Alleged Steve Jobs e-mail says 'hardly anyone' was buying Apple's Xserves - Page 3

You are actually selling this to me.
I can't stand the archaic structure of linux and have never given OSX Server a seconds thought until now.

you two, just stop with the nonsense. no professional IT shop is going to do something this stupid.

I work for a printing company that runs off of xserves. All of our desktop computers, save for one, are macs.

Good. The sooner we steer from this command line crap the better. Whenever I have to delve in to server technologies I can't help but think to myself: I wish I had all the time in the world as I could build a kick ass UI for this convoluted nonsense.

Let's start with no-hot-swap-anything. Not for power supply, not for drives, nada. That's why a mini is a poor server infrastructure.

Oh, and it's not 1U either

Not to mention the fact that no professional IT shop is going to give a rat's ass about OS-X server either.

Other than the horrendous disk access speed, no hardware raid, no redundant power supplies, single NIC, and no admin port -- other than that -- yeah, they're just like the servers we use.

Too funny. I can edit a config file in vi faster than you could locate it in your GUI. Folks who make their coin administering heavy iron understand that CL trumps GUI all day, every day. Your assertion that you could build a GUI to supplant the CL shows your lack of experience administering servers, friend.

Not true. You just have to get used to file locations. All the mechanics are the same and the tool set at your disposal make administering a OS X box *much* like Linux or other UN*X flavors.

What drove me nuts about Apple was their complete lack of support for OS X in the datacenter. They just didn't get supporting the enterprise. Mac OS X was up to the task; XServe was up to the task. Apple as a company was not.

I always felt like OS X Server was Apple's original hobby. And the datacenter isn't a place for that.

Truth is for most stuff, Linux based servers will rank number 1. If you need a Mac based server then if you can get passed the form factor, then the Mac mini is probably a good choice. What matters is what the hardware can do. You could probably put six Mac minis side by side (if placed on their side) and fit a 4U rack.

I believe that if you could get the right load balancing server with the ability to wake and sleep specific nodes, then the mini-ITX form factor would probably provide the best use of space and power management. I put the Mac Mini in the mini-ITX category.

Listen 'friend', you are showing your lack of experience (or blind disdain) for the GUI. You are the last of a breed. We can find a nice little home for you in a museum somewhere if you like.

There's a whole new era of computer interaction techniques on the horizon, if you think that they nailed the 'perfect' interaction method for server technologies back in the seventies you are very mistaken and very foolish.

Your current method of interaction is simply what you and others of your ilk are used to. You most probably fear change, and feel a sense of superiority for knowing all those stone age commands.

There is no law that says that a server must be rack mounted.



Change rackmount to server and you are even closer to the truth.


yep.

I believe I read somewhere that Pixar, Weta and Lucasfilms all use Unix based render farms for processing the input they do on their Mac and Windows systems



It's hard to say that they are abandoning the whole market but it is clear that they are abandoning a product that was only sellable to a very small group. Many, if not most, small to mid sized companies will do just find with a Pro or Mini based server or two.


they updated the site with a Mac Pro Server config the same day or the one after they made the xserve announcement


Wow, that is some serious FUD.


Or Apple has realized that they can't make THE product that everyone wants at the price they want and is conceding this one to the better companies.

How about an ultra-dense rack full of A4 processors running at 1GHz? That would be incredibly cool. Don't say it couldn't happen...

Blue sky, yes. But why not?
Seems very possible if one designed optimized low power SoCs. Using optimized SoCs would mean far smaller size, heat load, and power supply requirements.

I think Apple realized that a long time ago. Yes, the server market has become commoditized and there's no going back now to Sun's heydays of 50% gross margins during the dot com boom era of the late-90's. The server hardware is a commodity with razor thin margins and the only way the large enterprise players like IBM and HP make real money in the enterprise market is through software and services.

