I’m curious to see if Apple will bring anything similarly disruptive to the server market. So far servers haven’t been their strong suit, but a chip this attractive could change things.
Apple’s Xserves were awesome. Not cheap. Only marginally competitive. But a joy to work with because of all the nice little details like a FireWire port on the front so you could boot it off of an iPod.
there hasn't been a whole lot of evidence that they have what it takes to succeed in this space.
Does it matter? In 2006 and 2007 there were legions of pundits, columnists, and "experts" who said the same thing about Apple making a telephone.
I wonder if there's a market for a server optimized for iOS builds. Cram as many Mx chips and possible into a rackable case with abundant cooling. Certainly it would be useful to Apple internally. But I wonder if there are enough iOS developers with the budget to make this workable.
In contrast, I would say there's very little evidence Apple can pull off a majorly successful server play. It's not impossible, and I think the trends are potentially in their favor, but it definitely doesn't play to their strengths. Apple's biggest strengths are very consumer oriented, and the trade-offs they typically make are not great for an enterprise crowd (expensive hardware, willingness to abandon legacy compatibility, etc.).
There's probably a smallish market for very specialized servers that Apple could fill well, and maybe they will. Long term maybe that could translate to a wider market if they really make an effort. But I think it's at the very least a significantly longer time horizon than the iPhone.
Do you really think there's a market for dedicated hardware for iOS build servers? I mean there is some market for this since CI vendors already do iOS builds, but it seems like a bit of a stretch to imagine there being enough demand for Apple to actually put the R&D and product development resources into making this a reality.
I think you are using the past tense. Those things are still in production in some places. I wish they weren’t.
Also, I’d like one as a chassis for a Pi or NUC cluster.
Not to mention buying their own hardware will obviously save them.
[1] https://twitter.com/ajassy/status/1318930486517927937?s=20
I'm hopeful with respect to Apple dogfooding its silicon in the data center because it may feed back into robust ongoing support for Unix/Posix on their publicly-facing platforms.
I mean that's one possibility, but what seems much more "Apple-ey" (aka likely) is that they would release a very much locked-down platform of tightly controlled, managed services which would perform well and would have a beautiful dashboard design, but would offer a small subset of the functionality which is available from AWS or GCP, they would make some weird choices - like only allowing Swift for configuration files - and all of this would be very proprietary in nature and distant from their consumer products.
Right now Apple's cloud engineers are to some extent helping Linux be a better OS by filing bug reports, creating PRs, etc. That activity, directed toward an Apple Silicon rack OS, would redound to those of us sitting behind MacBooks, typing into the terminal, treating it as a Unix box with nice driver support.
Maybe, maybe not. Apple doesn't currently produce servers, so it would probably take a lot of time and money for them to build out that capability to the point where it's break-even or better compared to just buying commodity hardware.
Apple's current ARM offerings are strictly locked to their own hardware, and there's been no hints that they may move into the ARM-PC space selling general purpose chips and letting other vendors produce board. I'd expect to see that first before an Apple silicon powered server.