I remember there was this short period of time around (lousy approximate timeframe) Snow Leopard where a confluence of features and hardware was suddenly available and which would have made this just within reach of Apple completely changing the game:

- There were OOTB features on Mac OS X such as web page building and publishing

- There was Mac OS X, but there was also Mac OS X Server, a full-fledged, easy(-ish) to use solution to self host mail, calendaring, and so on

- There was Bonjour a.k.a Zeroconf, not just on the LAN but global as well.

- There was Back to my Mac and most importantly the technology underneath it which was essentially a "one switch Tailscale". Combined with the above you could SSH to any of your Macs from any other Mac you were logged into wherever it might be, Back to my Mac was merely VNC'ing/SMB'ing over that private overlay network.

- There was the quite budget friendly Mac Mini

- also, Airport Express/Extreme/Time Capsule, if you had one of those BtmM would magically WoL sleeping Macs.

- The Mac App Store was introduced

- Affordable residential FTTH started rolling out widely with solid downlinks+uplinks

And around that time I was god honest thinking: "these are all pieces of the same puzzle... next step they might turn each of their server features into separate server apps, and bootstrap an app store out of it for third parties to create and publish their own server apps, and everyone and their dog could have their own server of anything at home"

Instead things were dialled up to 11 towards datacenters.

Basically a Mac Server would have fixed 99% of our needs. Apple could make a Local iCloud Server / iOS Time Capsule where I still have all the content, but would require a subscription just for the backup services. And Apple could charge 3x the Amazon Cold Storage pricing just for reselling it.

I do think this is within realm of possibility if Steve Jobs is still alive. Or at least could be convinced.

Tim Coo only cares about services revenue. And iCloud it is.

SheevaPlugs [0] circa 2009 were perhaps a better promise of the age of self-hosting.

The most important bit here is solid uplinks, though, not OSes or boxen. At least in the US, self-hosting was choked off by cable-tv-based ISPs who offered asymmetric bandwidth with highly restrictive upload speeds. Partly that was because cable technology was originally designed to distribute media from the culture industry to the consumer, not peer-to-peer; partly that was an artificial restriction designed to thwart piracy.

The world today would look very different if every home in the early 2000s had been equipped with equal upload/download bandwidth; small home servers might have been normalized.

A second problem, and one that macOS server would not have solved, was collusion by the email big hosts (Google, Outlook, etc) to impose in the name of fighting spam restrictions that keep individuals from hosting their own mailservers. ISPs, of course, helped there too by blocking ports. Locking most consumers in to centrally-hosted email servers was a surveillance state's dream come true. If you can't send emails without suitable DKIM reputation, and only the big players get to determine whether you're reputable, you can't self-host your e-mail, and that's a major blow to privacy.

I, for one, miss my early internet days of having an AIX box with all services on it. I could telnet (SSH nowadays) in from anywhere and read my mail, newsgroups, etc., and update my web page and work on whatever. It would be awesome to have that ability again but with a server in my own home.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug

Apple explicitly called it the Digital Hub strategy. But they never went all the way.