Again, like in the PC desktop/laptop market, Microsoft and Intel make the lion share of the profits while the hardware vendors fight over the scraps. UNIX is the only real high-end with IBM/AIX (besides their "i" mainframe OS) and HP-UX while Sun/Oracle seems to be in a free fall to oblivion although I think Sun's hardware business will survive as a small niche. Even Sun is offering Windows and Linux servers now. And, of course, Dell moves a ton of cheap Windows and Linux servers to make their net 2.5% margins.

This is basically what the server market is looking like now.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/...ver-roost/6424

Let's look at the hardware server offerings of the major enterprise backend server vendors and see how Apple stacks up next to these guys (if you can call it that):

Dell
http://www.dell.com/us/en/enterprise...s&s=biz&cs=555

HP
http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/...v/servers.html

IBM Blade Servers
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladec...ers/index.html

IBM Power Servers - Apple uses some of these with AIX
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/

IBM Enterprise Class Mainframe Servers - Apple uses some z-class servers with AIX/Linux
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/hardware/index.html

Oracle/Sun - Apple uses a lot of Sun servers with Solaris
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/se...ers/index.html

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/se...ise/index.html

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/se...des/index.html

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/se...x86/index.html

That's a pretty bewildering array of servers from these enterprise backend suppliers. Again, I ask why would Apple want to compete in this field against these guys in any what way or form?

LOL Of course you kid.
Obviously a CLI is superior for many things (especially the ones that are impossible from a GUI.) And just as obviously the reverse is true.
Nitty gritty server admin from a GUI is as silly as doing page layout from a CLI.

I would have loved for server admin to do everything. While quite nice and super simple, it simply can't, partially because Apple, like others (example: Redhat for Linux) update their software distributions very slowly and thus are always out of date. PHP is a perfect example.

To stay up to date, all admins for Linux and for Mac OS X server I know update their own, typically via command line. The GUI simply isn't supporting it.

But it's pretty foolish to coin people using command line old school and behind the times.

The reality is that the shiny new cloud everyone loves to talk about, Apple's new data center and and many large virtual machine clusters are administered exactly that way

Steve to French guy: "You're rackmounting it wrong".

Yeah I was thinking of ARM while reading this but scared to voice it out for fear of being laughed at. Does anyone else think that the AppleTV with a dual-core 1.5ghz ARM and ATI 5770 could beat a PS3 in AAA-game title graphics? (OpenGL on ARM etc adjusted accordingly)

sorry mac mini replaced the cray set up .

9

Hey,

I sent an email to Jobs as well and he said he would send me free iPhones and iPads for life.


(Sorry, couldn't resist)

I have ACSP 10.5 Client. Got it in 2008. Now I'm glad I didn't invest much in learning OS X Server to get ACTC. Though NetInstall is totally awesome for installations of up to 20 demo Macs in the retail store. Over gigabitE to a Mac Pro server you can install 20gb images onto 3 to 5 Macs at once in 30 mins. This was 2 years ago, and NetInstall has been used for much longer. Of course in big business virtualisation and remote "ghosting" or whatever takes care of this.

I was also asked this year to help with Apple South East Asia to give talks on Mac implementation in Edu and Enterprise in my country, no doubt touching on server solutions as well. I felt something didn't jive and stepped away from that. With no iPad in this region except for Singapore, and iPhone in insanely short supply, in this region, Apple in edu and enterprise is a tough, tough sell. Not to mention the Pro market challenges. And service and support due to depending on only Authorised Service Providers, not Apple itself in this region. Now Xserve and Xraid is bye bye. Indeed, hardly anyone was buying them.

Sure, maybe no one gives a sh*t about "emerging markets", that's why Dell, HP and so on are huge across emerging market enterprises.

But of course, on the consumer side, iPhone, iPad and Macs are the Louis Vuitton of gadgets. In an impoverished society, status symbols are what you can cling on to for prestige.

