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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

There’s more to a mac than the sticker. It’s specific hardware that is tested and supported by the software. That’s worth a premium. Verifying your rack is a cost Apple doesn’t want to take on. iCloud doesn’t run on MacOS. It runs on Linux. Just buy the right hardware for the job.

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Does Apple dogfood their OS X/iOS CI pipelines, i.e. are they running them on some off-the-shelf Macs like they expect everyone else to do? I remember reading that at least in the past they were running virtualized OS X on regular servers for those (actually found following: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18117885).

And it's not like Apple would need to verify anything. They can grant the license, but say that the only supported configuration is Mac, it's up to VMWare and such to provide the support if they want to say that you can run OS X on their platform.

> are they running them on some off-the-shelf Macs like they expect everyone else to do?

No. Last time I poked into Xcode Cloud, it was running on Ice Lake server Xeons, which didn't ship on any Mac.

Azure doesn't run on Windows. Why would iCloud run on MacOS? There's exactly one organization in the world that needs to run iCloud, why would MacOS target that use case? I doubt Apple eats their own dogfood.

Azure does run on Windows. It's HyperV server below the rest of the hardware. It's a custom Windows install that you can't purchase, but it's Windows none the less.

That's interesting. Do you have a public source for this handy?

I remember seeing an article [1] proclaiming that more than 50% of Azure's workloads are on Linux, so I'm guessing their hypervisors are running an optimised Linux kernel somewhat.

1: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23156222

You can see it mentionned on this page: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamental...

that 50% is the guests, not the hosts... I think they even have Hyper-V, along with the Windows Server Kernel, running on ARM, since they now have ARM VMs... Only a matter of time before thats released in the wild... [1][https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-virtual-machine...]

Azure Devops Services is an updated version of their old Team Foundation Server stuff. You can't create projects, teams, or workitem areas/iteration paths that are any of the microsoft magic names ( con, nul, ...etc... ), presumably because they store the data on a windows drive and it would implode. git repos, too, but that's just good planning for any git service since allowing microsoft reserved names would make the repo unclonable to microsoft systems.

Interesting language, "more than 50%". I guess the real number doesn't look good for marketing.

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