Comment by ghaff

3 days ago

Xserve was always kind of a loss. Wrote a piece about it a number of years back. It became pretty much a commodity business--which isn't Apple.

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ghaff

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no_wizard  3 days ago

I always wondered what they were hoping for with their server products back when they had them. Consumers and end users benefit greatly from the vertical integration that Apple is good at. This doesn't translate with servers. Commodity hardware + linux is not only cheaper, its often easier, and was definitely less proprietary.

Its also a race to the bottom type scenario. Apple would have never been able to keep up with server release schedules.

Was an interesting but ultimately odd moment of history for servers.

  • ghaff  2 days ago

    Pre-iPhone and pre-Intel Mac, Apple was experimenting with a lot of things. The iPod wasn't a clear initial win--and the iPhone wasn't either. A lot of the success happened in retrospect.

  • ghaff  3 days ago

    Companies were still figuring out Linux with servers at the time. Xserve seemed like it might be something of interest to at least academia but Apple never really had their heart in it as I wrote at the time.

simondotau  3 days ago

How is server hardware more "commodity" than MacBook laptops? Both are quite sophisticated and tailored to their audience in nuanced ways; both are manufactured at scale and face fierce competition. I don't think Xserve was a uniquely commodity business, it was a B2B service business--which isn't Apple.

  • JSR_FDED  3 days ago

    It’s absolutely a commodity. The exact reason IBM sold their server division to Lenovo in 2014.

    • mschuster91  3 days ago

      I'd rather say IBM got cannibalized by "financial engineers", this wasn't a decision made because of "it's a commodity".

      There used to be a time when IBM actually meant quality (that's where "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" came from, after all), but nowadays? A loooot of stuff is either sold (Thinkpad went to Lenovo, Lotus Notes to HCL), faded into irrelevancy outside of extremely few niche markets (anything mainframe), got left for dead (the PC - it used to be called "IBM compatible personal computer"!) or got spun off (Kyndryl).

      According to Wikipedia, IBM has 282.000 employees worldwide. What the fuck are all of these people doing?

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