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Do we think Apple will once again sell servers to customers? I guess they could sell servers to customers who want to run the latest Apple Intelligence models

Do we think Apple will once again sell servers to customers? I guess they could sell servers to customers who want to run the latest Apple Intelligence models on-prem, even though that probably wouldn't make much of a difference, since you probably still have to trust Apple.

newsclues 2y ago
1u boxes or Mac Mini "servers"?
- simondotau 2y ago
  It would make sense for Apple to fork their next highest-end Mac Studio motherboard, make relatively minor changes to it (e.g. add a higher bandwidth NIC and strip out unnecessary I/O) then wrap multiples of those into a rack mount chassis, with commodity-grade cooling and power supply solutions appropriate for the context. Combined with a properly headless fork of their OS stack (think Darwin, not OS X Server) they could spin up a highly competitive solution using entirely "B-team" resources.
  - newsclues 2y ago
    Lots of interesting things Apple could do with their resources. A modern version of the Xserve RAID for high speed flash storage could be very interesting. The Mac Mini could be used as small blades. or they could do something really wild, like take the Oxide rack scale approach and make something big for DCs. But they might also want to get a piece of the prosumer homelab market that Ubiquiti is in?
  - rickdeckard 2y ago
    ...then it would be piped through their design-council, run through 5 more iterations to get a unique unibody case for it, accompanied by an optional proprietary Apple rack and a price-tag triple of the competition. That's along the lines of how it usually rolls whenever Apple tries to make something purely utilitarian, it's the most considerate and "fresh" look at a product, but ultimately designed to be used and then disposed when finished. A purely utilitarian IT-appliance without a individual end-user doesn't seem to be possible in their product pipeline, you usually end up with something "Prosumer": Impressive on its own, yet of degraded maintainability and scalability. It's like asking Bugatti to design a public transport bus. It would surely be an impressive bus, but not one you would want to maintain over years at a scale of hundreds.
h0l0cube 2y ago
I'm pretty sure this is for their own infra. FTA: > Apple said that it, together with Foxconn Technology Group, will later this year begin producing the servers that power the cloud component of Apple Intelligence — a system called Private Cloud Compute — in Houston. That marks a relocation, at least for some production, from overseas. Next year, it says a 250,000-square-foot facility for such manufacturing will open in the city. [...] > Apple will also expand data center capacity in Arizona, Oregon, Iowa, Nevada and North Carolina, all states with existing Apple capacity. The company confirmed that mass production of chips started at a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. facility in Arizona last month. Bloomberg News recently reported that plant is building chips for some Apple Watches and iPads.
willtemperley 2y ago
I think they might build a cloud offering. Something like Cloudflare workers but AI centric, perhaps running Swift on the Apple equivalent of V8 isolates. Makes sense from a business perspective - there's significant growth potential for them as their presence in web tech is approximately nil.
badlibrarian 2y ago
The Apple TV box (2021) is $129 with 3 GB RAM and 8 GB flash. Not hard to see where that could go.
philistine 2y ago
They will sell servers to customers ... as an add-on to iCloud. Apple now offers access to Apple Intelligence Pro at 9.99$ a month.

newsclues 2y ago

1u boxes or Mac Mini "servers"?

simondotau 2y ago
It would make sense for Apple to fork their next highest-end Mac Studio motherboard, make relatively minor changes to it (e.g. add a higher bandwidth NIC and strip out unnecessary I/O) then wrap multiples of those into a rack mount chassis, with commodity-grade cooling and power supply solutions appropriate for the context. Combined with a properly headless fork of their OS stack (think Darwin, not OS X Server) they could spin up a highly competitive solution using entirely "B-team" resources.
- newsclues 2y ago
  Lots of interesting things Apple could do with their resources. A modern version of the Xserve RAID for high speed flash storage could be very interesting. The Mac Mini could be used as small blades. or they could do something really wild, like take the Oxide rack scale approach and make something big for DCs. But they might also want to get a piece of the prosumer homelab market that Ubiquiti is in?
- rickdeckard 2y ago
  ...then it would be piped through their design-council, run through 5 more iterations to get a unique unibody case for it, accompanied by an optional proprietary Apple rack and a price-tag triple of the competition. That's along the lines of how it usually rolls whenever Apple tries to make something purely utilitarian, it's the most considerate and "fresh" look at a product, but ultimately designed to be used and then disposed when finished. A purely utilitarian IT-appliance without a individual end-user doesn't seem to be possible in their product pipeline, you usually end up with something "Prosumer": Impressive on its own, yet of degraded maintainability and scalability. It's like asking Bugatti to design a public transport bus. It would surely be an impressive bus, but not one you would want to maintain over years at a scale of hundreds.

h0l0cube 2y ago

I'm pretty sure this is for their own infra. FTA: > Apple said that it, together with Foxconn Technology Group, will later this year begin producing the servers that power the cloud component of Apple Intelligence — a system called Private Cloud Compute — in Houston. That marks a relocation, at least for some production, from overseas. Next year, it says a 250,000-square-foot facility for such manufacturing will open in the city. [...] > Apple will also expand data center capacity in Arizona, Oregon, Iowa, Nevada and North Carolina, all states with existing Apple capacity. The company confirmed that mass production of chips started at a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. facility in Arizona last month. Bloomberg News recently reported that plant is building chips for some Apple Watches and iPads.

willtemperley 2y ago

I think they might build a cloud offering. Something like Cloudflare workers but AI centric, perhaps running Swift on the Apple equivalent of V8 isolates. Makes sense from a business perspective - there's significant growth potential for them as their presence in web tech is approximately nil.

badlibrarian 2y ago

The Apple TV box (2021) is $129 with 3 GB RAM and 8 GB flash. Not hard to see where that could go.

philistine 2y ago

They will sell servers to customers ... as an add-on to iCloud. Apple now offers access to Apple Intelligence Pro at 9.99$ a month.