It's just not a market Apple can infiltrate. If Apple wants to compete on the high-end, they have to dethrone Nvidia and their current high-performance ARM servers (H100 clusters and whatnot). That is a suicide mission for Apple or any company really, regardless of the money they have on-hand.
So... who would they be selling to, now? I genuinely think such a "server Mac" would echo the Xserve without a fundamental shift in the way Apple treats the software community.
> It's just not a market Apple can infiltrate. If Apple wants to compete on the high-end, they have to dethrone Nvidia and their current high-performance ARM servers (H100 clusters and whatnot).
Why? And why is it only about hardware? So AWS, GCP and Azure all run Intel/AMD, who do they need to dethrone?
For all it matters Apple "cloud" could even use these nVidia servers themselves. Not like AWS only uses Graviton. So, so?
> So... who would they be selling to, now? I genuinely think such a "server Mac" would echo the Xserve without a fundamental shift in the way Apple treats the software community.
Right, why would they only do hardware? As is typical Apple the $ is in the ecosystem and services. The competition would be to offer cloud services that has a better experience just like they do for phones and others. The macbook pro was always more expensive and yet people still purchase them.
> The competition would be to offer cloud services that has a better experience just like they do for phones and others. The macbook pro was always more expensive and yet people still purchase them.
Which is both less relevant and quite different for enterprise services than consumer products. It's also not that obvious that Apple has a lot of expertise in this area and could provide something better than AWS/Azure/etc.. and Apple is not exactly the company which is willing to compete on lower margins.
> The competition would be to offer cloud services that has a better experience just like they do for phones and others
You are just back around to describing Xserve again. Regardless of whether it is software or hardware-based, an Apple Cloud has no upsell in today's market. That's why Xserve died, and it's why it would die again.
So... who would they be selling to, now? I genuinely think such a "server Mac" would echo the Xserve without a fundamental shift in the way Apple treats the software community.