Enterprise never ever mattered, and there arent enough digits available to show your “home lab” use case in the revenue numbers. Xserve, the RAID shelves, and the directory services were kinda there as a half hearted attempt for that late 90-00s AV setup. All of that fell on the cutting room floor once personal devices, esp iphone, was realized.
By the time I left in ‘10 the total revenue from mac hardware was like 15% of revenue. Im honestly surprised theres anyone who cared enough to package the business services for mac minis.
So if everything else is printing cash for a HUGE addressable consumer market at premium price points why would they try and compete with their own ODMs on more-or-less commodity enterprise gear?
Seems like I remember the main reason Macs survived as a product at all was because you needed one to develop for iOS. That may be an exaggeration but there certainly was a time when Macs were few and far between outside of creative shops. Certainly they were almost unseen in the corporate world, where now they are fairly common at least in laptops.
Macs survived because Apple got a cash injection, survived long enough to come out with colorful iMacs with an hockey puck mouse, still running on Mac OS 8, and the iPod.
Requiring one for doing iOS development they were already back into the green.
Microsoft had been writing the components of the Office Apps since 1985. Word and Excel were first developed on the Mac and PowerPoint was an original Mac App acquired by Microsoft.
At one point, Microsoft was making more money on each Mac sold than Apple. Microsoft wasn’t doing it for charity. If it were, why did it do it before the agreement and continue to support Mac today?
Apple got credit from banks before either the announcement or Steve Jobs return.
As someone living in a country, Portugal, where Apple had a single reseller, Interlog.
I could count with my hand fingers how many Macs I have seen being used between being born in the 70's and 2000's, up to 10.
My university graduation project was porting a visualisation framework from NeXTSTEP into Windows, because already there the university could not see a future with NeXT.
The fact that people believe Apple's cash injection, not only from Microsoft, that allowed for a survival plan, including an acquisition, has nothing to with Apple escaping bankruptcy is kind of interesting.
And yes Excel was initially developed for Mac, and once upon a time there was Visual Studio for Mac with MFC.
Still, it was Microsoft paying developers to build such products for a dying platform.
At no point was Microsoft spending more on Office for Mac than they were making on selling the Mac version.
It cost some. But famously Microsoft used byte code for Office that was portable and was dog slow around Office 5.
And it’s not my “believing”, it’s math. Apple lost far more than the net $150 million before it became popular.
This isn’t my reading the history books. My first computer was an Apple //e in 1986 and by 1993, I was following what was going on with Apple real time via Usenet and TidBits (been around since 1990) and I lied to get a free subscription to MacWeek.
The fact is Microsoft did spent R&D money to support Apple customers, with a product without which, Apple would even be less relevant in the late 90's.
They didn’t do it out of charity. They did it for profit. Microsoft was on the stage when the Mac was introduced in 1984. I don’t think they were ever seriously considering stopping Mac development. They ported office to PPC Macs in 1995 before the joint announcement 2 years later.
you probably don't go all in, but try to find real assets that are not _too_ strongly correlated and are likely to have durable long term value. The most compelling answers I've heard are things like desirable real estate, commodities, or futures/contracts like water rights. Even then its not no equities, just a much lower allocation to minimize down side while still capturing some of the exuberant growth
Generation and structure are important, but IME IDs arent complete without consideration of representation; encoding and opacity.
* User facing IDs must be opaque. If users can infer any structure or ordering from your ID they _will_ use and they _will_ create awkward dependencies on "your" implementation detail. My favorite example is the multi year and many many dev years of effort that went in to extending EC2 instance IDs. They were already assumed/intended to be opaque until clever users inferred the structure! The simplest answer of something like block cipher is so cheap as to be free (and can be accounted for as part of versioning).
* Encoding should be tailored for teh primary UX. Ex teh base32 variants are reasonably efficient and accommodating of text selection & input. Dictionary schemes (ala S/KEY rfc2289 or BIP39) may be more appropriate for voice communication.
* Following ID structure -> opacity -> encoding you should probably account for the block size and encoding efficiency to minimize padding or excess characters
I read the report when it come out. From memory, no. It never had any components or certification for human pressure vessels. IIRC theres no existing regs for carbon fiber and it would have cost like $50M to do the design and test work. They did buy some things, like the viewport, from companies who do certified parts, but instead opted for the same design minus any test certs to save money. The craft was never certified or inspected by the uscg. It did have a registration for a while, but they had to play find-a-new-district-sign-off shell games for a while, then… just stopped bothering.
Bad news, 60/40 isnt a diversification strategy the last few years. 1) positive correlation in equity and fixed income 2) US treasuries/dollars have not had a “flight to safety” bump when volatility/l or bad news happens recently 3) treasuring moving to “all” short term debt, short term rate cuts resulting in long term rate increases.
> datacenters depend on used hardware sales to recoup cost
Who? Ive worked for few big infra companies with millions to billions of DC assets. After depreciation and then some, say 3-5 years, theyre effectively scrap. Its more cost effective to buy new, denser, racks than continue to MRC on the stranded space and power. The reseller is cheaper/easier effectively paid to scrap the parts as e-waste and recover what they can.
