Since Apple isn't opposed to releasing new OS flavors, I think they should release "serverOS", a variant of macOS but licensed to run anywhere, even (or especially) on non-Apple hardware and in VMs.

It's very frustrating to a lot of people that macOS VMs aren't easy (licensing/ToS-wise) to spin up on non-Apple hardware, especially since Apple doesn't sell high-end servers any longer. Yes, that calculus will be different when the new Mac Pro begins to sell, but a lot of IT departments would rather add Apple VMs for testing/build/dev to their on existing on-premise compute clouds (vSphere/etc.) than spin up brand new ones on Apple hardware.

Additionally, there's a lot of demand for local Apple VMs on Windows machines. Microsoft makes a lot of money from software that's running on my Mac - especially Office and Windows (via Parallels Desktop or Boot Camp). Why shouldn't Apple make money from VMs running on Windows and Linux machines?

I would be very surprised if they didn't already have something like this internally for hosting iCloud and various other services. I agree it would be great for them to make it more widely available as a product.

Someone mentioned on HN a few months ago that they definitely do have large banks of both Apple-branded and non-Apple machines running a special in-house flavor of macOS. In fact, the last manufacturing run of XServe hardware had a more souped-up configuration than they ever offered to customers and was reserved for internal use at Apple.

It would be ... well, kind of them to offer IT solutions they use internally to other IT departments tasked to support work on Apple platforms. At the very minimum, they could license a version of macOS (or "serverOS") tuned for server workloads, VM deployments, and Apple Remote Desktop sessions.

It's a quip among colleagues that "macOS is not a server OS".

I have to run a bunch of VMs for builds, and I really wish I could be running Linux instead.

That doesn't mean the XNU kernel and core libraries couldn't be tuned to support compute- and network-bound workloads.

I don't know that it'd be worth the investment at this point. We already have our widely-supported Unixy system for that, Linux.

Furthermore, there's a longstanding (3 year) bug where the kernel would (very rarely) fail to execute a process. This would manifest as "/bin/sh: fail to execute binary file", because the posix_spawn() call returns an error (this is the actual bug), the libc interprets this as trying to execute a script, and falls back to running it through /bin/sh (this is standard Unix behavior), which can't execute it either because it's not a script.

That such a bug would persist for so long doesn't inspire confidence in the quality of the kernel.

> That such a bug would persist for so long doesn't inspire confidence in the quality of the kernel.

That says more about Apple's current priorities than anything else. Sure, Linux is more mature, but if Apple were to release serverOS for specific types of workloads that are needed, you can bet any bugs that would interfere significantly would be prioritized up.

Perhaps better yet they can build Apple-branded server hardware and compete with Azure and AWS on a Mac OS version of the cloud

It was called XServe. It died due to a bunch of reasons, mostly (I believe) having to do with price/power/performance of Intel chips.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve

Server hardware is low-margin. Apple doesn't do low-margin.

Cloud hosting is high-margin, though

I would pay a premium to be able to install macOS on a cloud VM that I can scale arbitrarily large (and to arbitrarily many instances, presumably with premium for each). I'd like to do scalable CI and builds for macOS.

(Also, if someone can find a maintainable method for it, I'd love to support someone who maintains a cross-compiler toolchain that targets macOS, making it possible to build Rust and C apps for macOS without having macOS installed. But that's not a complete substitute for having an actual macOS cloud build server, on which the compiled applications can run as part of the build process.)

This toolchain can build C, C++ and Rust programs for macOS on Linux and FreeBSD. You'd need an Apple developer account to download the SDK.

https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross

Handy!

How hard would it be to integrate something like that into rustup, to make it easy to install a capable cross-compiler backend?

This may be of interest to you: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/cloud-hosted-mac-agent...

No kidding. I would pay their entire iMac hardware margin for an OSX desktop license.

I'm afraid the markup would have to be a lot more than that. They're banking on you buying multiple pieces of hardware over the years, not just one iMac... Hardware lock-in is their whole business model...

We're talking about people like me who build their own desktops and wouldn't buy an Apple desktop otherwise. They could even make it a subscription.

Right, but how would they prevent eroding sales to people _not_ like you? That's exactly why the hardware lock-in model is so insidious.

> They could even make it a subscription.

Yes, my only point is that it would have to cost a lot more than the margin of a single iMac.

I see your point now. Oh well.

it falls on deaf ears because there are only dozens of us.

I don't fault them for it, they're a hardware company. Releasing the OS as a consumer product would probably destroy their hardware sales, since users (like me) wouldn't buy Apple hardware anymore.

But like I said, I would pay an outrageous fee to use MacOS on a non-Apple machine without violating the EULA. And I only want it for professional use, where I can justify certain expenses (like a $500 software license + yearly renewal for updates), but can't justify spending $2-5k on an Apple machine that won't give me the performance, maintenance, or upgrade path available from off the shelf components.

It's such a weird business calculus to develop for MacOS. I genuinely love their products and software, but it constantly feels like developers get screwed every generation (especially smaller shops that do heavy lifting on MacOS).

They probably wouldn't. Apple have very limited driver support, and they get away with that because of their tight hardware configurations.

The slickness of Mac OS X is partially because it's only deployed on high-end, well known hardware.

It would be a maintenance nightmare for Apple. MS puts a lot of resources towards making Windows run on everything. Apple controls the hardware with an iron fist so they don't have to do that.

I'd buy a stack of Mac Mini's and leave them unplugged if it allowed me to provision dozens of Mac VMs on real server hardware.

I mean they're not selling me one now, I don't need a hot plate on my desk. But I would pay a (comparatively) obscene amount of money for just the operating system license to install on a midtower.