The Server market is enormous with a much higher average selling price. It would make perfect sense for Apple to make servers if it meant more revenue and profit than they could make not doing it. There are rumors that Apple is planning a M8 based server in 2029.

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mbreese an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Apple tried to address the server market 20 years ago during the PowerPC days (and later Intel). Their Xserves were really well designed machines and worked well. And yes, they also ran Linux (Yellowdog, IIRC).

It failed.

But I think that they learned something really valuable. As a company, they don’t have a good understanding the server market or how to sell to it. Their premium product style just didn’t have a place in the race to the bottom server market.

We had two in my grad school lab that we used as web servers. But that was the problem - it was a premium designed product that wasn’t any better of a web server than a plain (cheaper) Dell 1U box.

Maybe things would be different now that they have a really unique chip. ARM as a whole ecosystem has more buy-in from other companies than PowerPC did. Their performance per watt and GPU design might make more of a difference this time around.

But I can’t see Apple being able to release and sell a data center centric server. I think others might have a better chance.

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toast0 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If Apple cared about the server market, they would have added syncookies into their TCP stack. Seems like they should have done it during the time of Xserve... it would have been somewhat straightforward to pull it in from upstream BSD back then. But they still haven't (last I checked).

Apple doesn't have the business to business support organization to make this kind of thing work either.

	▲	Asmod4n 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Apple also has no api to write a fast server. Libdispatch is a burden to use for a server because of its book keeping overhead, and their history with kqueue makes it hard to convince someone to use it.

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alsetmusic 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The rumors are that it’s for internal use. It’s already known that they have custom M2 or M3 servers that they don’t sell to the public. Source: multiple episodes of the Accidental Tech Podcast that discuss articles about this.

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podocarp 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Lol they don't even have tun tap in the kernel, can't even host VMs properly without extra setup or hacks

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fragmede 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's a helluva rumor. Apple tried b2b with Xserve, back in the day, but didn't have the stomach for it.

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boredatoms 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That’s because they tried integration with the rest of their SW ecosystem.

If they just did motherboards with cpu/ram/pcie and let other OEMs build complete systems the story would be very different

	▲	scheme271 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They tried it with various open systems that allowed licensed powerpc clones of their systems and they ended it because it reduced their profits as people bought the clones instead of mac hardware. I don't see them redoing that anytime soon.

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Wowfunhappy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

With the Xserve, all Apple had to sell was repackaged Intel systems—with an Apple markup. They had nothing special to offer on the hardware side.

Now they have Apple Silicon.