Apple has always sucked at properly embracing properly robust tech for high-end gear for markets outside of individual prosumer or creatives. When Xserves existed, they used commodity IDE drives without HA or replaceable PSUs that couldn't compete with contemporary enterprise servers (HP-Compaq/Dell/IBM/Fujitsu). Xserve RAID interconnection half-heartedly used fiber channel but couldn't touch a NetApp or EMC SAN/filer. I'm disappointed Apple has a persistent blindspot preventing them from succeeding in data center-quality gear category when they could've had virtualized servers, networking, and storage, things that would eventually find their way into my home lab after 5-7 years.
Enterprise never ever mattered, and there arent enough digits available to show your “home lab” use case in the revenue numbers. Xserve, the RAID shelves, and the directory services were kinda there as a half hearted attempt for that late 90-00s AV setup. All of that fell on the cutting room floor once personal devices, esp iphone, was realized.
By the time I left in ‘10 the total revenue from mac hardware was like 15% of revenue. Im honestly surprised theres anyone who cared enough to package the business services for mac minis.
So if everything else is printing cash for a HUGE addressable consumer market at premium price points why would they try and compete with their own ODMs on more-or-less commodity enterprise gear?
Seems like I remember the main reason Macs survived as a product at all was because you needed one to develop for iOS. That may be an exaggeration but there certainly was a time when Macs were few and far between outside of creative shops. Certainly they were almost unseen in the corporate world, where now they are fairly common at least in laptops.
Macs survived because Apple got a cash injection, survived long enough to come out with colorful iMacs with an hockey puck mouse, still running on Mac OS 8, and the iPod.
Requiring one for doing iOS development they were already back into the green.
It’s a myth that the “cash injection” from Microsoft saved Apple.
Microsoft gave Apple $250 million. The next quarter Apple turned around and spent $100 million on PowerComputing’s Mac assets.
Apple lost over a billion more before it became profitable. The $150 Net wouldn’t have been make or break.
Now Microsoft promising to keep Office on the Mac was a big deal
One way or the other, it was a cash injection from Microsoft, after all who paid the salaries from Office developers?
Also you're forgetting the part that those announcements gave Apple a good marketing for additional credit from banks.
Microsoft had been writing the components of the Office Apps since 1985. Word and Excel were first developed on the Mac and PowerPoint was an original Mac App acquired by Microsoft.
At one point, Microsoft was making more money on each Mac sold than Apple. Microsoft wasn’t doing it for charity. If it were, why did it do it before the agreement and continue to support Mac today?
Apple got credit from banks before either the announcement or Steve Jobs return.
As someone living in a country, Portugal, where Apple had a single reseller, Interlog.
I could count with my hand fingers how many Macs I have seen being used between being born in the 70's and 2000's, up to 10.
My university graduation project was porting a visualisation framework from NeXTSTEP into Windows, because already there the university could not see a future with NeXT.
The fact that people believe Apple's cash injection, not only from Microsoft, that allowed for a survival plan, including an acquisition, has nothing to with Apple escaping bankruptcy is kind of interesting.
And yes Excel was initially developed for Mac, and once upon a time there was Visual Studio for Mac with MFC.
Still, it was Microsoft paying developers to build such products for a dying platform.
At no point was Microsoft spending more on Office for Mac than they were making on selling the Mac version.
It cost some. But famously Microsoft used byte code for Office that was portable and was dog slow around Office 5.
And it’s not my “believing”, it’s math. Apple lost far more than the net $150 million before it became popular.
This isn’t my reading the history books. My first computer was an Apple //e in 1986 and by 1993, I was following what was going on with Apple real time via Usenet and TidBits (been around since 1990) and I lied to get a free subscription to MacWeek.
The fact is Microsoft did spent R&D money to support Apple customers, with a product without which, Apple would even be less relevant in the late 90's.
They didn’t do it out of charity. They did it for profit. Microsoft was on the stage when the Mac was introduced in 1984. I don’t think they were ever seriously considering stopping Mac development. They ported office to PPC Macs in 1995 before the joint announcement 2 years later.
For Apple, datacenter stuff is low margin business
Considering that Apple is moving away from Linux in the datacenter to its own devices, I'm not sure that's the case. The apple machines aren't available to the consumer (they're rack-mounted, dozens of chips per PCB board, custom-made machines) but they're much less power-hungry, just as fast (or more so), much cheaper for them to make rather than buy, and natively support their own ecosystem.
Some of the machine-designs that consumers are able to buy seem to have a marked resemblance to the feature-set that the datacenter people were clamouring for. Just saying...
> dozens of chips per PCB board
Have there been leaks or something about these internal machines? I am curious to know more.
No idea. I worked on them so I didn't really need the leak :)
> I'm disappointed Apple has a persistent blindspot preventing them from succeeding in ... things that would eventually find their way into my home lab after 5-7 years.
I can see the dollar signs in their eyes right now.
Aftermarkets are a nice reflection of durable value, and there's a massive one for iPhones and a smaller one for quick flameout startup servers, but not much money in 5 - 7 year old servers.