New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

did they consider it a separate line? if they did, good job, you found one

i was actually watching part of the intro video for that the other night.

I wasn't trying to find anything! I was just kind of sad when they discontinued that. The model identifier was "RackMac" for them. They were different enough hardware-wise to be a distinct product from the Mac Pro.

Mac OS X Server has been phased out in a way in that it's a feature pack you add on to a base OS X install rather than a distinct OS installer.

afaik apple's own server farms don't run any variant of OS X and are mostly using the same hardware as every other company. it was wise, imo, to drop that segment, but it's still something that had strong NeXT roots (Jobs' baby!) and got dropped.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebObjects has a similar arc

lol webobjects

someone brought that up in the context of the xserve announcement in the video i was watching

also, i thought icloud was running on AZURE, in part

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUdHQH99An0

really? I mean, it's possible, but Apple owns their own data centers. I think you're confusing iCloud data storage and whatever thing those dudes making that Vesper app rolled together.

imo azure makes sense if you're a low/mid-tier application developer who just needs a service backend for an application, but if you're a large business, you're probably going to want to have a more robust backend

also eMac

I think you're confusing iCloud data storage and whatever thing those dudes making that Vesper app rolled together.

i thought the data centers were relying partially on microsoft stuff

unggh

i know gruber's using azure, but i thought apple was too

yo mh: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/02/04/icloud-azure

I think I heard they're using Azure as well for iCloud (the document and Core Data APIs). The data centres are for all the rest, the stores in particular

webobjects was boss, btw. I would still like the objc version back.

kind of odd but makes some sense

also, yes, webobjects is cool

also, lol at caek remembering the eMac
:)

i have an emate in my room

anyone remember the PowerCD?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/Apple_PowerCD.jpg/220px-Apple_PowerCD.jpg

yes, Apple had a standalone digital music player before the iPod, a portable CD player/CD-ROM drive. Now Apple wants optical discs to go away completely.

afaik iCloud is a blend of Azure, AWS, and Apple-owned infra, depending on the region etc.

seems kinda pathetic. like, google and facebook don't do that, do they?

no, but google and facebook are primarily providers of services on the internet. apple definitely has a lot of traffic as far as the store goes, but bootstrapping new stuff off of existing infrastructure makes sense.

if icloud services were their main profit center, then sure it'd be dumb to host externally

how surprised would you be if they eventually took it solo? i wouldn't be

sure, right after they open up the iTunes store to other clients

you're being sarcastic, but apple does not like to rely on others. all that "own and control the primary technology" stuff

yes yes yes they may not consider this stuff a "primary technology"

and they don't compete much with microsoft or amazon

MUCH I SAID MUCH

wait, took what solo?

stopped relying on amazon and microsoft

yeah, I thought you meant took iCloud solo as in spun it off into its own business

that's in-housing, not solo!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ESdn0MuJWQ

yeah i mean of course they want to take this stuff in house. linkedin does a better job of this than apple.

i don't know anyone in architecture/data who would choose to work for apple if they could help it though so...

why are they so bad though?

esp. since they've been at it in small ways for over a decade

my theory is that google, linkedin, yahoo, etc. have all agressively open sourced their network/data stuff (hadoop, hive, pig, kafka, etc.) and created an ecosystem of talent to draw from. apple obviously do this in some areas, and have benefited correspondingly (ios, etc.), but not in this one.

like there is no one not already at apple who is an expert in apple's technology in this area, which is not at all true of google or even MS

Some of it they're pretty good at - the iTunes Store shifts some bits and the App Store is surprisingly robust for what is basically an iTunes hack. But it's all WebObjects and yeah there are like 25 people on a mailing list who could work on that outside Apple. None of that is hosted externally, apart from the CDN bits

it's just fucking wild to me that apple is a hardware/software/services company, knows that's who it is, yet doesn't put a hell of a lot more effort into the services part of that formulation

xpost

it's in their long term interest to get better at services. keeping that in mind, why wouldn't they do whatever they have to do so that ten years from now their shit is killer, even if that means using something other than webobjects or whatever? even if that means rewriting massive amounts of stuff and fucking with hardware in their data centers

make it a goal to get google-caliber at services

not that that'd even be achievable

but try to get there -- set the bar high

not, "we can't even get our notes app to sync properly"

With the exception of pro- and semi-pro software, they've given up nearly completely on selling much software.

It's pretty much hardware >
operating systems for hardware >
media ecosystem (iTunes store, etc) that builds their media ecosystem >
base applications that make people buy other hardware (iTunes & such linking hardware to iPad/iPhone/iPod) >
pro applications they sell for a few bucks that drive hardware sales >
services that keep hardware afloat w/back-ups and keeping up to minimal expected standards for 2014