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I wonder when will be the time when Apple themselves just give in and create something like a M core Xserve. They stopped selling them as they weren't popular,

I wonder when will be the time when Apple themselves just give in and create something like a M core Xserve. They stopped selling them as they weren't popular, but at that time Macs simply weren't popular. Apple themselves would make good use of the Xserve for their own internal use rather than buying Dell/HP servers like they currently do. Also things like Xcode cloud are currently running on x86 commodity servers, in the future Apple likely will stop supporting x86 altogether and it makes sense to run it on AS. They could reuse the high-end Mac Studio or similar chips and only have a custom board and chassis suitable for server use, with additional IO and redundancy. And for those saying that Apple isn't interested in large deloyments, they literally make the Mac Pro in rackmount form for render farms and so forth. The Mac Mini has 10G ethernet and the formfactor purposely hasn't changed. The chips are efficient enought that you don't need screaming loud 1U fans and they could definitely create a quiet 1U Studio suitable for both dense datacenter deployments and a TV studio technician's rack.

leonheld 3y ago
> rather than buying Dell/HP servers like they currently do I wonder what kind of software/OS they run on those machines.
- mysteria 3y ago
  AFAIK it's simple virtualized x86 MacOS. Their EULA doesn't apply to them of course so they can run it on whatever they like.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    EULA for thee, but not for me!
xattt 3y ago
My understanding was that Xserve, and the corresponding OS X Server, were discontinued because performance for Apple-rolled server software sucked ass. There were at least a few threads on Apple’s forums where people were redirected to community-supported software. There is a fairly strong use-case now with robust software, but I feel like Apple wants to maintain an illusion that their developers are small mom-and-pop shops with a Mac Mini in corner of their farmhouse.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  macOS also lacks some fairly basic server features. Last time I looked the kernel didn't do SYN cookies for example.
orenlindsey 3y ago
Apple just needs to make it easier to install Linux on these machines. Or, make their own server software that's "good enough". Like OS X server but actually good. But I doubt they would do this well. It would be way, way too expensive and probably not have upgradeable RAM.
dijit 3y ago
> they literally make the Mac Pro in rackmount form for render farms and so forth The rackmounted Mac Pro is actually intended to be used amongst other rackmounted audio equipment in Studios. FWIW. That it can be used for both is a nice accident, but it's not well optimised for a render farm. Not that this matters really as it can be used this way so they can still get access to this market.
amelius 3y ago
Tim Cook's Apple is a consumer electronics company, so forget it.
lwkl 3y ago
Apple doesn't want to be in the server market and I don't think that will change any time soon. They would have to either build a whole new organisation for that or use resources that go into their consumer products like the iPhone to build servers. > They could reuse the high-end Mac Studio or similar chips and only have a custom board and chassis suitable for server use, with additional IO and redundancy. 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. > they literally make the Mac Pro in rackmount form for render farms and so forth. The Mac Pro has a rack mount version is not for the server room. People use racks in audio and video production too and that's where you will probably find most of the rack mounted Mac Pros. You can probably fit 2 CPUs and 4 - 8 GPUs in the space a Mac Pro takes in your datacenter. So why would you choose a Mac Pro over that?
- markonen 3y ago
  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.
- tomcam 3y ago
  > 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.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    > 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.
markphip 3y ago
I wonder if the system on a chip design of Apple Silicon would work for servers. Would it just be a special packaging that crammed several Mac mini boards into a rack mounted chassis? If so, then they would just be repeating what others are already doing. The RAM being part of the chip seems like a limiter to scaling up to a server model with a lot of cores and RAM in a single blade. Not saying this is not all doable just that it probably requires design and investment they otherwise do not have any desire to do.
- devrand 3y ago
  Even if they just replicate what these companies are doing I think there's two main benefits: 1. less waste. The entire case is being thrown away immediately by these volume consumers. All the packaging and what not is also wasted. 2. easier/cheaper deployment. Companies are already paying their employees to design replacement cases, control boards, etc. and getting them built at relatively small scales. Then they're paying them to shuck and transplant from the Mac Minis. Apple could probably charge a >50% premium for their solution vs the equivalent number of Mac Minis and companies would jump on it. Additionally, at least in my experience, the headaches and fixed costs of deploying these machines means companies refresh them far less often than other hardware. It's totally possible that companies would refresh more frequently if Apple just sold something easier to deploy.
Almondsetat 3y ago
Apple already books all of TSMC's bleeding edge nodes for the consumer market. How can they possibly start selling equivalent server hardware?
- bee_rider 3y ago
  A slightly tweaked “server” version (more ram in the package) of their chip from the previous TSMC node could be an interesting way to use up some non-bleeding-edge capacity.
grecy 3y ago
I wonder how much power they would save in their own data centres by switching to Apple Silicon. Surely it would be astronomical
runjake 3y ago
> in the future Apple likely will stop supporting x86 altogether and it makes sense to run it on AS Nearly all of that backend Apple infra runs on Linux and (formerly?) Solaris.
- runlevel1 3y ago
  As of a few years ago, an Apple employee told me they were primarily running on OEL (Oracle's Red Hat-based Linux). As for why Oracle: I think they said something along the lines of Oracle indemnifying them -- or being best equipped to mount a defense -- in a software licensing lawsuit.
kalleboo 3y ago
They don't have the bandwidth to do it. They can't keep up in hardware design, CPU manufacturing (TSMC throughput), software, anything. They're running on all cylinders just trying to release a new phone, new OSes every year and in addition to that chasing the dream of creating some kind of new category (TV, watch, cars, VR headset) that they can't afford to assign engineers to something mundane that they can silently outsource. Unlike companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft they are institutionally afraid of over-hiring and losing their culture. This is a conservative tradeoff where they may lose the ability to grow seemingly "small" markets (small=anything smaller than the iPhone) in favor of not losing their culture (becoming a Google or Meta which just squanders every opportunity)
- ISL 3y ago
  A trillion dollars makes many things possible.
keepamovin 3y ago
I'm wondering when Apple is going to publicly release it's Cloud offering to compete with Azure, AWS, etc! :)
- pjmlp 3y ago
  That is what they kind of do with XClound and iCloud based services.
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    What is xcloud?
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      A typo, I should have written Xcode Cloud, https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/ https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/

leonheld 3y ago

> rather than buying Dell/HP servers like they currently do I wonder what kind of software/OS they run on those machines.

