12 ms·

I just don't understand why Apple won't offer their own cloud offerings or just straightforward partner with some public clouds and offer servers more suitable

I just don't understand why Apple won't offer their own cloud offerings or just straightforward partner with some public clouds and offer servers more suitable for developers than forcing people to use desktops as servers.

throwaway4good 6y ago
Makes you wonder what kind of hardware Apple is using for all their own cloud services (web, mail, messaging, icloud etc.).
- vondur 6y ago
  Don’t they use AWS like everyone else?
  - kortilla 6y ago
    Big tech companies with large bandwidth requirements don’t use AWS. Netflix doesn’t use AWS for video, Facebook doesn’t use AWS for most stuff, Google and Microsoft obviously don’t now because of competition but they didn’t before GCP and Azure were things.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    They used to rely heavily on AWS and Azure, but they've moved a lot in-house now.
    - Crash0v3rid3 6y ago
      Apple has been using GCP and AWS for years. My understanding was they ditched Azure.
- ruffrey 6y ago
  Apple has a self host cloud division as well as AWS according to news reports. Unclear if they run on Linux but it seems likely they must, even a bit if using AWS. Theoretically they could probably upload custom AMIs with macOS.
  - sl1ck731 6y ago
    I don't believe its possible to get macOS (or atleast wasn't) onto an AMI in anyway.
    - rescbr 6y ago
      I'd say it is possible to run Darwin on AWS, but I have never tried. FreeBSD runs well, so we know that any OS with drivers will boot on AWS. They're Apple after all, so they can build macOS to boot from a standard environment - UEFI, kernel that doesn't check the copy prevention string on SMBIOS, etc. Us, mere mortals, are more restricted, as we don't have the keys of the kingdom.
  - Crash0v3rid3 6y ago
    Apple uses GCP as well as AWS.
- IST-Throwaway 6y ago
  When I was there, a variety of brands of hardware, mostly running RHEL. In fact running OS-X in datacenters was verboten, and eventually limited to a couple of small racks running on their own network segments where you could put in a mac pro if desperately needed to.
  - wayne 6y ago
    Somewhat surprising since unlike their customers, there's no license restriction to Apple running macOS on different hardware. Maybe they didn't want to maintain a separate fork only for internal use. And having their own OS makes it more challenging to port apps to AWS/Azure.
    - watermelon0 6y ago
      The real question is how would this be beneficial to them? Almost everyone runs production systems on either Linux or Windows, so they would be an outlier, and the only one debugging and contributing to the operating system/libraries/etc. I've read before on HN about people using Mac hardware in production, when they needed access to macOS graphics API, but since this only concerns a software implementation, and hardware was standard until M1 processors, it's reasonable to assume that Apple could port that part of OS to Linux, if they needed to use it from servers.
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    "Running OS-X in datacenters was verboten" Why?
    - cma 6y ago
      Maybe they didn't want to run into a tech debt thing of "we can't push this update to consumers even though it would cause no issues for them, because it would break X and Y on our backend servers and the two would have to diverge for some time until we come up with a fix."
    - toast0 6y ago
      I'm not an Apple insider, but I can imagine many reasons. For one thing, the tcp stack is ancient, and easy to syn flood. (It was forked from FreeBSD in 2001ish, before FreeBSD added syncookies and syncache). Synflooding os x makes the whole network stack unresponsive, including other interfaces like localhost.
- kevincox 6y ago
  I'm really curious what they use for their CI. Do they compile all of their iOS apps on Apple hardware? Or do they get the luxury of using proper server hardware and software?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Lots of Mac Pros, some virtual machines.
notRobot 6y ago
Because Apple really doesn't care about anything to do with developers. It's too tiny a percentage of their user base.
- api 6y ago
  It's a large part of their Mac user base. That being said, I don't think Apple has enough people who would be interested in hosting on MacOS to justify an Apple cloud offering. I think they know that.
  - notRobot 6y ago
    > It's a large part of their Mac user base. Is it really? Lots of devs use Macs, yes. But compared to the sheer number of regular, non-dev users, that has to be tiiiiny. I found lots of stats on the internet about what percentage of developers use Macs, but none about how just many Mac users are developers, so it'd be fascinating to see that number of anyone can find it.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      It's not about the percentage of users. Developers fuel their platform. Without developers MacOS and iOS are nothing. Apple knows this.
      - oblio 6y ago
        They definitely care about devs less than Microsoft. They know that they have a relatively captive rich user base and devs will kowtow to them in order to develop stuff they can sell to that user base. That's the real target. And you can see it by how they treat the development tools (stuff like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25563276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25563276 or the many deprecations, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562604). Or CI/CD setups using their tools.
        6y ago
emeraldd 6y ago
