Comment by Melatonic 21 hours ago
Apple has also never been big on the server side equation of both software and hardware - don't they already outsource most of their cloud stack to Google via GCP ?
I can see them eventually training their own models (especially smaller and more targeted / niche ones) but at their scale they can probably negotiate a pretty damn good deal renting Google TPUs and expertise.
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.
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.
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.
By that definition, Apple is absolutely in the commodity products business.
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?
Apple just announced it
Mostly AWS actually. Apple uses Amazon’s Trainium and Graviton chips to serve search services. "Fruit Stand" is the internal name for Apple at AWS.