Apple tried to address the server market 20 years ago during the PowerPC days (and later Intel). Their Xserves were really well designed machines and worked well. And yes, they also ran Linux (Yellowdog, IIRC).

It failed.

But I think that they learned something really valuable. As a company, they don’t have a good understanding the server market or how to sell to it. Their premium product style just didn’t have a place in the race to the bottom server market.

We had two in my grad school lab that we used as web servers. But that was the problem - it was a premium designed product that wasn’t any better of a web server than a plain (cheaper) Dell 1U box.

Maybe things would be different now that they have a really unique chip. ARM as a whole ecosystem has more buy-in from other companies than PowerPC did. Their performance per watt and GPU design might make more of a difference this time around.

But I can’t see Apple being able to release and sell a data center centric server. I think others might have a better chance.

If Apple cared about the server market, they would have added syncookies into their TCP stack. Seems like they should have done it during the time of Xserve... it would have been somewhat straightforward to pull it in from upstream BSD back then. But they still haven't (last I checked).

Apple doesn't have the business to business support organization to make this kind of thing work either.

The rumors are that it’s for internal use. It’s already known that they have custom M2 or M3 servers that they don’t sell to the public. Source: multiple episodes of the Accidental Tech Podcast that discuss articles about this.

> There are rumors that Apple is planning a M8 based server in 2029.

The issue is that the current Apple way of designing hardware doesn't really work for servers. An individual 1U server can easily cost $50,000 or more. Soldering everything together so that if a single memory chip goes bad you have to replace the entire machine instead of that one stick is going to make customers unhappy. Likewise, they expect to be able to add storage or network ports, and expect the software to have enough openness that the new systems will work with their existing enterprise SAN or what have you.

Obviously Apple could make open server hardware, but then people might start wondering why they can't make open laptop hardware.

Lol they don't even have tun tap in the kernel, can't even host VMs properly without extra setup or hacks

That's a helluva rumor. Apple tried b2b with Xserve, back in the day, but didn't have the stomach for it.