mysteria 3y ago
AFAIK it's simple virtualized x86 MacOS. Their EULA doesn't apply to them of course so they can run it on whatever they like.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  EULA for thee, but not for me!

xattt 3y ago

My understanding was that Xserve, and the corresponding OS X Server, were discontinued because performance for Apple-rolled server software sucked ass. There were at least a few threads on Apple’s forums where people were redirected to community-supported software. There is a fairly strong use-case now with robust software, but I feel like Apple wants to maintain an illusion that their developers are small mom-and-pop shops with a Mac Mini in corner of their farmhouse.

mike_hearn 3y ago
macOS also lacks some fairly basic server features. Last time I looked the kernel didn't do SYN cookies for example.

orenlindsey 3y ago

Apple just needs to make it easier to install Linux on these machines. Or, make their own server software that's "good enough". Like OS X server but actually good. But I doubt they would do this well. It would be way, way too expensive and probably not have upgradeable RAM.

dijit 3y ago

> they literally make the Mac Pro in rackmount form for render farms and so forth The rackmounted Mac Pro is actually intended to be used amongst other rackmounted audio equipment in Studios. FWIW. That it can be used for both is a nice accident, but it's not well optimised for a render farm. Not that this matters really as it can be used this way so they can still get access to this market.

amelius 3y ago

Tim Cook's Apple is a consumer electronics company, so forget it.

lwkl 3y ago

Apple doesn't want to be in the server market and I don't think that will change any time soon. They would have to either build a whole new organisation for that or use resources that go into their consumer products like the iPhone to build servers. > They could reuse the high-end Mac Studio or similar chips and only have a custom board and chassis suitable for server use, with additional IO and redundancy. 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. > they literally make the Mac Pro in rackmount form for render farms and so forth. The Mac Pro has a rack mount version is not for the server room. People use racks in audio and video production too and that's where you will probably find most of the rack mounted Mac Pros. You can probably fit 2 CPUs and 4 - 8 GPUs in the space a Mac Pro takes in your datacenter. So why would you choose a Mac Pro over that?

markonen 3y ago
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.
tomcam 3y ago
> 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.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  > 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.

markphip 3y ago

I wonder if the system on a chip design of Apple Silicon would work for servers. Would it just be a special packaging that crammed several Mac mini boards into a rack mounted chassis? If so, then they would just be repeating what others are already doing. The RAM being part of the chip seems like a limiter to scaling up to a server model with a lot of cores and RAM in a single blade. Not saying this is not all doable just that it probably requires design and investment they otherwise do not have any desire to do.

devrand 3y ago
Even if they just replicate what these companies are doing I think there's two main benefits: 1. less waste. The entire case is being thrown away immediately by these volume consumers. All the packaging and what not is also wasted. 2. easier/cheaper deployment. Companies are already paying their employees to design replacement cases, control boards, etc. and getting them built at relatively small scales. Then they're paying them to shuck and transplant from the Mac Minis. Apple could probably charge a >50% premium for their solution vs the equivalent number of Mac Minis and companies would jump on it. Additionally, at least in my experience, the headaches and fixed costs of deploying these machines means companies refresh them far less often than other hardware. It's totally possible that companies would refresh more frequently if Apple just sold something easier to deploy.

Almondsetat 3y ago

Apple already books all of TSMC's bleeding edge nodes for the consumer market. How can they possibly start selling equivalent server hardware?

bee_rider 3y ago
A slightly tweaked “server” version (more ram in the package) of their chip from the previous TSMC node could be an interesting way to use up some non-bleeding-edge capacity.

grecy 3y ago

I wonder how much power they would save in their own data centres by switching to Apple Silicon. Surely it would be astronomical

runjake 3y ago

> in the future Apple likely will stop supporting x86 altogether and it makes sense to run it on AS Nearly all of that backend Apple infra runs on Linux and (formerly?) Solaris.

runlevel1 3y ago
As of a few years ago, an Apple employee told me they were primarily running on OEL (Oracle's Red Hat-based Linux). As for why Oracle: I think they said something along the lines of Oracle indemnifying them -- or being best equipped to mount a defense -- in a software licensing lawsuit.

kalleboo 3y ago

They don't have the bandwidth to do it. They can't keep up in hardware design, CPU manufacturing (TSMC throughput), software, anything. They're running on all cylinders just trying to release a new phone, new OSes every year and in addition to that chasing the dream of creating some kind of new category (TV, watch, cars, VR headset) that they can't afford to assign engineers to something mundane that they can silently outsource. Unlike companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft they are institutionally afraid of over-hiring and losing their culture. This is a conservative tradeoff where they may lose the ability to grow seemingly "small" markets (small=anything smaller than the iPhone) in favor of not losing their culture (becoming a Google or Meta which just squanders every opportunity)

ISL 3y ago
A trillion dollars makes many things possible.

keepamovin 3y ago

I'm wondering when Apple is going to publicly release it's Cloud offering to compete with Azure, AWS, etc! :)

pjmlp 3y ago
That is what they kind of do with XClound and iCloud based services.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  What is xcloud?
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    A typo, I should have written Xcode Cloud, https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/ https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/