ElCapitan

Timmy can blame it on emerging markets as much as he want, but the real problem is a product mix that is outdated or underperforming at the current price points (for the Mac), and overpriced products on mobile (iOS).

As SJ once said: "Even our butts look better than their faces!"

sandor said:

randominternetperson said:

sandor said:

Being a professional who has used Apple's professional products for the better part of 15 years, and still has racks of fibre arrays, XSan & Mac Pros feeding off of them, i wish Apple would just pull the band-aid off.

They only desire to be a consumer company, and no longer consider any advantage to maintaining the mind share of the creative professionals.

It does make bottom line sense, and will trim the supply line quite a bit. But i am sad to know that the decade + of running OS X Server for web services, mail, calendars, OD, etc, is now at an end.

We were the users that happily paid $999 for OS X Server, and rejoiced in the simplification of complex, capable Unix tools that Apple created with Server. We are creators and the idea that we were also capable of running and managing our tools was the promise that Apple sold us, and it worked, until the past three OS revisions that quickly chipped away the self-sufficiency. 

Move to the cloud and catch up with where IT has been going for years.  Running your own servers makes little economic sense nowadays.  And therefore Apple selling such servers makes even less sense.

What we can have hosted is already hosted. Before "the cloud" was a marketing term.

Offloading 200 TB of 4 & 8 Gbps fibre channel Xsan isn't a thing the cloud is capable of in an economical way.

It is not only that but a load of countries in Europe have quite strict rules for what data you can and cannot store in the cloud. Even what can be stored outside the country border. 

In addition, storing data in the cloud which are mostly operated by US companies, non US companies get subject to everything from data traffic snooping, the arbitrary applications of US laws in direct conflict with local legislation to even experience sanctions and lose their data overnight. We can also have abrupt changes in cost due to currency fluctuations. 

It is not for nothing IBM thinks private secure clouds will be the biggest and fastest growth area in the coming years. In any case it will require both servers and storage. 

For the Apple server nay-sayers, believe it or not but people also do have in-house server apps that only run on macOS. There is hardly a company around that offers that in the cloud. 

melgross said:

ElCapitan said:

So rather than producing the best servers and storage options themselves like they used to do, they are peddling someone else's kit. How Cook-ish!

Oh, stop it. Apple had servers for years, with Jobs at the helm, but discontinued them a long time ago. It wasn’t the first time either. That was even further back, when Apple had a floor standing server that ran on IBM’s Unix variation.

the problem is that Apple has never really had an interest in this area. While their PPC servers were given very good reviews, and as Apple didn’t charge for their OS per seat, as everyone else did, they were considered a real bargain. But as Apple never wanted to do what their customers, and, more importantly, their potential customers wanted, sales began to drop.

Apple had a "server" all the way back to 1986 which would convert a Mac Plus with a 40 MB HD to a workgroup server for file sharing across LocalTalk. From 1993 they added dedicated hardware with the Workgroup Server 95 running Apple Unix (A/UX). Apple hardware server configs were discontinued on October 22, 2013 with the Mac Pro "cheese grater" Server config. 

A cheese grater config upgraded to 2018 standards in combination with the right storage would have fit perfectly into such workloads as this LumaForge thingy.

Since SJ passed Cook has been on a mission decimating anything that resembles pro, business and enterprise offerings. 

"for every Mac user there are 18 iPhone and iPad users" - Yes there is, but nothing goes down as fast as a fashion company the gets uncool.

Combine that with a company that increasing is pricing themselves out of the market in country after country, that don't bother to renew hardware so they lose their highest paying and historically most loyal customers.

Look, Apple can focus all they want on fashion customers, group identities, virtue signaling, and production of toothless moves and curated news. I say GOOD LUCK with all of that, because it is a recipe for moving the company into something people easily can turn agains and away from. 

Apple used to be the pride of the industry, the beacon everyone looked up to while they stole it's technologies scrambling to keep up. – Not so any more.