Apple tried to address the server market 20 years ago during the PowerPC days (and later Intel). Their Xserves were really well designed machines and worked well. And yes, they also ran Linux (Yellowdog, IIRC).

It failed.

But I think that they learned something really valuable. As a company, they don’t have a good understanding the server market or how to sell to it. Their premium product style just didn’t have a place in the race to the bottom server market.

We had two in my grad school lab that we used as web servers. But that was the problem - it was a premium designed product that wasn’t any better of a web server than a plain (cheaper) Dell 1U box.

Maybe things would be different now that they have a really unique chip. ARM as a whole ecosystem has more buy-in from other companies than PowerPC did. Their performance per watt and GPU design might make more of a difference this time around.

But I can’t see Apple being able to release and sell a data center centric server. I think others might have a better chance.