Apple had rack-mount servers. They got rid of them. I don’t know the exact reasons why, but I assume it’s because there weren’t enough people buying them and they couldn’t make enough profit on building and supporting them.

I did find it interesting that Apple took the entire last run of that hardware for themselves, so that they could run their own internal VMware clusters on real Apple hardware for their developers.

There’s no way that Apple could build an AMI to run on hardware designed and built by someone else. Apple has a small number of people who really know what they’re doing, and they get shifted around to whatever project Apple thinks is most important — whether that’s hardware or software.

Apple needs to own the whole enchilada here, for multiple reasons. So, they can sell Apple hardware to AWS for inclusion inside of AWS data centers. But it has to be real-deal Apple hardware, running real-deal Apple OS, even if it is under a hyper visor like VMWare.