Apple turning to new server suppliers to cut costs - report
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.
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.
Comments
Now, that's an interesting concept!
Three levels of servers:
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 ...
Chinese government: Stop that this instant!
Apple: Sorry, must be a bit of side-spill.
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.
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.