Considering their backend (iCloud, etc.) runs on Linux fleets, I believe they are more pragmatic than idealists.

I'd love to see a full fleet of Mac servers (XServe was a handsome piece of kit), but I believe one shall choose their battles.

Im curious which OS they run on these https://wccftech.com/apples-private-cloud-compute-server-m5-...

isn't it very stripped down iOS?

So this is all pure speculation, but seeing as they are a hardware company I wonder if they have some sort of internal only server chassis to house apple motherboards for their backend, tolerate asahi linux for this? No real external market for apple servers so they don't develop it past "Ok for internal use"

The more I think about it the more I doubt it, even if you make your own hardware it is hard to compete with a commodity server, but it is an interesting thought.

Update: or perhaps they do, a sibling comment had a picture of such.

They definitely have their own servers. There was a post about that, some time ago. There’s a sibling post to yours, about them.

Not sure about the backplane architecture. I’m pretty sure they are custom datacenter rack units.