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There was plenty announced at WWDC this year, from new versions of iOS and macOS, to the AI-ification of everything. But hidden in Apple's plethora of announcements was Private Cloud Compute (PCC), a technical model for offloading AI processing capabilities to the cloud in a privacy-focused manner. There's a lot to unpack about PCC, but one thing did catch our eye. It runs exclusively on Apple Silicon, making use of several semi-proprietary technologies like Secure Enclave in the cloud.

Apple has made servers before, but they haven't shipped a new one for well over a decade. With this new market for Apple Silicon-based cloud computing, could Apple be about to finally announce a replacement for the classic XServe?

Source: Wikimedia commons

The original XServe marked Apple's entry into the enterprise server market. Released in 2002, XServer was a series of rack-mountable servers running on a customer version of macOS. Capable of running either individually or in clusters, it was especially favored by creatives and educational institutes due to the collaborative features and easy onboarding for specific sectors. This server (at the time, known as Mac OS X Server) was relatively unique in the enterprise space in that it provided a graphical user interface not just to set up the operating system, but also to set up and enable core functionalities like hosting web pages, email servers, or databases.

XServe had several generations, even making the switch from Power PC to Intel alongside the rest of the Mac lineup, and was initially very popular. The creative sector in particular loved the XServe, with its easy setup and seamless integrations with existing Mac products, and applications like Final Cut Server, all making it perfect for scaling up creativity.

An XServe cluster in use at Nasa (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Ultimately the original XServe was dropped in 2010 as its popularity faded. Less and less effort was put into maintaining the bespoke applications and GUIs that made the XServe popular, and eventually, the dedicated version of Mac OS X Server was rolled into mainline macOS. This spelled the end for XServe, and it was announced that any further development would cease.

In the aftermath of XServe's demise, a frustrated customer emailed Steve Jobs, only to be told "Hardly anyone was buying them."

In theory, the Mac Pro Server and Mac Mini Server replaced the XServe. In practicality though, this ushered in a decade of pain for anyone trying to run Mac OS X in the data center. The 'server' OS was bundled into mainline Mac OS X, and the server-specific components were made available as a download through the newly launched Mac App Store. Development continued on the server elements, and it still exists now in some form.

The hardware for the Mac Pro Server and Mac Mini Server didn't last long though. The Mac Pro Server was discontinued in 2013, after barely a single refresh from its late 2010 launch. Ouch. The fate of the Mac Mini Server wasn't much better, and it was discontinued in 2014. There was no clear replacement for either of these products, and running Mac OS X in the data center became even harder. In the wake of this, we got the trashcan Mac Pro, which, well, the less said the better. It was everything you didn't want in a server rack - circular, badly cooled, and difficult to repair.

Source: Wikimedia commons

Fast-forward to today and macOS is a nightmare for the data center. Due to the way Apple's ecosystem works for certain things, like XCode or iOS app development, developers are required to build jobs on Apple hardware or run certain code tests. To do this at scale, big companies often need access to tens or hundreds of macOS machines in the cloud.

The combination of developers and businesses needing access to macOS in the cloud, the difficulty of virtualizing and the lack of any appropriate form factors, has led to a whole side industry of Mac Mini hosting. You can rent Macs in the cloud either through dedicated providers like macincloud.com, or more recently they've also become available through AWS. Depending on the provider (or which spec you select), these will likely be Apple Silicon Mac Minis or Mac Pros mounted in a data center somewhere.

As we mentioned at the start, Apple is now running its PCC at scale, on Apple Silicon hardware. Apple doesn't mention what hardware they're using for this. The modern Mac Pro has a rack mount version, but it's prohibitively expensive and is more intended for professionals in the music space than for data center use. The Mac Mini is also far from ideal, and wasn't designed for data center utilization. The Mac Studio is probably the most reasonable candidate, but again, it is a far cry from the rack-mountable hardware we're used to in the data center.

This raises the question - does Apple have some more hardware in the pipeline? And could we finally see a worthy successor to XServe? Cloud hosting for Macs has been a nightmare for years, and it's a problem Apple is surely aware of (as it's running more and more of its silicon in the cloud right now). Apple is almost certainly never going to compete directly for cloud compute, but what has changed since the discontinuation of XServe is the size of Apple's utilization. The company is using more and more of its hardware in the cloud, and building additional software services like PCC on top of its proprietary hardware. Given Apple's track record for software support, this is the company likely to commit to years of supporting Apple Silicon in the data center.

Whether we will ever actually get new, proper data center hardware from Apple, we don't know. It's fully possible that Apple identifies its market as mostly internal, and already has specialized hardware that won't ever be released for public consumption. But if any of this potentially novel server hardware does see the light of day, you can guess it won't be by halves, and we'll be doing our utmost to dig into every detail of it. That said, it's unlikely I'll be using Apple Silicon to replace my NAS any time soon.

Apple had a ton of AI features to show off during WWDC, but once it releases in Q3 2024, a lot of them will be missing in action.

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Is Apple going to give us the XServe replacement we need? - XDA Developers