I remember when I worked at a startup and we were trying to get a team at Apple to purchase our SaaS product. They wanted the software hosted on a Mac, so we ran it on a Mini to demo. Also strange things like presenting them in Slides instead of Powerpoint. But this was also like 10 years ago.

That’s not strange at all. I use to teach fitness classes part time at Coke’s headquarters. We were told specifically not to bring in drinks or water bottles from competitors.

> We were told specifically not to bring in drinks or water bottles from competitors.

Ridiculous :-))

There was a time when they made this guys:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve

With their new CPUs maybe it is time to bring them back?

I mean surely they are not going to license Dell to put a M1 chip in a rackspace computer.

Considering how they've been making Mac servers more and more irrelevant, I wouldn't have my hopes up.

I was running OSX in a datacenter on campus, so I think you mean the huge server farms like where mesosphere etc were famously in play?

Somewhat surprising since unlike their customers, there's no license restriction to Apple running macOS on different hardware. Maybe they didn't want to maintain a separate fork only for internal use. And having their own OS makes it more challenging to port apps to AWS/Azure.

The real question is how would this be beneficial to them? Almost everyone runs production systems on either Linux or Windows, so they would be an outlier, and the only one debugging and contributing to the operating system/libraries/etc.

I've read before on HN about people using Mac hardware in production, when they needed access to macOS graphics API, but since this only concerns a software implementation, and hardware was standard until M1 processors, it's reasonable to assume that Apple could port that part of OS to Linux, if they needed to use it from servers.

"Running OS-X in datacenters was verboten"

Why?

I'm not an Apple insider, but I can imagine many reasons.

For one thing, the tcp stack is ancient, and easy to syn flood. (It was forked from FreeBSD in 2001ish, before FreeBSD added syncookies and syncache). Synflooding os x makes the whole network stack unresponsive, including other interfaces like localhost.

Maybe they didn't want to run into a tech debt thing of "we can't push this update to consumers even though it would cause no issues for them, because it would break X and Y on our backend servers and the two would have to diverge for some time until we come up with a fix."