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skissanetoday at 5:00 AM2 repliesview on HN

Does Apple use macOS in servers in its datacentres? Or are they all Linux?

Surely at a minimum they need macOS for CI.

Apple does have one advantage here-they can legally grant themselves permission to run macOS internally on non-Apple hardware, and I don’t believe doing so legally obliges them to extend the same allowance to their customers.

But that might give them a reason to keep x86_64 alive for internal use, since that platform (still) gives you more options for server-class hardware than ARM does


Replies

jabwdtoday at 9:32 AM

They do run Apple Silicon in data centers, so perhaps another custom version of Darwin + their system frameworks. It is hard to tell without some leaks :)

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thereintoday at 9:37 AM

They use Ubuntu on x86-64 servers, at least for iCloud. Backends for iCloud, Photos and Backups etc. are written in Java.

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