I suspect they don't believe there is a market for them or at least not enough of a market to justify the development expense. I know they've tried producing a "server" in the past and even a server version of their operating system, but it didn't seem to go anywhere. Unless they had a way to meaningfully compete with Windows and Linux (really, linux) the only viable market I can see is for build systems, and that's pretty niche.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  With Servers you have to maintain a good supply chain and deal with institutional buyers. It's almost a parallels business to the rest of their offering. They won't get support at the genius bar... Server OS seemed to be targeted at small businesses to run on a Mac Pro or Mac Mini connected to NAS and hosting internal applications. But it wasn't very different from regular OSX.
jrwoodruff 6y ago
They tried, but it's just not their DNA. Apple isn't a B2B enterprise company, they're a B2C consumer company that, as a side effect of their consumer success, ended up with a decent number of devices in enterprises. But they know they can't, and don't want to try, to win against the big entrenched enterprise players. https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-apple-had-to-kill-the-xserve/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-apple-had-to-kill-the-xser...
- secabeen 6y ago
  Yeah, they certainly don't have the right DNA on the hardware side. On the software side, they've been working a lot more closely with JAMF recently, and there's quite a bit of enterprise support in the MDM space there.
  - mintone 6y ago
    Can confirm with this, when we approached Apple on MDM they all but opened an account for us with JAMF.
  - mrpippy 6y ago
    They also bought Fleetsmith recently
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    Apple Remote Desktop is a pretty neglected app but it’s fantastically good. It’s got so many features that make remote administration so very good.
- ketamine__ 6y ago
  Am I wrong to think there are workloads that can only be run on Mac? Seems like a competitive advantage.
  - Macha 6y ago
    The only workloads that can only be run on a mac are those which are Apple specific, such as building/testing iOS apps.
jedberg 6y ago
One of the rules on these Macs in AWS is that you have to rent them for a minimum of 24 hours at a time and you have to rent the whole machine. I think they don't want to cannibalize Mac sales. If you want to make an iPhone app, you have to buy a Mac to do it. They don't want to make it easy for you to rent one just to compile the app.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  That's the only reason I need them, to compile a binary and submit it. But can apple dictate licensing terms like this? If aws buys a mac, can't they use it however they like? Or are there terms limiting this in the purchase agreement.
  - kayodelycaon 6y ago
    Can Microsoft dictate the terms under which you can use their software? Some companies only charge for commercial use of their products. So the “it’s free” argument doesn’t really hold water.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Yes. Software companies dictate whether their software has to be run on a dedicate host, the allowed number of cores, etc. all of the time. Companies have tried to “rent DVDs” digitally by playing the DVD on their hardware and streaming it. It got shot down by the courts.
  - est31 6y ago
    I agree that what you want to do should be possible and cheap, but generally if you build something for a platform you'd also want to test it on that platform, no? What you say implies that you compile the binary and don't test it before submitting?
    - lukeramsden 6y ago
      Automated testing should be done at CI stage, and you can submit a binary to Apple without having to send it live on the AppStore (TestFlight is for that), or you could send it to other beta distribution channels
ksec 6y ago
Well there will be a ARM Mac Pro, so hopefully that will be rack mountable. And any Cloud customer can have it hosted. I do wish they have less restriction on macOS usage timing. And a services for Web Developers to test their site on Safari. Which is currently impossible to do with buying a Mac.
- theobeers 6y ago
  It seems to me that the licensing situation—you have to lease a whole machine for a minimum period of 24 hours—will make the Mac Pro a poor choice in most contexts. The Mac Mini at or near its base configuration may remain the most sensible option.
  - skohan 6y ago
    It would be kind of crazy to imagine, if the M-series processor for the Mac Pro is among the best performing CPUs in the world - which it may turn out to be - that these processors would be virtually inaccessible in the server space in any relevant way. It seems like something which should not result from a free market. I wonder how "usage" is defined here: for instance, if I run a managed service on a fleet of Macs in the cloud, which serves many end customers from each machine, is this allowed under the terms?
    - ghaff 6y ago
      >if I run a managed service on a fleet of Macs in the cloud, which serves many end customers from each machine, is this allowed under the terms? IANAL (and haven't read the full EULA) but probably. The 24 hour restriction seems to apply to leasing. I would assume that running a multi-tenant managed service (or, for that matter, serving web pages) from a Mac would not be seen as leasing.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    > It seems to me that the licensing situation—you have to lease a whole machine for a minimum period of 24 hours—will make the Mac Pro a poor choice in most contexts Not necessarily. A Mac Pro would work well for single-tenant usage where you want to run a series of applications that can each burst to the whole machine but not take long to finish.
jbverschoor 6y ago
They will...
rnantes 6y ago
