Apple whispers farewell to macOS Server

I don't see why they think it has to go...

Maintaining macOS Server isn't that hard for them. It's not like it actually does very much (which they acknowledge by pointing to so many poorly resourced but brilliant open source alternatives, much of which theirs is based on). It is a part of the market that only competes against the cloud nowadays, so would take very little investment to make 'a thing'; such as partnering with other software vendors like Atlassian to build a suite that small companies really need (I never saw a company buy macOS over SBS, it was more like they would use it over gmail. Not everyone 'just' wants to use cloud based services (many are wary of getting locked in to the Borg, MS or anyone else) and putting all your files in the places that don't belong to you is not something everyone actually wants to do.

But the cloudy types at Apple are getting all the oxygen so they are dumping something that is actually very good, even if it needed some love.

My Mac mini server has run for 7 years now. In the beginning I setup a mirror RAID 1, easily possible using their old AppleRAID (and mdadm) at the CLI, very easily. Apple never chose to even support AppleRAID on the mini, despite it working so well. I even made it support the OS's DRP. The array ran 24x7 for 5 years, supporting two guest VMs, a database and two webservers, all on 2 500GB 2.5" HDDs.

Never halted. Never failed despite not having ECC memory.

Then I swapped it to an SSD and a HDD (no RAID), and it still runs flawlessly. Not even the fans have failed, and the OS is supported as well as it was on day one with very little effort to maintain on my behalf (I hope).

What a tremendous piece of work, Steve Jobs. So what to do? Scrap it.

Not very smart, Apple. Eyes are all off the ball in terms of security and real product now. All hands are instead on making hot air in the upper atmosphere instead. It'll bite them in the tail, IMHO.

CUPS

echo "I wonder what will happen to CUPS" >> lpr

Stupid, short-sighted, beancountery

Everything that's wrong with Apple these days.

And so Macs get strangled a little bit more.

Macs were never servers.

I have two Mac Mini "servers" (as sold to my employer) sitting next to me. I mean... come on... one hard drive, not even proper RAM, nothing. You couldn't rely on them to do anything at all. And if the only difference was a £25 software upgrade, you know they aren't going to be anything special. That's pretty much why they had to buy two... just in case one went pop.

Literally, I turned one off several years ago because at that point MacOS clients could directly join to LDAP without all the OpenDirectory / golden-triangle junk. The other is kept running because it supervises our iPads but even that I'm regretting (and, in fact, we're scrapping iPads too). If I could, I would gather them all in, wipe them all out and supervise them on an online service (Google Apps lets you do it).

Neither devices were my choice of hardware, but certainly classing anything Apple as "a server" is a complete lie. And, yes, I have had RAM and disk failures in them.

Good riddance to a complete misuse of the word server.

It is strange they are still supporting it at all

If they are still producing updates for it, why shut off the parts people presumably bought it for? Just announce that the next update will be the last, and be done with it. If they quit selling it eight years ago, no one is going to be too put out that updates have stopped.

There were quite a few hints that something was up when 5.4, was released following the launch of High Sierra. For instance, File Sharing had been removed, now being controlled by High Sierra itself. Nevertheless, this is a very popular product and, anecdotally, I see about 2 macOS Server deployments for every 3 of Windows Server Essentials or 4 of Synology DSM in small business setups.

The list of alternatives provided by Apple is interesting. For instance, KerioConnect is suggested as an email product. In the UK, this costs £353 for 5 users for the first year. Quite a difference to macOS Server, which includes this and other functionality for £19.99 all in.

In-house at Apple?

Does anyone know what Apple use in-house? I assume they have 10s of thousands of Macs and quite a few iphones too.

Tim Cook is an idiot.. that is the point...

He is the wrong CEO for Apple. He is destroying Apple with things like this.

Calendar and contacts server included in MacOS server

I hope they keep up development on their rather nice open-source calendar and contacts server. It's written in Python, and even included in Debian these days.

