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The virtualization stuff and extreme energy efficiency are reason enough for Apple to get back into servers. There’s also the rack mount Mac Pro. The thing is,

The virtualization stuff and extreme energy efficiency are reason enough for Apple to get back into servers. There’s also the rack mount Mac Pro. The thing is, many server use cases would benefit from remove a lot of macOS end-user user-space fluff. Apple would want to reintroduce something like standalone Darwin images but with the Apple virtualization framework added back in. I don’t think Apple will do any of this soon, but a business deploying thousands of Macs may want Mac servers.

dangus 3y ago
There’s a reason Mac minis 1. Still exist 2. Have a 10Gb Ethernet option for a computer that is supposedly a desktop ideal for Grandma’s emails. Apple knows that people use them as servers.
cedws 3y ago
Apple don't even have to sell server hardware. They could build an IaaS service relatively easily and undercut every existing cloud Mac company on price. Easy win for next quarter profits too. Maybe they don't want to be a cloud provider, but they're missing out on a lot of money.
- xvector 3y ago
  At least when I used to work at Apple ~4 years ago, our internal clouds were nowhere near the robustness needed to open up to the public. Poor security/isolation controls, outages, clunky usage, etc. Apple's cloud software engineering muscle is fairly weak and providing an IaaS might be "easy" for the hardware side of the company, but very difficult for the software side.
  - Cheer2171 3y ago
    But why couldn't they build out that capability? They could go on a hiring spree with all their cash and the state of the tech job market. Apple often goes into new market areas. Surely Apple is farther along in the cloud services game than they were in the VR game when they decided to go all-in into VR, or same for wearables, phones, music...
    - jrockway 3y ago
      Does Apple want to spend a lot of money to be #5 in the cloud after AWS, GCP, Azure, and Oracle? Who is going to switch? I feel like all of the big spenders on those platforms are there because they got the best sales pitch (best basketball seats, best steak dinners, etc.) My last job was at a tiny startup for 4 software engineers and we picked AWS because of that. As the people using the platform, we hated AWS after they consistently messed up our account in every possible way despite paying $700/month for support... but they routinely took our sales team (???) out for dinner, so we never switched to GCP. (I used GCP at my next/current job and they are ... weird. But we used their managed K8s service in a very weird way and they were very supportive when we escalated things.)
      - latchkey 3y ago
        GCP is weird cause you're weird?
        jrockway 3y ago
        OK I'm definitely weird and that's not Google's fault. Well, maybe a little. No, the support situation is weird. You have to have a contract with some third-party company, in our case, SADA. You then send all your support requests to them, and if they deem it necessary, they escalate it to Google. I feel like we always stumped them and then a person with a google.com email would be cc'd and instantly give us a good answer. SADA was very chill, though. Pretty competent in general except for their weird account enrollment system (which I had to deal with any time someone joined my team). The weird thing that we were doing was creating 100s of managed Kubernetes clusters a day. We make an open-source app that runs on Kubernetes and tried to have a cloud offering, and this provided the best isolation between customers. People would sign up, and then we built all the infrastructure for them from scratch. (The AWS way is to have the customer give you their AWS account ID, and then they would pay for all the infrastructure themselves. But for whatever reason, GCP didn't seem to have that option, and honestly our best customers