I could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud Computing platform within the next 2 years. - They would be vertically integrated with Apple Silicon - Apple themselves are increasingly depending on cloud services - Async/Await in Swift will likely land next year, making Server-Side Swift much more appealing - Apple is greatly increasing cloud / Kubernetes hires - Could share a single Apple Silicon ARM architecture from client(ios) to dev(mac) to cloud
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  I’m dubious. The only way I could see this happening is if it was some companion platform for iCloud/iOS apps. I just don’t understand what anyone has to gain from Apple making an “open” cloud platform.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  > I could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud Computing platform within the next 2 years. Apple, as a company, does not "do" long-term support; they're the anti-Microsoft when it comes to backwards compatibility. As soon as you start being an infrastructure service provider that means you HAVE to offer an LTSB branch of your OS, and Apple does not want to do that (and macOS has stagnated a lot since Apple devoted most of their OS engineering efforts to iOS). Apple doesn't offer a "real" server OS SKU at all (the "macOS Server" app package is for SOHO management, not for use as a high-availability application server OS). ...which means that Apple would have to provide an offering using Linux or BSD - such as a "naked" Darwin distro - but again, Apple does not want to have to support that, and I'm sure devs don't want to see the IaaS OS scene fragment further, and Darwin is far, far removed from being yet another Linux distro. Amazon offers ARM cloud systems - why should Apple risk their profitability by competing in an arena that doesn't pose any risk to their bottom-line? And what do they have to gain?
  - e40 6y ago
    This is the fly in the oinment. I would love to see Apple have an LTS branch of macOS, but I just don't see this happening. Too much would need to change in the company for that to happen. From a macOS developer's standpoint, it's really a huge PITA there is no LTS. But, we adjust. Because we have a low-level product (compiler), we sometimes get into a situation where we need to sunset a product before we would normally do that, just because the older product doesn't run on the supported macOS versions. Doesn't happen often, but it does happen.
AlphaSite 6y ago
I think with their recent hiring spree for core K8s contributors and another factor they may well do. It’s something they’ve dipped their toes into in the past for iCloud services. If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud services where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud, so I could see them extending that model to a time slice of compute as well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the previous model was too limited for most use cases, but it’s not fundamentally broken. I don’t think the economics of the M1 with 32+ cores make sense unless they go down the route of either build a cloud platform and amortise the cost of the chip design over a larger number of devices (or a chip let approach, but I’m not sure this matches their general design approach). Also I’m pretty sure they think they have a competitive advantage over traditional x86 and ARM vendors so they’ll likely want to strike while that still holds.
- kbenson 6y ago
  > If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud services where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud, so I could see them extending that model to a time slice of compute as well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the previous model was too limited for most use cases, but it’s not fundamentally broken. The average Apple consumer customer can make plenty of use of cloud storage. What use does the average user have for cloud compute resources? Unless Apple starts offloading some processing to the cloud, and gives them some free, I'm not sure how regular users would use this, and offering it for free assuming the majority of people won't use it is just asking for some popular app to come along that takes advantage of that and screws up the economics. Not to mention people probably won't be happy to have a limit and pay for overage use for stuff that is likely provided by free on other platforms (if Google Photos prettifies your photos for free and Apple does it through metered compute with some given free, that's bad optics).
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    Also, Apple has quite a lot of effort into specifically running things locally rather than in the cloud. For example, Photos.app does all its facial recognition and 'Memory' creation locally.
  - 6y ago
bradknowles 6y ago
Apple had rack-mount servers. They got rid of them. I don’t know the exact reasons why, but I assume it’s because there weren’t enough people buying them and they couldn’t make enough profit on building and supporting them. I did find it interesting that Apple took the entire last run of that hardware for themselves, so that they could run their own internal VMware clusters on real Apple hardware for their developers. There’s no way that Apple could build an AMI to run on hardware designed and built by someone else. Apple has a small number of people who really know what they’re doing, and they get shifted around to whatever project Apple thinks is most important — whether that’s hardware or software. Apple needs to own the whole enchilada here, for multiple reasons. So, they can sell Apple hardware to AWS for inclusion inside of AWS data centers. But it has to be real-deal Apple hardware, running real-deal Apple OS, even if it is under a hyper visor like VMWare.

