Sam Oliver
The e-mail reportedly sent by Jobs came in response to a user who lamented that Apple was abandoning the professional market. In the note obtained by Mac Generation, the user pleaded that Apple continue to offer its rackmounted servers.
Jobs allegedly responded on his iPhone: "Hardly anyone was buying them."
Last week, Apple revealed that it would discontinue its Xserve hardware after Jan. 31, 2011. Users have been asked to transition to new hardware, including a new Mac Pro Server configuration that Apple began selling on Friday.
Apple also talked about the sales rankings of its server hardware in its "Xserve Transition Guide" released last week. In it, the company revealed that the Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server has been the company's most popular server system since its introduction in the fall of 2009.
Jobs has been known to respond to e-mails sent to him by users. He has even cited those e-mails publicly, quoting one at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference. "I was sitting in a cafe with my iPad, and it got a girl interested in me," the note read. "Now that's what I call a magical device!"
Of course, faking an e-mail is also possible, and makes any note reportedly sent by someone as prominent as Jobs suspect. Earlier this year, a phony e-mail exchange was offered for sale to a number of sites, including AppleInsider, before one technology publication purchased the fake conversation and published details from it. Apple's public relations department quickly responded by outright denying the exchange.
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134 Comments
I guess he makes some sense, but you can't rackmount a Mac Pro.
Apple pulled the XServes years ago from MacWorld leaving us with just consumer gear and little reason for professionals to attend.
Apple never displayed them in a retail store that I ever saw.
Apple spent little on advertising them.
And you're surprised hardly anybody is buying them?
The lack of stability and support for OSX Server killed the X-Serve and X Serve Raid.
I guess he makes some sense, but you can't rackmount a Mac Pro.
Mac minis?
I suppose an apple forum is the wrong place to ask this question, but:
- How many of you have rack-mounted servers at your company?
- For those of you who do, what OS?
We have Exchange servers for email/calendaring, and UNIX servers (I have no idea what flavor; it's not my specialty) for everything else.
Call me stupid ("okay, stupid") but I think the only people who care what flavor the rackmount is are the IT people working on it. Everyone else just cares if it works. Unix works great as a server platform with or without the mac veneer on top, and end users are none the wiser. IT geeks should know their way around a unix terminal without needing some shiny veneer. Hence, no need for a mac rack-mount server.
For the less-intelligent folk (again, me) there is a need for mac veneers, but our needs run to things like mac mini servers and mac pro servers. Once we get into rack-mounting things we know we're unqualified.