The big news at WWDC, aside from the forthcoming release of Leopard (the latest revision of OS 10) is the completion of Apple’s switch to Intel hardware. With today’s launch of the Intel Xeon-powered Mac Pro and Xserve, the last pieces of the puzzle have been placed on the board. This brings an end to Apple’s PPC-based products, and begins a new era under the Intel banner. On the bright side, these new machines are sure to bring a better performance per-watt than previous models. It will also be interesting to see what position Apple takes on virtualization now that their server line has moved to x86/x86_64 hardware.
TechThink
An IT geek's weblog
One problem I see with the new Apple is their apparent switch in focus. Apple has traditionally been a hardware company. Their focus now seems to be on OS X, but they still want to be a hardware company. This is evident in Apple’s unwillingness to license OS X for use on non-Apple hardware. Unfortunately, there’s also a lack of meaningful changes to their current products features. Apple finally added out-of-band management to its Xserve line, but that’s something that should’ve been there in the last generation. Tom Yager of InfoWorld recently speculated that Apple would include 10 gigabit ethernet in the new Xserve, but that wasn’t to be either. The fact is, you can get a server from HP with the same power per-watt efficiency and better features at a lower cost. At home, OS X and a pretty case might be enough to make you switch, but in the server room, Apple’s got a long way to go if they want buy-in from IT. With their server products still playing catch-up to HP, IBM and Dell, Apple needs to innovate if they want to survive. Honestly, I think the new Xserve is a stop-gap solution. Apple’s engineers had serious pressure to get a new Intel-based server product to market, but they also knew they had to solve 2 glaring issues with their current products. (the lack of redundant power and out-of-band management) Hopefully what we’ll see in the next year or so will be the addition of a few extra features. (10Gb ethernet to start, perhaps with an integrated TCP offload engine for better performance with applications such as iSCSI.)