All your data are belong to us. Employ only your family and use iCloud family sharing. All non-cashcow Apple products must be in the firing line to pay for all that uncollected tax that's about to be hoovered up by the US and the EU.

I genuinely thought Mac OS Server was discontinued back in 2010 when they discontinued the server hardware. I've quite literally never seen an installation of Mac OS Server, ever. Any company I've ever been involved in with Macs as their only clients has used Linux servers and mixed environments often use Windows servers.

I thought it already dead...

I was surprised to read this as I thought OS X Server was dead and had been for a long time.

I brought it when it as £299 (?) for OS X Snow Leopard and threw it on a spare Mac Mini. I have to say I thought it bloody awful at the time. It was extremely limited for what we wanted to do, which wasn't OS X builds or FCPX render farms, the support from Apple was utterly useless (zero) and so much had to be done from the command line that the UI was pointless.

I recall the main reason we wanted it was to serve up OS X updates to a small collection of Macs at home. We had quite a few, limited capacity on our network and so basically putting a small proxy server in place to be a Software Update Server seemed sensible. Ha, how little did I know how utterly, utterly useless SUS was. We spend weeks configuring it and trying to get it to serve stuff to our Macs and all it ever did was consume vast quantities of bandwidth as it kept resetting. In the end we simply gave up and moved to a higher capacity network provider.

We also wanted to move a Linux based Postfix server onto the mail server, but that was just a big a joke. The UI was useless the moment we tried to get virtual addresses working and so you had to hit the command line, well we were doing that already so that was no step forward. I fact every utility we tried seemed to be a backward step from what we had so in the end we put the Mac mini back to a desktop client and abandoned OS X Server. The price then dropped to £15 which I thought was still £20 too much.

Whilst some people may be misty eyed over this pile of dingo kidneys, my view is it should have been shot years ago. Now the X-Server hardware is another story altogether...

It’s a bit of a shame really.

I kind of knew this day was coming really, but it’s still a shame nevertheless.

Whatever anybody thought of MacOS Server after Mac OS 10.6, it did eventually develop into an easy to use and pretty rock solid basic server, with just enough function for SME when carefully configured.

Personally I use it on an old, but still rock solid 2009 20-inch iMac running 10.11 as a general home server. I mostly use it for VPN when in places with public WiFi, but also to sync my contacts and calenders across devices, and obviously file sharing.

I appreciate Apple providing these open source alternatives, but in ll honesty I doubt they’ll be anything close to the “click and go” that Sever offered me - I really don’t want to have to do my day job when at home.

RIP Server. You were well loved. At least by me anyway.

Many years ago, I remember replacing a gaggle of Microsloth email servers with a single Mac Pro (which happily dealt with email an order of magnitude faster).

While, from my perspective, this is a sad demise, it was perhaps an inevitable one given the price of a machine running Linux (which can also be had with redundant power supplies).

What do we do about Apple

Apple need to remember the idea of computing friction, and do everything they can to remove it. Right now they are actively adding it back in. Used to be, for example, that you could buy a Macbook, open it up, and get going. Frictionless. Now it's pain. Oh, you wanted to connect a peripheral? Sorry, dongle. And cash. Oh, you wanted wired, Ethernet like a grown-up? More cash. Just horrible. And the innovations in exchange for all this are pitiful things like the touchbar.

I decided that the friction outweighed the benefits and bailed on Apple, sadly. Windows has friction too, but I'm not being charged premium dollar to endure it.

iServer?

Perhaps they're phasing out MacOS Server because they want to put more resources into iPad Server...

Goodbye Apple.

Damn shame, I was about to pull the trigger and buy it despite the poor reviews, you know, just to have a tinker.

Sad

I am not particularly fond of Apple or their products, but I still found this to be very dismaying news.

It will make it even harder for any business to consider putting Macintosh computers on the desks of its employees, since using a Macintosh as the local server to a fleet of Macintoshes only makes sense; same training, same standard of security.

However, for any other server task, the cost of Apple hardware would place them out of consideration anyways.