throwaway4good 6y ago

Makes you wonder what kind of hardware Apple is using for all their own cloud services (web, mail, messaging, icloud etc.).

vondur 6y ago
Don’t they use AWS like everyone else?
- kortilla 6y ago
  Big tech companies with large bandwidth requirements don’t use AWS. Netflix doesn’t use AWS for video, Facebook doesn’t use AWS for most stuff, Google and Microsoft obviously don’t now because of competition but they didn’t before GCP and Azure were things.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  They used to rely heavily on AWS and Azure, but they've moved a lot in-house now.
  - Crash0v3rid3 6y ago
    Apple has been using GCP and AWS for years. My understanding was they ditched Azure.
ruffrey 6y ago
Apple has a self host cloud division as well as AWS according to news reports. Unclear if they run on Linux but it seems likely they must, even a bit if using AWS. Theoretically they could probably upload custom AMIs with macOS.
- sl1ck731 6y ago
  I don't believe its possible to get macOS (or atleast wasn't) onto an AMI in anyway.
  - rescbr 6y ago
    I'd say it is possible to run Darwin on AWS, but I have never tried. FreeBSD runs well, so we know that any OS with drivers will boot on AWS. They're Apple after all, so they can build macOS to boot from a standard environment - UEFI, kernel that doesn't check the copy prevention string on SMBIOS, etc. Us, mere mortals, are more restricted, as we don't have the keys of the kingdom.
- Crash0v3rid3 6y ago
  Apple uses GCP as well as AWS.
IST-Throwaway 6y ago
When I was there, a variety of brands of hardware, mostly running RHEL. In fact running OS-X in datacenters was verboten, and eventually limited to a couple of small racks running on their own network segments where you could put in a mac pro if desperately needed to.
- wayne 6y ago
  Somewhat surprising since unlike their customers, there's no license restriction to Apple running macOS on different hardware. Maybe they didn't want to maintain a separate fork only for internal use. And having their own OS makes it more challenging to port apps to AWS/Azure.
  - watermelon0 6y ago
    The real question is how would this be beneficial to them? Almost everyone runs production systems on either Linux or Windows, so they would be an outlier, and the only one debugging and contributing to the operating system/libraries/etc. I've read before on HN about people using Mac hardware in production, when they needed access to macOS graphics API, but since this only concerns a software implementation, and hardware was standard until M1 processors, it's reasonable to assume that Apple could port that part of OS to Linux, if they needed to use it from servers.
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  "Running OS-X in datacenters was verboten" Why?
  - cma 6y ago
    Maybe they didn't want to run into a tech debt thing of "we can't push this update to consumers even though it would cause no issues for them, because it would break X and Y on our backend servers and the two would have to diverge for some time until we come up with a fix."
  - toast0 6y ago
    I'm not an Apple insider, but I can imagine many reasons. For one thing, the tcp stack is ancient, and easy to syn flood. (It was forked from FreeBSD in 2001ish, before FreeBSD added syncookies and syncache). Synflooding os x makes the whole network stack unresponsive, including other interfaces like localhost.
kevincox 6y ago
I'm really curious what they use for their CI. Do they compile all of their iOS apps on Apple hardware? Or do they get the luxury of using proper server hardware and software?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Lots of Mac Pros, some virtual machines.

notRobot 6y ago

Because Apple really doesn't care about anything to do with developers. It's too tiny a percentage of their user base.

api 6y ago
It's a large part of their Mac user base. That being said, I don't think Apple has enough people who would be interested in hosting on MacOS to justify an Apple cloud offering. I think they know that.
- notRobot 6y ago
  > It's a large part of their Mac user base. Is it really? Lots of devs use Macs, yes. But compared to the sheer number of regular, non-dev users, that has to be tiiiiny. I found lots of stats on the internet about what percentage of developers use Macs, but none about how just many Mac users are developers, so it'd be fascinating to see that number of anyone can find it.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    It's not about the percentage of users. Developers fuel their platform. Without developers MacOS and iOS are nothing. Apple knows this.
    - oblio 6y ago
      They definitely care about devs less than Microsoft. They know that they have a relatively captive rich user base and devs will kowtow to them in order to develop stuff they can sell to that user base. That's the real target. And you can see it by how they treat the development tools (stuff like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25563276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25563276 or the many deprecations, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562604). Or CI/CD setups using their tools.
      - 6y ago

emeraldd 6y ago

I suspect they don't believe there is a market for them or at least not enough of a market to justify the development expense. I know they've tried producing a "server" in the past and even a server version of their operating system, but it didn't seem to go anywhere. Unless they had a way to meaningfully compete with Windows and Linux (really, linux) the only viable market I can see is for build systems, and that's pretty niche.