Datacenters hire companies to do this on their behalf, as they don't have the internal know-how to do this. Even the big cloud companies do this.
They're on 3-5 year cycles, yet the hardware life has a good 8 years in it. The reseller sifts through what comes out, sees what is still alive, scraps what isn't, and resells the rest.
What you don't understand is this isn't a one way relationship. If you're a major cloud company, your hardware probably already is worthless. Meta (and other companies) use a non-standard case and rack "standard" called Open Compute (OCP)... there is no resale market for these, as normal datacenters use normal racks with normal cases. Meta has to pay a company to dispose of these and lose 100% of their investment.
But lets say we go to someone else that does use standard hardware, and the rest of the industry buys this stuff up (to maintain existing fleets that don't need upgraded yet, not everybody is on some ridiculous 3-5 year churn), the company you partnered with to deal with your e-waste is likely to either give you a much better rate or even pay you for your hardware (if it is in high demand).
These enterprise inference machines have zero resale value. Even the OCP stuff I mentioned above has a small market (theres a few smaller datacenters out there toying with OCP due to it having better density, but aren't willing to buy new to test it out), but there is no market for these inference SBCs.
See my sibling comment to this for more information on why the SBCs are uniquely weird.
Maybe i read too much in to “depend on used hardware sales.” Ive worked for 2/5 and 3/15 largest us companies doing cloud and infra stuff. Recovered costs from EOL hardware has just never ever mattered. Not even a rounding error on P&L and hardware/dc org has 1000 higher value priorities. Ill admit maybe the offset costs were squirreled away in finance but not visible to the business.
Even with zero resale value thats “fine.” Anytime Ive owned capacity planning it’d be more cost effective to pay someone a multiple of rack MRC to get the hardware out and free up the space and whips. The impediment was almost always free hands and coordination functions that were being spent on new adds rather than replacement.
E-waste disposal is a huge cost, and it might be entirely possible you're not seeing the cost, or you're not aware of what a badly negotiated contract looks like.
Also, a lot of the industry runs on incredibly poor margins. The only datacenter space in the world right now printing money is either owned by clouds or owned by the AI bubble (which are sometimes the same companies, or the cloud leasing space to the AI bubble).
Mostly, profits are eaten by power deals (this is why Facebook put their biggest important DCs up where the cheapest power in the US is) or property ownership (buying land, building the DC, paying property taxes, maintaining the building, etc, that shit aint cheap), and then you get to buy hardware and hopefully get customers.
Amazon, Google, Facebook, et al all cheat their way through every loophole known to man to keep the costs down and the profit high; not a lot of it is from scale, even though they're still trying to chase that to the end, too.
They tried to do a LOT. An absolutely huge amount of work trying to abstract all of the existing Code* services, big chunks of other AWS services, and then corp (and non corp!) identity. The last part, getting human identity in to AWS, is such a fundamental gap. In the end its unsurprising that they couldnt get to a competitive place against gitlab/github/etc. I do hope theres more success with identity center picking up some of those IdP pieces.
I remember seeing that, though iirc it was a lot more surgery than I wanted to do on my blinds (which already had a shaky wife-acceptance-factor due to spotty zigbee connections). Thanks for the reminder, though.
> Total Cloud Revenue (SaaS + IaaS): $6.7 billion, up 27%. CapEx (Full Year): $21.2 billion. The company is facing supply constraints, unable to meet the high demand for its cloud services, leading to scheduling customers into the future.
Much lower name recognition for smaller customers. But there are some big big name "AI" & B2C companies who have _huge_ spend with OCI. This isnt "rent a couple of instances" its much more like "provide a couple GW of compute for X years."
I don't know if this comment is one of ignorance, or juvenile "well actually", but it is tragically misinformed. From an Australian perspective all of the big players, CSR, John Mansviille, & James Hardy, knew asbestos was a significant hazard by _at least_ the 40s. There were early epidemiological studies of cancers around asbestos work sites, and workers, in the 50s here in NSW. Unions and gov health departments start to push back on exposure and seek meaningful damages in the 60s and 70s. There were _public_ campaigns about the dangers in the 70s and 80s. It wasnt meaningfully restricted, _and continued to be commonly used_, through the 80s. A complete ban, primarily workplaces IIRC, wasnt introduced until 2003. The randian wank fantasy of "the informed consumer knows best" has been repudiated innumerable times.
And, as others have pointed out, this is not an individual choice. The families who got asbestosis from washing their fathers work clothes didnt make a choice. The bloom of cancers for residential suburbs miles around james hardy in camellia didnt have a choice. There is no expiration date on the dangers of friable asbestos. It remains hidden in the common environment forever, until someone else stumbles on it.
By the time I left in ‘10 the total revenue from mac hardware was like 15% of revenue. Im honestly surprised theres anyone who cared enough to package the business services for mac minis.
So if everything else is printing cash for a HUGE addressable consumer market at premium price points why would they try and compete with their own ODMs on more-or-less commodity enterprise gear?
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