Posted from my iPad

Perhaps you should tell these guys: The State of the Mac mini
http://www.macminicolo.net/state2009.html

Perhaps you could tell them a thing or two: Tips on Running a Remote Mac Server http://www.farawaymac.com/

Perhaps their facilities are too outdated for you. Nevada Facility http://www.macminicolo.net/facility.html

Perhaps my reference library is missing something.
http://www.tuaw.com/2008/04/05/tuaw-...lo-for-a-spin/
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews...er-review.ars/
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2365699,00.asp
http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-...-719349/review

What I have learned after reading numerous threads about the Xserve:

The Xserve is an awesome/terrible product that was a bargain while being overpriced, which sold poorly because it sucked/Apple didn't advertise enough, and will be sorely, sorely missed even though Apple has no idea how to support enterprise customers so good riddance. It will be fairly easy to replicate it's functionality for less even thought it will be impossible and everyone using them will be better off with commodity hardware/will shortly go out of business.

Prefect. Now you have ruined it for everyone unless you didn't in which case you should have, so I hope you're are happy.

Hey, I sent an email to Steve once and all I got was a lousy t-shirt that was one size too small!

Awesome. Just awesome!

Well, they've been half-assed (or even less-assed) about the enterprise market to begin with. I think the Xserve, (and Xserve RAID) was a great idea, with slick, yet practical design. But, as has been stated several times already, Apple did almost no marketing for it. It's almost as if they were implicitly telling the world, "this is just a nifty experiment we're knocking around. Don't take it too seriously." And, with the exception of VATech, a few universities, and the Xserve-meisters who have commented here, the world said, "Okay, we won't."
I never once saw an ad—on TV or print—for Apple Xserve. But I've seen plenty of ads for Dell, HP and IBM blade/server solutions for enterprise. The point being, you can build awesome stuff, but you're not gonna sell it if no one knows anything about it.

The Mini or Mac Pro Server are fine for small businesses or home office situations, but can't be feasibly scaled to large enterprise situations. Sure, you could do large-scale hacks to make them work, but when you get to the enterprise level, hacking is really not a good idea. You need a solution that's robust, and reliable, not something that you tinker with and hope it works.


I was talking about a new Mac Pro design, not simply a stopgap measure, utilizing the current Mac Pro.


Oh, I take my FUD very seriously!!


Apple has never tried to make "THE product that everyone wants at the price they want". And I can't imagine Apple or any company internally or publicly saying "We're just not very good at this, so we'll let someone who's better do it instead." But, it seems like with their $50 billion in cash, they could take a couple billion, and work with large enterprise/IT professionals to design 2-3 Xserve form factors that could suit various needs. This would tell enterprise that Apple is serious about enterprise, and hence, enterprise would be more likely to take Apple seriously as well.

Well, that's kind of like saying, why is Apple still wasting their money and energy building Macs, when they're still at around 5% market share? They're just embarrassing themselves!

Also, back when rumors of the original iPhone were floating around, people were saying, "Really? Apple's making a phone??!?!?. Yeah, right! Why would Apple want to even try entering a market with serious players like Nokia, Motorola, etc.???"

Ummm... Rather bad comparison, I must say. At the most, Apple probably sold around 10,000 Xserves a quarter. That wouldn't amount to 0.5% market share of which is a much smaller and very specialized market than the PC market. Well over 1,300,000 Windows servers are sold per quarter but that's still peanuts compared to around 75,000,000 PC's sold per quarter around the world.

In contrast, Apple sells over 42,000 Macs per day and growing at 25%+ year-over-year. On a daily basis, Apple also sells well over 150,000 iPhones and 50,000 iPads and these numbers will probably double over the next year. Over 1,300,000,000 phones are sold per year, so Apple still has long, long ways to go and plenty of room to grow with a very profitable product. Which businesses would you focus on?

Apple sold more Macs last quarter than they did all year several years ago. Apple is selling more Macs than ever before and the Mac business alone account for $22 billion in annual sales. Tim Cook pointed out that number would be #65 on the Fortune 500 chart. The Mac business is very profitable for Apple as well. Although Apple's market share in global PC unit shipments is only around 5%, it is estimated that Apple rakes in 35% of the profits.

It'd be great if Apple can also make high-end profitable servers, but those (like IBM's fully-loaded mainframes and Power UNIX servers) would cost well over $1 million each. In the low-end, cheap generic servers running Wintel and Linux cost less than half the amount of the Xserve with inferior specs and performance.

