Apple turning to new server suppliers to cut costs - report

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in General Discussion
In another cost-cutting measure, Apple is switching up its server supply chain to force price competition, a report claimed on Tuesday.




The company recently increased orders from Inventec partner ZT, and added another firm, Inspur, according to DigiTimes sources. This has led to lower orders from Quanta Computer, which is said to be shifting focus anyway, from datacenters to private cloud systems for enterprise.

Apple was previously more concerned with better technology and yield rates, but has now become more interested in price savings, the sources suggested.

The company is known to pit multiple suppliers against each other to keep price quotes down and its own profits up. In fact the company has reportedly been intesifying competition among component and assembly partners for iPhones and MacBooks, for instance adding Wistron as a third iPhone manufacturer on top of Foxconn and Pegatron.

Apple -- and its investors -- are used to high profit margins on its products, but the company has to weigh a number of factors, such as which new technologies it needs to attract buyers, and how much the public is willing to pay.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 34
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    Where's the standard disclaimer that DigiTimes rumors aren't worth the wasted electrons and bandwidth?
    nolamacguyTurboPGT
  • Reply 2 of 34
    Will this make iCloud better ? :)
  • Reply 3 of 34
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    SylvainL said:
    Will this make iCloud better ? :)
    "Forget about it, Jake... it's DigiTimes."
    nolamacguyTurboPGTlatifbp
  • Reply 4 of 34
    dysamoriadysamoria Posts: 3,430member
    Cost to consumers is never the reason for reducing expenses. Profit margins are.
    melodyof1974[Deleted User]johnbearlymf
  • Reply 5 of 34
    dysamoriadysamoria Posts: 3,430member
    Wouldn't it be nice if Apple made their own servers, running on their own OS...
    melodyof1974calizoetmbjony0latifbplymfbadmonk
  • Reply 6 of 34
    macxpressmacxpress Posts: 5,931member
    dysamoria said:
    Wouldn't it be nice if Apple made their own servers, running on their own OS...
    Not from a profit standpoint...I guess if they developed their own strictly for their own data centers, but why reinvent the wheel when there's already stuff out there that does what they want. Apple will never make servers for the general public again. Its not necessary and not profitable at all. 
  • Reply 7 of 34
    sog35 said:
    So is the opinion that cloud will be a cheap commodity?

    Funny how Wall STreet is pinning all its hopes on cloud services for Amazon and Microsoft. Both are getting ridiculously high valuations because of cloud revenue growth. Crazy.  In a few years cloud providers will be just like gas stations. Commodity.

    I really can't believe how insanily stupid wall Street is.
    It's not just the street but the tech media as well. I still remember reading articles chastising Apple for not offering cloud services like AWS or Azure.
    SpamSandwichradarthekatcalibadmonk
  • Reply 8 of 34
    A lot of this is probably due to the sheer quantity of servers Apple is having to buy as they prepare to migrate away from having their stuff spread across Google's cloud, AWS, and Azure. 
    cali
  • Reply 9 of 34
    kennmsrkennmsr Posts: 100member
    dysamoria said:
    Wouldn't it be nice if Apple made their own servers, running on their own OS...
    I guess this is telling us that Apple CAN'T make Enterprise level equipment. They are so concerned about making Cradle to Grave hardware for their customers but are unable to make an Enterprise Server by the thousands to meet all their Data Center needs. It doesn't have to run OS X (Server) but it can be custom tailored to be power efficient and robust enough to meet all the demand needs of iCloud, iTunes, & App Store. You can't tell me that the company that created servers that created the Fastest Super Computer Cluster in 2008 at Virginia Tech and they only used G5 Xserves to accomplish the task aren't able to build an enterprise level server with all their added in house experience in 8 years.
    dysamoria
  • Reply 10 of 34
    All Wall Street does is praise cloud services. Apple should have at least been a player to get some respect. It seems any tech company not offering cloud services is automatically labeled as a no-growth loser with Apple being called the number one loser.
  • Reply 11 of 34
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,828member
    All Wall Street does is praise cloud services. Apple should have at least been a player to get some respect. It seems any tech company not offering cloud services is automatically labeled as a no-growth loser with Apple being called the number one loser.
    Not sure I follow, Apple has a ton of cloud services.
    ai46
  • Reply 12 of 34
    lkrupplkrupp Posts: 10,557member
    SylvainL said:
    Will this make iCloud better ? :)
    I don't know. iCloud works pretty damn well for me right now? What's your problem other than parroting troll talking points?
    calimacxpressnolamacguyai46
  • Reply 13 of 34
    cnocbuicnocbui Posts: 3,613member
    Apple should have built and deployed a globe-spanning network of geosynchronous orbit high bandwidth data streaming satellites, then they could boast of 'beyond the clouds' services.
    realjustinlongdysamorialymf
  • Reply 14 of 34
    Brazil, because its political leadership reneged on promises, has been a bust.  Adding Wistron has more to do with increasing capacity (replacing Brazil) than it does reducing costs.
  • Reply 15 of 34
    johnbearjohnbear Posts: 160member
    poor apple, they probably don't have enough money to keep up the servers...;)

  • Reply 16 of 34
    cnocbui said:
    Apple should have built and deployed a globe-spanning network of geosynchronous orbit high bandwidth data streaming satellites, then they could boast of 'beyond the clouds' services.

