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Real-estate is probably the cheapest part about datacenters. You also seem to be forgetting how much cash Apple is sitting on.
by what_ever 9y ago
Real-estate is probably the cheapest part about datacenters. You also seem to be forgetting how much cash Apple is sitting on.
- selectodude 9y agoI'm know how to change the oil on my car, it would quickly become cheaper for me to get the ramps and the oil catch pan and such instead of pay somebody else to do it, but I'm still never going to do it. I don't want to keep that stuff in my house, I don't value the extra few dollars I pay for somebody else to handle it. The fixed costs to save some money in the long run are irrelevant because I don't want to be handling any of it to begin with. Now, if I had a fleet of cars, the calculus may change on that.
- fixermark 9y agoYeah, sorry; I said "real estate" when what I should probably have said was "Physical ownership and plant maintenance." Owning and operating a datacenter is a whole kettle of fish that they don't want to get into if they don't need to. The real estate taxes (wherever they set it up) will matter, but the larger costs are likely to be in day-to-day operation, upgrading and maintaining hardware (and the entire process for that), dealing with actual natural disasters like a flood (or a bird flying into a transformer house and blowing power to N% of the datacenter, which means they need a backup generator, which means they need to test and maintain the backup generator, etc., etc.). There's definitely a break-point where it's cheaper to pay someone else (in Apple's case, multiple someone-else's) to deal with that hassle.