908B64B197 6y ago
With Servers you have to maintain a good supply chain and deal with institutional buyers. It's almost a parallels business to the rest of their offering. They won't get support at the genius bar... Server OS seemed to be targeted at small businesses to run on a Mac Pro or Mac Mini connected to NAS and hosting internal applications. But it wasn't very different from regular OSX.

jrwoodruff 6y ago

They tried, but it's just not their DNA. Apple isn't a B2B enterprise company, they're a B2C consumer company that, as a side effect of their consumer success, ended up with a decent number of devices in enterprises. But they know they can't, and don't want to try, to win against the big entrenched enterprise players. https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-apple-had-to-kill-the-xserve/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-apple-had-to-kill-the-xser...

secabeen 6y ago
Yeah, they certainly don't have the right DNA on the hardware side. On the software side, they've been working a lot more closely with JAMF recently, and there's quite a bit of enterprise support in the MDM space there.
- mintone 6y ago
  Can confirm with this, when we approached Apple on MDM they all but opened an account for us with JAMF.
- mrpippy 6y ago
  They also bought Fleetsmith recently
- lostlogin 6y ago
  Apple Remote Desktop is a pretty neglected app but it’s fantastically good. It’s got so many features that make remote administration so very good.
ketamine__ 6y ago
Am I wrong to think there are workloads that can only be run on Mac? Seems like a competitive advantage.
- Macha 6y ago
  The only workloads that can only be run on a mac are those which are Apple specific, such as building/testing iOS apps.

jedberg 6y ago

One of the rules on these Macs in AWS is that you have to rent them for a minimum of 24 hours at a time and you have to rent the whole machine. I think they don't want to cannibalize Mac sales. If you want to make an iPhone app, you have to buy a Mac to do it. They don't want to make it easy for you to rent one just to compile the app.

jjeaff 6y ago
That's the only reason I need them, to compile a binary and submit it. But can apple dictate licensing terms like this? If aws buys a mac, can't they use it however they like? Or are there terms limiting this in the purchase agreement.
- kayodelycaon 6y ago
  Can Microsoft dictate the terms under which you can use their software? Some companies only charge for commercial use of their products. So the “it’s free” argument doesn’t really hold water.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Yes. Software companies dictate whether their software has to be run on a dedicate host, the allowed number of cores, etc. all of the time. Companies have tried to “rent DVDs” digitally by playing the DVD on their hardware and streaming it. It got shot down by the courts.
- est31 6y ago
  I agree that what you want to do should be possible and cheap, but generally if you build something for a platform you'd also want to test it on that platform, no? What you say implies that you compile the binary and don't test it before submitting?
  - lukeramsden 6y ago
    Automated testing should be done at CI stage, and you can submit a binary to Apple without having to send it live on the AppStore (TestFlight is for that), or you could send it to other beta distribution channels

ksec 6y ago

Well there will be a ARM Mac Pro, so hopefully that will be rack mountable. And any Cloud customer can have it hosted. I do wish they have less restriction on macOS usage timing. And a services for Web Developers to test their site on Safari. Which is currently impossible to do with buying a Mac.

theobeers 6y ago
It seems to me that the licensing situation—you have to lease a whole machine for a minimum period of 24 hours—will make the Mac Pro a poor choice in most contexts. The Mac Mini at or near its base configuration may remain the most sensible option.
- skohan 6y ago
  It would be kind of crazy to imagine, if the M-series processor for the Mac Pro is among the best performing CPUs in the world - which it may turn out to be - that these processors would be virtually inaccessible in the server space in any relevant way. It seems like something which should not result from a free market. I wonder how "usage" is defined here: for instance, if I run a managed service on a fleet of Macs in the cloud, which serves many end customers from each machine, is this allowed under the terms?
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >if I run a managed service on a fleet of Macs in the cloud, which serves many end customers from each machine, is this allowed under the terms? IANAL (and haven't read the full EULA) but probably. The 24 hour restriction seems to apply to leasing. I would assume that running a multi-tenant managed service (or, for that matter, serving web pages) from a Mac would not be seen as leasing.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  > It seems to me that the licensing situation—you have to lease a whole machine for a minimum period of 24 hours—will make the Mac Pro a poor choice in most contexts Not necessarily. A Mac Pro would work well for single-tenant usage where you want to run a series of applications that can each burst to the whole machine but not take long to finish.