Also, servers have a much longer upgrade/replacement cycle than PC's and certainly mobile devices like phones and tablets. Servers, if maintained properly, can easily do what they're supposed to do for a decade or longer, if necessary. So IT departments are much stingier about upgrading or replacing old servers. They can just upgrade or add additional processors or just add a few more servers to the existing infrastructure if they need to expand. Server companies make more money doing maintenance and doing consulting and integration work than selling the hardware.

I'd say Apple knows exactly what they're doing. They're focusing on what they do best in markets they know they can compete in. That means the consumer market. The enterprise backend is not an area that Apple ever cared about and never had expertise in. Apple is making a big push into the enterprise but it will be for the front end client devices with the iPhone, iPad and the MacBooks. Apple will have a much easier time selling these devices to the large enterprises than selling servers.

I neve said that. Seriously, those things were said more by the Apple haters, doubters and the phone companies and industry pundits. Apple already had the consumer focus and the experience of selling massive volumes of the iPod for years before getting into the phone business. Also, they had something with the iPhone that the entrenched competitors didn't have. That's way different than coming up with the next great high-end server that can disrupt and up-end the market. You have to compare apples to apples here. You're comparing an apple to a watermelon.

adopting embedded system methodology (i.e., SoCs) for the enterprise, especially with its infrastructure requirements, would be silly. totally different use cases; totally different market segments.

Yeah, it'd be so much better to pay almost as much for a Mac mini server. Besides, if I had a dollar for every "professional IT shop" I've seen who didn't know what they were doing, I could buy an Xserve myself.

I was thinking of A4 for data center use. Its lower-power, low TDP makes for some potentially high density rack mounted boxes that would blow away the MIPS you could pack into the same volume using Xeons or Opterons. And the cost of each A4 is very affordable.

Just because Apple gave up on XServes doesn't mean they gave up on the server market. They're probably thinking different. Trying to compete with HP or Dell in the data center when the only thing that differentiates Apple's 1U box is the OS isn't working (obviously). Everyone seems to be looking for more rack space density: more CPUs and more MIPS per cubic inch.

Well, I think I've spent enough time on this whole subject and won't bother with it anymore. I think the most telling thing is that this news of Apple discontinuing the Xserve is not even mentioned in most mainstream tech sites and tech stock analysis sites. I visit a lot of other non-Mac-specific tech-oriented sites like CNET, ZDnet, Computerworld, Computer Weekly, Silicon Alley, Daring Fireball, Fast Company, eWeek, PC World, etc. as well as general business/stock sites like Motley Fool, Seeking Alpha, WSJ, NY Times, Business Week, etc. and it's apparent that this whole Xserve thing isn't even newsworthy to them. Normally, they care about everything that has to do with Apple but this news isn't even a blip on their radar.

We use a rack of XServes and still have one X Raid running and we're not going to use Mac Minis or Mac Pros, because Apple knows as well as we do that that doesn't work in data centres. Apple is just paying lip service to Xserve users.

We have to move on. Linux (Red Hat, Novell?) with Helios (or OpenLDAP, Netatalk, mDNS etc) or Windows with ExtremeZ-IP to support Mac clients? That's what I want to know.

I sent an email to Steve Jobs and all I got was waking up in a bathtub full of ice w/my pancreas missing

if you go with Windows 2008, OS X has native support for it. and if you google around, MS has a lot of native support for OS X in Windows 2008

we are visually intuitive creatures and naturally take to a gui over a single blinking cursor that waits for us to figure it out. but, some things still have to be done with the command line for a number of reasons. not all are valid reasons. but that is the way it is right now.
i do like Bill Joy's comment from a Wired magazine interview: interviewer -"And yet you've been famously cool about Linux."

Bill Joy - "Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It's a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux."

the GUI admin tools are nothing more than command line scripts with pictures. they are nice but unless someone codes every script you can possibly need you still have to do command line. even on windows server i had to write a script to alert me of an error that pops up once in a while