    Now, that's an interesting concept!  

    Three levels of servers:
    • home server
    • cloud server
    • geo server

    Your data would percolate up  private device storage-->home server-->cloud server--->geo server ...  and trickle down in the reverse.

    Where's the data?  Do you have the data?  I had the yesterdata, but don't have it now. Where's the data ...

    edited August 2016
  • Reply 17 of 34
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,628member
    macxpress said:
    dysamoria said:
    Wouldn't it be nice if Apple made their own servers, running on their own OS...
    Not from a profit standpoint...I guess if they developed their own strictly for their own data centers, but why reinvent the wheel when there's already stuff out there that does what they want. Apple will never make servers for the general public again. Its not necessary and not profitable at all. 
    Facebook, Twitter and Google are examples of techs building their own servers including for cloud services where needed. At least one of those uses their own self-developed software to run them too, tho perhaps all three do.
    edited August 2016 dysamoria
  • Reply 18 of 34
    cnocbuicnocbui Posts: 3,613member
    cnocbui said:
    Apple should have built and deployed a globe-spanning network of geosynchronous orbit high bandwidth data streaming satellites, then they could boast of 'beyond the clouds' services.

    Now, that's an interesting concept!  

    Three levels of servers:
    • home server
    • cloud server
    • geo server

    Your data would percolate up  private device storage-->home server-->cloud server--->geo server ...  and trickle down in the reverse.

    Where's the data?  Do you have the data?  I had the yesterdata, but don't have it now. Where's the data ...

    Imagine what you could feed to an Tv from a satellite.

    Chinese government:  Stop that this instant!

    Apple:  Sorry, must be a bit of side-spill.
  • Reply 19 of 34
    maestro64maestro64 Posts: 5,043member
    sog35 said:
    So is the opinion that cloud will be a cheap commodity?

    Funny how Wall STreet is pinning all its hopes on cloud services for Amazon and Microsoft. Both are getting ridiculously high valuations because of cloud revenue growth. Crazy.  In a few years cloud providers will be just like gas stations. Commodity.

    I really can't believe how insanily stupid wall Street is.


    Hate to tell you this cloud services and the systems that go into them have been a commodity for a long time. Hell Google and Amazon do not even buy their servers from any of the server manufacturers. They both spec out the system and have a company like Flextronics build the system. Google and Amazon negotiate the cost on processors with Intel, memory with the memory guys and HDD and SSD with the storage guys. Flextronics only make a small profit on make the product nothing on sourcing the parts. Google was first to do this and Amazon followed their lead. There is no money to be made in cloud computing when you have Google and Amazon giving it away and they took all the cost out of the hardware. Wall Street are idiots as you know, so they have just got people throwing their money in to this market and dump and run. There are so many Cloud storage and computing company who ran up over the last 5 yrs and now they are lower than when the IPO.


    I just surprise Apple is not doing the same instead of buying from ZT, I know that company and their products are not all that inexpensive even is this article is half true. Apple will never get it operating costs down doing it this way. Google figure this and I give them lots of credit on that. One of the few things they did well.

    edited August 2016
  • Reply 20 of 34
    rob53rob53 Posts: 3,304member
    kennmsr said:
    dysamoria said:
    Wouldn't it be nice if Apple made their own servers, running on their own OS...
    I guess this is telling us that Apple CAN'T make Enterprise level equipment. They are so concerned about making Cradle to Grave hardware for their customers but are unable to make an Enterprise Server by the thousands to meet all their Data Center needs. It doesn't have to run OS X (Server) but it can be custom tailored to be power efficient and robust enough to meet all the demand needs of iCloud, iTunes, & App Store. You can't tell me that the company that created servers that created the Fastest Super Computer Cluster in 2008 at Virginia Tech and they only used G5 Xserves to accomplish the task aren't able to build an enterprise level server with all their added in house experience in 8 years.
    Apple can make just about anything but servers, for the most part, aren't seen by the public and only need to work. It's very easy to get a company to throw some generic CPUs together, add a power supply and various I/O devices and call it a server. These don't require graphic cards in the consumer sense but can use GPUs where additional computing speed is required. For the majority of cloud services, e.g., mail, messaging, etc., the most important aspect of a server is its ability to handle multiple requests so multiple, very fast ethernet access, fast disk access and plenty of disk storage is all that's required. You only need a bare bones server OS to run them. Why would Apple want to waste their time building something like this when servers are a commodity? Well, lots of Mac users want them for one but that isn't the direction Apple is going in at the moment.

    As for the VT supercomputer cluster, that was a different time. The G5 was a very nice general purpose computer that hit the market at the right time. Cray and IBM were behind the time and (personally) I believe they were embarrassed at the numbers VT was able to get using OTS hardware. If you look at what happened afterwards, Apple stands no chance of creating OTS hardware to compete with the current crop of supercomputers. The current top500.org supercomputer has 10.6M cores (only 1.45GHz each). We're complaining at the cost of a 12-core CPU for the Mac Pro. The only way Apple could compete would be to waste a bunch of money and time stringing together 2M unreleased 6-core A10 CPUs and see what happens. Even if they were able to run a LINPACK benchmark that come close, they would never sell a complete system. This isn't Apple's business.
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