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Comment by enos_feedler | Hacker News Reader

I find it bizarre of Apple to do anything publicly in partnership with Meta. I always thought the reasons Apple snubbed Facebook were out of values and principles not business. That could be wrong. Now that Meta has a line of business that Apple can finally charge a platform tax on there is new reason to start sleeping with them.

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> I always thought the reasons Apple snubbed Facebook were out of values and principles not business.

Apple is showing a masterclass of how to tow the line perfectly. Or more candily "have the cake and eat it too".

If you ask anyone, what's one company that'll stand up to government requests, most reasonable people would say Apple. Yet, Apple is extremely strategic when it comes to China. It thrives in that country, without being associated with CCP.

Same here - they are happy to partner with Meta, without getting any of the bad "aura".

To be clear, all companies do this just that Apple alone has a successful strategy here. Tim Cook personally gifted the current adminstration with a gold plaque, something none of the other "dirty" CEOs did. Such a public gesture, yet nobody would think that Apple is in bed with the current administration. Its marvelous to see this happen in real time.

Apple also was one of the largest contributors to the ballroom. They're not maintaining much of a "moat" between the company and the administration.

> If you ask anyone, what's one company that'll stand up to government requests, most reasonable people would say Apple. Yet, Apple is extremely strategic when it comes to China. It thrives in that country, without being associated with CCP.

You can stand up to government requests when it is legal to do so. Eventually you have to decide to abide by the law or leave the market.

Its still weird though.

The datacenters are not full of Mac studios but Nvidia hardware.

They are known for macbooks.

And they are not willing to build proper apple servers for all the build systems people have.

They did, and few people bought them, so they stopped.

I worked at a company where one of the pieces of hardware we were building at the time used a PowerPC CPU (this is back in ~2007). We had a rack of Apple xServe for build and test. The xServe was nice pieces of hardware compared to the x86 kit we had, more like Sun gear in their attention to detail and ease of use.

At my current company we compile for x86 and devs can do a full build and test environment on their laptops (which are 95% MacBook Pros) but it is unclear what will happen when Rosetta support is pulled. Now the interesting thing is we plan to move our stuff over to target the AWS Graviton (and other cloud ARM cores) as those instances are cheaper for generally the same performance (for what was are doing anyway) so the point will be moot. There will be some crossover point where having build and test servers in a rack will be cheaper than doing it in the cloud. At that point having Apple ARM based servers would be a win assuming we can build a binary that works for Graviton, et.al.

I believe you will still be able to use Rosetta 2 from VMs, if local builds using linux (say via a devcontainer) are acceptable.

They discontinued the X-Serve because they had no control and they canned Nvidia and AMD in time. The last straw was Intel their no on the iPhone chip led to the creation of Apple Silicon.

They also had no’s from Motorola and IBM before Intel. All of those conflicts contributed to Apple creating Apple Silicon, which in turn led to in-house modems, and several in-house custom chips for other Apple devices down the road, I anticipate it will also lead to some move in the memory area.

Apple sells a Mac minis to companies though - to the point that they were supposedly asked to avoid redesigns when possible so that new models could slot into existing rack solutions.

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