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If you need macOS on the server for whatever reason, your only option is the Mac.

I have four Mac minis racked up for this, with two use cases: 1) iOS CI/CD and 2) some computer vision stuff using Apple’s Vision framework.

No complaints, but I obviously wouldn’t run anything that didn’t need to be on a Mac on these systems.

BTW, you can rack mount twenty Mac minis in the footprint of a single rack mounted Mac Pro (there’s a 1U mount that takes two and they’re small enough to mount on both the front and the back of the rack). So 20 M2 Pros per 5U.

They’re of course not a sysadmin’s dream but they do tend to stay up and Ansible works fine.

I think you're completely wrong.. My reasoning:

- Highly energy efficient non-mobile computers (mini, pro, etc).

- They already run a huuuuuuuge server park on AWS for themselves

- They've been (successfully) transitioning their revenue towards "services" for almost a decade

- I suspect they want a piece of the LLM market as well.

- They acquired Fleetsmith for device management in the enterprise

- They implemented nested virtualization in the M2+

- The cloud is highly profitable, and I suspect they want a piece of that cake

- They spent a lot of resources creating a boot policy that allows booting other/unsigned operating systems on Apple Silicon. (asahi). This is not present on iOS

- They already offer "cloud runners" for XCode (cloud). This is a very contained service, to start offering cloud services

- The timeline for iCloud platform:

- 2016: Azure -> Google. 2018/2019: Google -> AWS. This $1.5B contract will end this year. It seems like a prefect moment to switch from AWS to their own platform and later-on offer more generic services to companies.

- They need to 4T or 5T marketcap somehow. Options are - LLMs, Cloud servers, the Enterprise, (Vision), or something completely new, but the Vision Pro is the last major category under Tim Cook, so I don't think anything new will happen for consumers.

All in all, it seems like Apple will go back in the (cloud) server business.

They're wrong, for a simple reason: my build jobs that can run on a Mac finish faster on a Mac.

As far as the complex list of reasons:

- Correct.

- Do they run the server park, or AWS?

- "Services" is a word Apple uses as shorthand for Wall Street types to mean "monthly subscriptions to consumers", it doesn't mean "things we charge for", because at that point it has 0 meaning

- Why would anyone run an LLM on an M-series server?

- Why would Fleetsmith help manage servers? It's MDM. You don't need or want provisioning profiles on servers.

- Nested virtualization makes sense.

- Cloud isn't highly profitable, it's highly revenue-able. Profits are declining as the titans bash it out.

- They didn't spend a "lot of resources"

- Xcode Cloud is in the cloud - but they're already offering it.

- The timeline for iCloud elides a whole lot of time.

- They don't need a 4T or 5T marketcap and those aren't the only options.

You know too much about Apple and it's blinding you because you can connect all the info you know about it to any other arbitrary trend. Been there, that's why I'm comfortable being overly concise about it.

AWS for "iCloud", not sure what else they run. I meant a "cloud server park"

Services is anything software as far as I know.

If they run their own servers, they'll have a large number of gpu core which could be used for LLMs. From what I understood is that M* is pretty good at them. That way they're not helping NVIDIA grow more as a competitor.

My point with Fleetsmith is that they're looking at corporate use.

Maybe not a lot of resources for them (boot loader), but they deliberately allow booting other operating systems.

I firmly disagree about cloud profitability. I read numbers between 30% and 60%, although I also found 2.6% for GCP and -8% for Azure. Not sure why they're so far apart. Amortization shouldn't be the issue. Perhaps "R&D"

Last part, you might be right ;-)

Counterpoint; Apple is still just as greedy as they were when Xserve failed the first time.

Cloud customers want good prices and well-supported hardware. On the server, Mac is neither of those really. Apple's hardware pricing would need a complete revision to stay competitive, and their software policy would need to open up even more to enable better API coverage, proper virtualization and compelling hardware compatibility. Even if Apple did that, it would merely be enough to keep MacOS a second-class citizen in the world of server OSes. The existence of OpenBSD and Linux almost obsoletes any real-world application of a licensed server OS.

Apple can go back into the server business if they want, but the server business isn't begging for more overhead or grudge matches between vendors. Apple cannot turn the server industry into a trillion-dollar opportunity without reversing policy entirely, on both the hardware and software side of things.

> Also what would be the benefit of running Xcode cloud on Apple Silicon? Today cross compilation is the norm so the architecture doesn't matter. They would have to make a new datacenter version of their chips without the GPU and accelerators that aren't used for CPU heavy tasks.

ARM builds can be done on x86, but what about the automated tests after? Those have to be run on ARM when you target AS and everyone including Apple themselves needs something to do that.

> Apple doesn't want to be in the server market and I don't think that will change any time soon.

It might. Mac sales have been declining for several years now.

> Mac sales have been declining for several years now.

I’m not so sure about that. I think the Apple Silicon thing added a big boost.

But I’m often wrong. I’m sure there’s numbers, somewhere.

In their SEC filings. Less boring version:

https://www.macworld.com/article/2130070/mac-sales-slump-rev...

Fair ‘nuff. Time will tell.

But I never found Mac servers particularly compelling. We used to have a couple of XServes (and the overpriced RAID disks), for years in our rack, where I worked. We never bothered using distributed builds, which was probably the only unique service they offered.

After the pandemic purchasing spike for both home schooling and work from home, every computer manufacturer's sales declined.

In Apple's case you also have the people who upgraded early for the M1 performance boost, and they aren't likely to toss out a new computer unless they are doing cutting edge tasks.

Yeah, Covid will probably result in waves of refresh.

Anecdote wise, my corp forced a refresh in Q4 so I expect a crest is coming in 2024.

Apple could always license out their A chips and OSX to some preferred vendors if they don’t want to be in the business themselves.

Apple tried licensing once before, and it did not work out very well for them (e.g.: I owned a PowerComputer PowerTower back in that time). I understand how it would benefit a number of people, but Apple is a consumer company. How would this benefit Apple in a meaningful way?