on servers, but I could see a case for BSD being in the running.

The macOS userland is based on BSD so you’d get a nice little fit there. And it’s not like some common BSD is bad at doing the job of a server. I know it can do great things.

Who knows if it was ever discussed. They wouldn’t want Windows (licensing, optics, etc) and macOS isn’t tuned to be a high performance server. Linux is incredibly performant and ubiquitous and a very very safe choice.

Another BSD that Apple used at one point was NetBSD, which is what they ran on their AirPort wireless routers prior to their discontinuation.

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