Apple's current line of ARM chips lack the memory and IO features that are essential for server application. Sure they could be added in a new design but I suspect that the value proposition of in house designs would not as good with the added baggage.
Overall Apple just isn't that interested to produce low margin commodity servers. If Apple had a sliver of intention of returning to the market they would have kept both Xserve and the server OS going with minimal effort. Sony's smartphone business division have been losing money for a number of years but they have repeatedly stated that they will keep it going for the foreseeable future because it would be much harder to enter the market again later without one foot already inside the door.
> Apple's current line of ARM chips lack the memory and IO features that are essential for server application.
Some people just want to run software. There are plenty of cloud service providers that use COTS desktop hardware as servers, and their customers don't complain.
Personally I run a few services on a basic Hetzner Cloud CX11 instance, with memory and IO never having been a bottleneck or concern. If I could wip out a Mac mini to do the same, I'd be happy.
Not everyone needs a Ferrari. Most of us manage quite well with a beaten-up Ford.
I agree. For a lot of people their "server" is just an old laptop running headless in a closet. However eventually one will want more memory and storage, and both are highly constrained on M1 products at the moment.
The demand for high density deployment of Apple hardware has always been present, but the bigwigs from Cupertino could not care any less. On the market one can find all sorts of adapters, both commercial and jury-rigged, for rack mounting a couple of Mac Mini units. And there are companies whose entire business is renting out bare metal Macs in a colo so developers could do their work remotely. I just came across the article below and it made me chuckle - apparently this company went as far as putting dozens of iMac Pro in a rack with the screen facing sideways, and this hotchpotch of gear for rent somehow makes good money.
> If your needs are that mundane, I really don't see why an Apple ARM chip would matter?
I don't think "mundane" is a fair and honest take. Just like most of the industry benefits little to nothing from performance gains from microservices, I'd say that most of the industry benefits little to nothing from high-performance hardware, specially after containerization and container orchestration services took over the industry.
I know for a fact that some WebApps that are household names by now use a single m4.large instance to serve all the traffic from a single deployment region while barely taxing it's CPU quotas. If those quotas were reached it's trivial and boring to just spin up more "mundane" hardware and cease to have a problem.
Why push this myth that everyone needs Ferrari hardware to do everyday work when half the world would do well with today's bicycles?
If we must go with the car analogy then I'd argue that M1 Macs are the Ferrari and Lamborghini of personal computing: They are fast, sleek, and could accomplish a number of specific tasks much better than everything else. Sure it's entirely possible to pull a trailer with a Lambo, however every sane person would agree that any beater truck would have done a better job.
I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that they meant non-macOS Apple hardware servers.
Also this was never intended for people using an old laptop 'as a server' anyway, of course that works, and people doing that don't need the enterprise features from a server-specific version of the OS.
Well, some people claim that non-Server Windows can't ever be used in a server role, even with third-party software, and that you need a CAL for every person connecting to third-party software on Windows Server, so it's at least possible.
> Except as otherwise permitted by
the terms of this License or otherwise licensed by Apple: (i) only one user may use the Apple Software at
a time, and (ii) you may not make the Apple Software available over a network where it could be run or
used by multiple computers at the same time
It's of course debatable whether, say, using the built-in file sharing counts as "making the Apple Software available", doubly so for third-party servers, but that's exactly the argument some of those Microsoft licencing people are making.
This sounds like they're trying to prevent people running farms of Mac minis AWS style, rather than using them as a server. But a highly paid Apple layer may still disagree.