were all too "new" to the cloud to have a routine AWS bill. So it worked for us, and whenever cluster creation was glitchy, GCP was happy to help us. What we were doing was unusual, but since we always paid on time, I guess, they were not mad about it or anything. I did offer to CC them on our cluster-creation monitoring alerts and they declined ;) Anyway, what I thought was weird was that with AWS, AWS is your support contract. With Google, it's some other company entirely. That'd kind of weird, right? You buy something from Vendor X and then when the product doesn't work, you talk to Vendor X. But with Google, we were too small potatoes for them to be worth talking to us for. But if something got escalated to them, they were very nice about it. (What's extra crazy to me is that I used to work on Google Fiber, and we had great support for people paying them much less than we were paying. Want to call someone and talk about how you're scared about viruses for 45 minutes? Google Fiber support would listen and assuage your fears, every single time. They were great people consistently doing a great job. Not sure why GCP didn't steal them!)
  - lbourdages 3y ago
    Was it based on Macs, or all Linux boxes?
  - Kinrany 3y ago
    I wonder if Apple might want to do it because of this weakness. Build a new public cloud from scratch, feed it with money that comes from a new source, migrate internal services onto it once the public has tested it enough to fix most of the bugs.
  - bradknowles 3y ago
    When I did a contract to deliver a Jenkins CI/CD server for Apple Retail Engineering, their entire internal cloud was basically just VMware running on the last full batch of Apple rack-mount XServe machines. So, not exactly something that I would consider competitive against the likes of Azure or AWS. In fact, AWS now sells services where you can bring your VMware internal clouds over to be officially supported by VMware on AWS.
keepamovin 3y ago
Would it be at all possible for another business to do this, instead of Apple? if for not other reason than that being perhaps the most likely way to actually compel apple to do it themselves, hahaha! :)
- bombcar 3y ago
  Apple doesn’t license macOS to run on anything but genuine Apple hardware. Which is why these racks of minis always keep popping up.
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    OK, but would it be possible to rvng it to run? I guess that would be illegal, but...just like with software piracy...if it's possible, it will be done....what's stopping someone setting up a data center in a more permissive part of the world and running images on whatever hardware they like?
    - bombcar 3y ago
      I’m sure it’s happening - hackentoshes have existed forever - but ARM makes that harder and I doubt paying customers want tos some the relatively smallish amount. I’ve always been suspicious that some of the cheaper “rent a Mac mini VM” may be doing trickery with a Linux virtual machine host.
      - mdasen 3y ago
        Wouldn't this be relatively easy to test with a benchmark? Apple's ARM processors are pretty fast, especially for single-core stuff. Most data-center processors are designed for lots of cores at the cost of single-core performance. Plus, if you're using an x86 processor, you'll need to be translating ARM to x86 which is going to come at a big cost. To get plausible Mac mini benchmarks on the fastest x86 processor, you'd need overhead to be less than 25%. Plus, you'd be buying a $650 x86 processor instead of spending $600 on a Mac mini. You'd also need to think about power. That x86 processor draws 150W base and 253W peak compared to an M1 Mac mini which hits a peak of 39W. Even if you're getting pretty cheap power (5-cents per kWh), that's still $44/year in extra costs. I've used QEMU on Github's x86 runners to run Linux-ARM and it's painfully slow. It seems like it would be hard to make the economics work out well while still offering a plausible experience speed-wise.

