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Comment by buildbuildbuild | Hacker News Reader

Disrupt the hosting market, Apple. We're ready for your EC2.

Achieving a quantum power/performance leap without swinging for server market share is an massive wasted opportunity.

But Apple is Apple. I'll keep dreaming. Oh look, an AWS invoice.

Apple's focus tends to be on consumer products, I don't see them swinging for the fences and presenting an AWS like cloud offering at least under their own name.

Personally I'd like them to offer alternative versions of their CPU to cloud providers, I imagine that the current core configurations are not ideal for the sorts of workloads the big cloud providers need from a single processor.

But this will require serious heavy lifting and would likely require official linux support for Apple's hardware (undoubtedly they have internal systems running bare metal linux on Apple silicon), however I don't see Apple wanting to do this in the open and in public.

What’s the advantage? I don’t think it’s likely to cost less as a service, especially directly from Apple. If you get the same performance per dollar you might as well keep using what you have.

Heat and energy savings only apply to the direct user (in this case Apple Hosting) and unlikely to be passed onto you (since it’s Apple).

We’ve already seen this with M1 computers which are simpler and less expensive but did not have a lower retail price.

They would use their scale and engineering muscle to differentiate. Free outgoing bandwidth to iCloud users. The most eco friendly cloud. “Lambda at edge” which can compute on charging iOS devices nearby, those users earn a little Apple Cash. “Launch in iCloud” thin client support for resource intensive applications, using a proprietary low latency VNC alternative (like Parsec). I want to see them get creative.

Completely agree. I can't see them reviving the Xserve brand with their own silicon, but I could see them introducing cloud hosting services. Ideally with differentiation in something like environmental credentials (reduced, renewable power, etc.) to try and gain market share whilst maintaining margin.

They already have, though the marketing is subtle. [1][2]

[1] https://www.apple.com/icloud/

[2] https://developer.apple.com/icloud/cloudkit/

We are talking AWS competitors, not Google Drive alternative.

Besides a deliberate paucity of knobs to tweak, what exactly is the difference with AWS S3 as far as the target market (app developers) is concerned? This is a cloud hosting service in all but name.

https://developer.apple.com/icloud/icloud-drive/

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...

AWS is bringing ARM to the cloud in the form of their new Graviton instances, so in a way we already have this.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/

"has already brought"

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