As of April 21, 2022, Apple has discontinued macOS Server. Existing macOS Server customers can continue to download and use the app with macOS Monterey.
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.
I doubt many people are running macOS Server installations at this point, so I don’t think this will impact a great number of people.
Thought they killed this off years ago! Maybe it was just their server line?
They killed MacOS X Server as an OS version and started offering the Server utils as a package in the App Store.
They killed the rackmount hardware, but the server version of MacOS was still a thing. For a while it was an OS option for the Mac MIni.
Around 2009 I ordered an Apple server for a small office. Great hardware, nice licensing terms, and easy to administer. Kinda Linux with good UI. I still remember the beauty inside the server rack, hidden for most eyes…
This will bite quite hard Mac workshops out there that don’t want to purchase desktop hardware to run build agents on continuous integration chains.
Now, the only alternative is to do mind boggling things like Amazon is doing to offer MacOS solutions on AWS: bolt a mac mini inside a 1U rack with a disk array on a thunderbolt port: https://aws.amazon.com/pt/blogs/compute/getting-started-with-anka-on-ec2-mac-instances/
At least until Apple began to offer decent cross compiling support for their core SDK, so devops engineers can setup Linux instances to that job.
Nah, putting a mini into a rack is not mind-boggling.
This here was, at the time where there just was no powerful headless Mac: https://www.slashgear.com/imac-pro-server-rack-macstadium-private-cloud-02532722
Had one of these in a rack back in the day. Worked fine.
https://www.sonnetstore.com/products/rackmac-mini
The power button was awesome, a mechanical linkage that pressed the button on the Mac from the front panel.
I’m missing something, I thought it was only the app they are discontinuing, I thought xseves had been dead for years, or is there a different form factor I forgot about?
Generally, servers were never really the focus for Apple, or for the vast majority of Mac users for that matter. Some people think that, because MacOS X Server came before MacOS X, MacOS X was somehow a server-centric OS. Nope, it was all a clever manoeuvre.
You see, MacOS X Server 1.0 was never meant to exist in the first place. What was released as MacOS X Server 1.0 was initially meant to be the first MacOS X (most likely with a server edition alongside).
But, back when the first MacOS X release candidates (aka Rhapsody) were being unveiled, software developers for the Mac expressed disdain for the fact they’d have to choose between rewriting their source code for Cocoa (“Yellow Box”) or having their applications confined to the Classic Environment emulator” (“Blue Box”), which they often called the “penalty box”, and threatened to terminate the Mac versions of their apps altogether (keep in mind that, back then, the Mac was an ailing platform, so Apple couldn’t take that risk). So Apple backtracked and worked on a method to allow for easy porting of classic MacOS apps to MacOS X by supporting most of the classic MacOS API in MacOS X (which they called the Carbon API). In the meantime, the Carbon-less MacOS X they had ready for shipping was released as MacOS X Server 1.0 so they could make some money out of it and collect feedback and bug reports from power users.
tl;dr As I said above, servers were never really the focus for Apple. People who bought into the idea of a MacOS X server got duped.
Actually, they did try pushing both the xServe and xSAN quite a bit in the mid 2000’s.
Interesting, I thought pixar had a farm of xserves, but I saw one article about that but it apparently never happened at scale. Linux on Intel just crushed them. Ouch. Steve Jobs own company rejected the platform, maybe thats why apple killed it off.
It did server a purpose. It was Apple’s answer to Active Directory. Everything was FOSS stuff behind the scenes, but they did add nice GUIs.