That’s because they tried integration with the rest of their SW ecosystem.

If they just did motherboards with cpu/ram/pcie and let other OEMs build complete systems the story would be very different

They tried it with various open systems that allowed licensed powerpc clones of their systems and they ended it because it reduced their profits as people bought the clones instead of mac hardware. I don't see them redoing that anytime soon.

Also in that case they didn’t even own the hardware. They were IBM chips. They just had a reference design and a BIOS.

That still doesn’t overcome the issue that they are selling every single one they can already. They have no need for additional chip sales.

All the capacity at all the fabs is booked up for years. They can’t make more if they want to.

So any hypothetical sales of OEM style guts would only cut into the number of Macs they can sell to existing customers. And there’s no way they would ever do that.

> They have no need for additional chip sales.

Higher margins?

Servers need a lot of RAM. Apple can either make 42 iPhones with 12GB or one server with 512GB RAM.

42 people with iPhone will buy airpods, some subscriptions and apps. They also be vendor locked into Apple ecosystem and almost guaranteed to bring more iPhone sale in 3 years.

Apple must be dumb to canibalize their own market.

With the Xserve, all Apple had to sell was repackaged Intel systems—with an Apple markup. They had nothing special to offer on the hardware side.

Now they have Apple Silicon.

It really isn't that great when comparing against server systems.

I think most people here never seen the inside of sliding pizza boxes on server racks, really seeing them.