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You know what's even more mind-blowing about Apple? They've resolutely stayed far away from the server market. Apple computers just won't be found serving web
by AStonesThrow 1y ago
You know what's even more mind-blowing about Apple?
They've resolutely stayed far away from the server market. Apple computers just won't be found serving web pages, operating cloud services, hosting storage arrays or anything. There are no rackmount Apples, no back-office Apples. They're all-in on the consumer market, and really concentrating on home users. Apples used in business settings work because of their high quality and excellent integration, and in spite of their non-enterprise focus.
If you try to spin up a macOS VM in the cloud, Avril Lavigne's band will invade your data center, and they will roll up to the most impressive rack, and film a music video there.
How many Unix workstations in a museum were from brands who were slummin' it, because they put big iron in every existing data center, and leveraged their resources to miniaturize all that and bring a mainframe or mini to every engineer's desk?
Also, Apple managed to tackle and really solve many features where Unix has a bad reputation. GUI/UX integration; hardware interfaces such as audiovisual, multimedia; software installation and management; sandboxing and strict access control for untrusted apps; integrated backup solutions.
Yes, it's mind-blowing that their "unofficial motto", "It Just Works" can be applied to something under the hood (FreeBSD) that is better known as the realm of tinkerers, hobbyists, and people whose tower PCs have excellent ventilation, because they don't even bother to fasten the case to the chassis anymore.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoThey used to sell racks. Incidentally a lot of people buy mac minis for a homeserver utilizing the thunderbolt for a DAS. I believe this is still the only “first party” way to use a remote server for time machine backups. People seem to complain about headaches trying to get it to work over samba with linux servers but apple lets you specify another mac end point for time machine cleanly in their gui.
- _mlbt 1y agoApple still sells Mac Pros in rack mountable form factor. They also sold rack mountable Mac servers known as Xserves for nearly a decade... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve
- AStonesThrow 1y agoOkay, shall we start a new meme about "The Year of macOS in the Data Center (2010)"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server#Discontinuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server#Discontinuatio... It appears that Apple ensures that enterprise/server use cases remain safe, legal, and rare. My estimates of zero rackmounts and zero servers was an exaggeration, but I'm curious if the comparative percentage rises beyond a single digit. I must confess: I yearn for the days when AppleTalk was an absolutely amazing peer-to-peer networking solution, and when it ran rings around anyone trying to cobble together an ad hoc 10Base2 LAN in their office.
- jtotheh 1y agoI do this (use a mini for hosting time machine backups). I have them on external drives, I have two and switch between them weekly, keeping the other one at a friend's house.
- rbanffy 1y ago> People seem to complain about headaches trying to get it to work over samba with linux servers A long time ago, when I had a bunch of 68k Macs, I had an AppleShare server running Debian. I even served MP3 files to iTunes using a DAAP service. At some point I set up a Time Machine system for the newer machines - the trick was to broadcast a specific machine type so that the Macs would recognise it.