Mike Peterson
Apple is officially discontinuing its $20 macOS Server app starting on Thursday, years after beginning to phase out the service.
In a recent support document, Apple announced that it officially pulled the plug on the service as of April 21, 2022. The last version of the app will be macOS Server 5.12.2.
The company added that existing customers can continue to download and use the app on macOS Monterey. However, it also noted that many of the core features of the macOS Server platform are already included in more recent versions of the Mac operating system.
"The most popular server features— Caching Server, File Sharing Server, and Time Machine Server are bundled with every installation of macOS High Sierra and later, so that even more customers have access to these essential services at no extra cost," Apple says.
Apple has also provided additional resources and support documents for users wanting to migrate from Profile Manager to other mobile device management (MDM) solutions.
The macOS Server app first debuted in 1999 and provided a variety of server and system administration tools and capabilities to macOS users. Apple has phased out some many aspects of the service over the years, incorporating functionality into other apps.
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17 Comments
The nice thing about OSX Server was all configurations were handled in one place. Now you have to go find all the features.
One of the nicer features of OS X Server back in the day was the UI for management of DNS. It wasn't for extremely complex situations but it was very handy for small to medium sized networks and it was a lot easier than hand editing text files.
Has all the functionality been transitioned to other services for customers outside the US?
I remember back in the early days of Mac OS X (client) you use to be able to enable Web Sharing where essentially you could turn your Mac into a web hosting server. Any idea how to re-enable this option or is it gone for good?
I guess there is no "Server" for the rest of us.
Our file sharing permissions started going wonky.
Our centralized Time machine died-
The whole concept of Apple ID- for a shop with multiple computers- owned by a company- and assigned to employees- got super complicated-
and it was super frustrating.
Now- we have a raspberry pi running our DNS and our Wiki
we're constantly having our apple messages go to personal phones instead of computers-
File sharing permissions get garbled more and more-
And in a day when collaboration is all the rage-
we're using fontbase to manage fonts-
and a bunch of other programs that are halfassed collaboration tools- that should be where Apple is scoring big time.
Because they sure don't act like they care about mine.
Bring back Apple server. Please. Please. With all of it's ease of use capabilities.