What is the problem being solved here? Apple already offers a solution – iCloud.
Why would they want to sell you a box for offline backups?
Apple doesn’t want to sell us a box. They want to sell us a subscription. My assertion is that Apple’s model of selling hardware would work for home servers.
The problem is something like: “I need to keep my family photos/files safe” or “I need to store customer orders and data” or “I need a way to protect my data when I drop my phone in the toilet.”
Even giant companies with eye-watering IT budgets see the appeal of having someone else manage their physical hardware and software infrastructure.. I haven’t worked at a company that owned its own servers in nearly a decade.
Apple doesn’t want to sell us a box and coincidentally nobody wants to buy a box.
It’s easy to reason about data locality. I can have a literal social network of just my actual friends and no tech company gets to spy on it.
Cloud backups are still good for disaster recovery if they are fully encrypted.
You know, with such a scary and complex network of online adversaries and government agencies, I wonder if I could pay someone else to manage that risk for me. My business is selling online greeting cards for pets and I don’t really specialize in network security and data protection.