volcan

Apple shareholder / voters and Apple customers are not really the same. Perhaps Apple sees their customer base as actually much more interested in human rights than the shareholders do. Trying to be proactive in the interests of their customers is not necessarily a bad thing for business. The shareholders may not want to spend money on this now but it is quite possible they don't possess the long term vision that Apple board members have.

cpsro said:
Apple's involvement in both client and server guaranteed compatibility.  Standardizing on one platform (macOS) in house for servers and workstations also reduced management costs.

It doesn't really reduce management costs in the long run because the technical resource pool is so limited. If something goes wrong and you are not around to fix it, virtually no one else knows how to work on it. Sort of like a web designer who codes in Ruby, Coldfusion or Django. Bad idea. Unlike Linux or Windows, for macOS Server there is no help available.

Want to see a funny forgotten Apple web page?

https://www.apple.com/iservices/certification/roadmap.html

GG1 said:

I'm puzzled by the crypto mining direction. Seems more volatile than customer orders. Perhaps it is essentially free for them if they have the hardware (they make the mining chips) and have a renewable energy source.

I believe TMSC Solar ceased operations last year. I'm not so sure they are planning to do the actual Bitcoin mining themselves but rather selling equipment to others such as Bitmain. Right now even if you have free power and internet like what might be provided to small corporate business suites as part of their lease, with a $6-7K mining box you can only make a couple dollars a day. I has become nearly impossible to make a profit mining as the system is designed to continually make it more difficult to find transaction keys as time goes on. Investing in buying Bitcoins is very risky due to the volatile prices. Not a stable business model at all.

fastasleep said:
You don’t need to be a beta tester, pretty sure you can download these without even a developer account:

https://developer.apple.com/safari/download/

I actually have a developer account. I just don't want any beta software on my machine.