They killed server because that was a losing battle: Apple was never going to "win" at servers. Despite all their effort they managed to score only a few modest

They killed server because that was a losing battle: Apple was never going to "win" at servers. Despite all their effort they managed to score only a few modest wins, and the intense competition in that space made it a huge distraction. Remember Apple started down the "server" road decades ago with their A/UX UNIX server (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX). Throughout the 1990s you could get a high-end Mac spec'd as a UNIX machine if you wanted, though I've only ever seen a handful in the wild. The introduction of a special-purpose server was an anomaly, the Xserve had no specific predecessor, perhaps some kind of "go big or go home" effort on Apple's part. While that system wasn't bad by the standards of the time, it couldn't compete with the likes of Dell, HP and others who offered way more flexibility on configuration and who would seemingly sell super budget low-end servers at a loss to lock people into their product line so they can squeeze them on support costs, a model Apple's allergic to.