Posted on 07/12/2011 11:02:42 AM PDT by Swordmaker
I suspect that may also be somewhat responsible for the demise of the XServe. Nobody wants to pay a premium for a glitzy machine that spends it's life in a dark room.
The XServe got rave reviews from admins. It was very well designed, easy to do anything without tools (that wasn't as common when the XServe was introduced). And compared to Windows servers, the licensing made them much less expensive.
You keep your server room dark when you're in there? Do you keep night vision goggles in the man trap? I like walking into the server room and seeing all those nice Sun systems racked up, or the cool looks of the EMC and NetApp racks, rather than the ugly hodgepodge of the x86 server racks. It makes the server room look neater, and I'm a server neat freak (channel and label that cabling!). I'm not alone in this.
People buy servers and operating systems to run applications. What good is a free OS that won't run the apps you need?
If you're that impressed with Mac servers, why did you buy Sun?
Apple is moving away from high-powered local servers and into providing cloud services. Note the recent billions of dollars of investment in the infrastructure to support them. The XServe is simply not on the strategic roadmap, not worth the R&D and support investment for the small role Apple sees it playing. Whether this approach is a good one is debatable.
There is rumor that for those people who absolutely have to have a rack-mounted Mac, the next Mac Pro may be rackable.
I didn't buy it. This particular enterprise actually has little use for what Apple offers in the server room. There is no Oracle 11g or MSSQL 2008 equivalent on the Mac. Horses for courses.
That isn't all you can't get the equivalent of on a Mac, and you aren't the only one the didn't need what Mac was offering, by a long shot.
Mac doesn't want to deal with the back end, they want to own the front end, make you figure out how to make the integration work in the middle, and convince you it's worth it because it looks cool.
They did, just not limited enough. They made 12,000, and had to cut the price from $9K to $2K before they finally unloaded all of them.
I have to disagree with your slowness characterization of the Macbook Air. When the Macbook Air came out on January 15, 2008, at 2.9 pounds and .76 inch thick, it was far faster than any other sub-notebook on the market at 1.6GHz... and it would run Windows XP, Vista, and later Windows 7. The offerings from the other companies at the time in the same class were generally 1Ghz or slower. Although not a speed demon, with 667MHz DDR2 RAM, and a Intel P7500 Core 2 Duo processor, it easily competed with main stream notebook computers.
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