jbverschoor 6y ago

They will...

rnantes 6y ago

I could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud Computing platform within the next 2 years. - They would be vertically integrated with Apple Silicon - Apple themselves are increasingly depending on cloud services - Async/Await in Swift will likely land next year, making Server-Side Swift much more appealing - Apple is greatly increasing cloud / Kubernetes hires - Could share a single Apple Silicon ARM architecture from client(ios) to dev(mac) to cloud

madeofpalk 6y ago
I’m dubious. The only way I could see this happening is if it was some companion platform for iCloud/iOS apps. I just don’t understand what anyone has to gain from Apple making an “open” cloud platform.
DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
> I could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud Computing platform within the next 2 years. Apple, as a company, does not "do" long-term support; they're the anti-Microsoft when it comes to backwards compatibility. As soon as you start being an infrastructure service provider that means you HAVE to offer an LTSB branch of your OS, and Apple does not want to do that (and macOS has stagnated a lot since Apple devoted most of their OS engineering efforts to iOS). Apple doesn't offer a "real" server OS SKU at all (the "macOS Server" app package is for SOHO management, not for use as a high-availability application server OS). ...which means that Apple would have to provide an offering using Linux or BSD - such as a "naked" Darwin distro - but again, Apple does not want to have to support that, and I'm sure devs don't want to see the IaaS OS scene fragment further, and Darwin is far, far removed from being yet another Linux distro. Amazon offers ARM cloud systems - why should Apple risk their profitability by competing in an arena that doesn't pose any risk to their bottom-line? And what do they have to gain?
- e40 6y ago
  This is the fly in the oinment. I would love to see Apple have an LTS branch of macOS, but I just don't see this happening. Too much would need to change in the company for that to happen. From a macOS developer's standpoint, it's really a huge PITA there is no LTS. But, we adjust. Because we have a low-level product (compiler), we sometimes get into a situation where we need to sunset a product before we would normally do that, just because the older product doesn't run on the supported macOS versions. Doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

AlphaSite 6y ago

I think with their recent hiring spree for core K8s contributors and another factor they may well do. It’s something they’ve dipped their toes into in the past for iCloud services. If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud services where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud, so I could see them extending that model to a time slice of compute as well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the previous model was too limited for most use cases, but it’s not fundamentally broken. I don’t think the economics of the M1 with 32+ cores make sense unless they go down the route of either build a cloud platform and amortise the cost of the chip design over a larger number of devices (or a chip let approach, but I’m not sure this matches their general design approach). Also I’m pretty sure they think they have a competitive advantage over traditional x86 and ARM vendors so they’ll likely want to strike while that still holds.

kbenson 6y ago
> If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud services where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud, so I could see them extending that model to a time slice of compute as well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the previous model was too limited for most use cases, but it’s not fundamentally broken. The average Apple consumer customer can make plenty of use of cloud storage. What use does the average user have for cloud compute resources? Unless Apple starts offloading some processing to the cloud, and gives them some free, I'm not sure how regular users would use this, and offering it for free assuming the majority of people won't use it is just asking for some popular app to come along that takes advantage of that and screws up the economics. Not to mention people probably won't be happy to have a limit and pay for overage use for stuff that is likely provided by free on other platforms (if Google Photos prettifies your photos for free and Apple does it through metered compute with some given free, that's bad optics).
- crooked-v 6y ago
  Also, Apple has quite a lot of effort into specifically running things locally rather than in the cloud. For example, Photos.app does all its facial recognition and 'Memory' creation locally.
- 6y ago

bradknowles 6y ago

Apple had rack-mount servers. They got rid of them. I don’t know the exact reasons why, but I assume it’s because there weren’t enough people buying them and they couldn’t make enough profit on building and supporting them. I did find it interesting that Apple took the entire last run of that hardware for themselves, so that they could run their own internal VMware clusters on real Apple hardware for their developers. There’s no way that Apple could build an AMI to run on hardware designed and built by someone else. Apple has a small number of people who really know what they’re doing, and they get shifted around to whatever project Apple thinks is most important — whether that’s hardware or software. Apple needs to own the whole enchilada here, for multiple reasons. So, they can sell Apple hardware to AWS for inclusion inside of AWS data centers. But it has to be real-deal Apple hardware, running real-deal Apple OS, even if it is under a hyper visor like VMWare.