dangus 3y ago

There’s a reason Mac minis 1. Still exist 2. Have a 10Gb Ethernet option for a computer that is supposedly a desktop ideal for Grandma’s emails. Apple knows that people use them as servers.

cedws 3y ago

Apple don't even have to sell server hardware. They could build an IaaS service relatively easily and undercut every existing cloud Mac company on price. Easy win for next quarter profits too. Maybe they don't want to be a cloud provider, but they're missing out on a lot of money.

xvector 3y ago
At least when I used to work at Apple ~4 years ago, our internal clouds were nowhere near the robustness needed to open up to the public. Poor security/isolation controls, outages, clunky usage, etc. Apple's cloud software engineering muscle is fairly weak and providing an IaaS might be "easy" for the hardware side of the company, but very difficult for the software side.
- Cheer2171 3y ago
  But why couldn't they build out that capability? They could go on a hiring spree with all their cash and the state of the tech job market. Apple often goes into new market areas. Surely Apple is farther along in the cloud services game than they were in the VR game when they decided to go all-in into VR, or same for wearables, phones, music...
  - jrockway 3y ago
    Does Apple want to spend a lot of money to be #5 in the cloud after AWS, GCP, Azure, and Oracle? Who is going to switch? I feel like all of the big spenders on those platforms are there because they got the best sales pitch (best basketball seats, best steak dinners, etc.) My last job was at a tiny startup for 4 software engineers and we picked AWS because of that. As the people using the platform, we hated AWS after they consistently messed up our account in every possible way despite paying $700/month for support... but they routinely took our sales team (???) out for dinner, so we never switched to GCP. (I used GCP at my next/current job and they are ... weird. But we used their managed K8s service in a very weird way and they were very supportive when we escalated things.)
    - latchkey 3y ago
      GCP is weird cause you're weird?
      - jrockway 3y ago
        OK I'm definitely weird and that's not Google's fault. Well, maybe a little. No, the support situation is weird. You have to have a contract with some third-party company, in our case, SADA. You then send all your support requests to them, and if they deem it necessary, they escalate it to Google. I feel like we always stumped them and then a person with a google.com email would be cc'd and instantly give us a good answer. SADA was very chill, though. Pretty competent in general except for their weird account enrollment system (which I had to deal with any time someone joined my team). The weird thing that we were doing was creating 100s of managed Kubernetes clusters a day. We make an open-source app that runs on Kubernetes and tried to have a cloud offering, and this provided the best isolation between customers. People would sign up, and then we built all the infrastructure for them from scratch. (The AWS way is to have the customer give you their AWS account ID, and then they would pay for all the infrastructure themselves. But for whatever reason, GCP didn't seem to have that option, and honestly our best customers were all too "new" to the cloud to have a routine AWS bill. So it worked for us, and whenever cluster creation was glitchy, GCP was happy to help us. What we were doing was unusual, but since we always paid on time, I guess, they were not mad about it or anything. I did offer to CC them on our cluster-creation monitoring alerts and they declined ;) Anyway, what I thought was weird was that with AWS, AWS is your support contract. With Google, it's some other company entirely. That'd kind of weird, right? You buy something from Vendor X and then when the product doesn't work, you talk to Vendor X. But with Google, we were too small potatoes for them to be worth talking to us for. But if something got escalated to them, they were very nice about it. (What's extra crazy to me is that I used to work on Google Fiber, and we had great support for people paying them much less than we were paying. Want to call someone and talk about how you're scared about viruses for 45 minutes? Google Fiber support would listen and assuage your fears, every single time. They were great people consistently doing a great job. Not sure why GCP didn't steal them!)
- lbourdages 3y ago
  Was it based on Macs, or all Linux boxes?
- Kinrany 3y ago
  I wonder if Apple might want to do it because of this weakness. Build a new public cloud from scratch, feed it with money that comes from a new source, migrate internal services onto it once the public has tested it enough to fix most of the bugs.
- bradknowles 3y ago
  When I did a contract to deliver a Jenkins CI/CD server for Apple Retail Engineering, their entire internal cloud was basically just VMware running on the last full batch of Apple rack-mount XServe machines. So, not exactly something that I would consider competitive against the likes of Azure or AWS. In fact, AWS now sells services where you can bring your VMware internal clouds over to be officially supported by VMware on AWS.

keepamovin 3y ago

Would it be at all possible for another business to do this, instead of Apple? if for not other reason than that being perhaps the most likely way to actually compel apple to do it themselves, hahaha! :)

bombcar 3y ago
Apple doesn’t license macOS to run on anything but genuine Apple hardware. Which is why these racks of minis always keep popping up.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  OK, but would it be possible to rvng it to run? I guess that would be illegal, but...just like with software piracy...if it's possible, it will be done....what's stopping someone setting up a data center in a more permissive part of the world and running images on whatever hardware they like?
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I’m sure it’s happening - hackentoshes have existed forever - but ARM makes that harder and I doubt paying customers want tos some the relatively smallish amount. I’ve always been suspicious that some of the cheaper “rent a Mac mini VM” may be doing trickery with a Linux virtual machine host.
    - mdasen 3y ago
      Wouldn't this be relatively easy to test with a benchmark? Apple's ARM processors are pretty fast, especially for single-core stuff. Most data-center processors are designed for lots of cores at the cost of single-core performance. Plus, if you're using an x86 processor, you'll need to be translating ARM to x86 which is going to come at a big cost. To get plausible Mac mini benchmarks on the fastest x86 processor, you'd need overhead to be less than 25%. Plus, you'd be buying a $650 x86 processor instead of spending $600 on a Mac mini. You'd also need to think about power. That x86 processor draws 150W base and 253W peak compared to an M1 Mac mini which hits a peak of 39W. Even if you're getting pretty cheap power (5-cents per kWh), that's still $44/year in extra costs. I've used QEMU on Github's x86 runners to run Linux-ARM and it's painfully slow. It seems like it would be hard to make the economics work out well while still offering a plausible experience speed-wise.