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Comment by mbreese

4 years ago

Do you really think that Apple couldn’t port Linux to an M1 chip without outside help? If Apple wanted a server product, they wouldn’t need to rely on outside volunteers and they would be more actively helping. Apple used to make servers, and hardware wise, they were great. Software wise, it was more of a mixed bag.

If Apple wanted to help push a server or cloud product, do you think AWS would be racking retail Mac Minis?

This has informal geek cred motivation written all over it. More of a good-will measure than anything else. If this was an explicit market/new product motivation, any assistance would look very different and be more formal.

6 comments

mbreese

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cromka  4 years ago

> Do you really think that Apple couldn’t port Linux to an M1 chip without outside help?

It could be that they work on it internally and naturally want to keep it a secret for as long as possible. However, in that case, they would absolutely also want the community to advance "independently" so that Linux software on Apple Silicon has most of the practical issues ironed out by the time Apple is ready to announce their stuff. Think of it as having a free alpha/beta testing even before your product is publicly announced. A pure win-win.

This, at least, is how I would do it if I was pulling the strings at Apple.

  • nvx736  4 years ago

    I think you answered your own question they had server hardware with bad software , with community and ecosystem enablement they could get into it . Why they can’t release a server rack with m1 macs ??

    • mbreese  4 years ago

      Because the server business has lower margins than they’d like? Trying to sell Mac laptops vs Windows laptops is very different than selling ARM servers vs x86 servers (all running Linux). The margins and support costs would be very high for not very many unit sales. And I doubt they would want to sell chips to someone like Supermicro for them to integrate into servers. I can’t imagine Apple trying to sell to OEMs and reducing their own relative fab capacity to sell chips to someone else.

      If you want a rack of M1 servers, buy a couple of Mac Minis. But if you want them to also run Linux, that’s going to be a bit more difficult. macOS is compatible enough for many (most? all?) *nix server software, so why would Apple need to have a separate product?

saagarjha  4 years ago

Apple does bringup of their chips with Linux. I've heard that they run that before they ever boot Darwin.