Given the ridiculously low power requirement of m1 chips if anyone wants to use these probably in small scale capacities they should just buy it. The power and maintenance won't be that much if a hassle (10 of these would use less than 300w) and you would get warranty too. I think the mac mini m1 was designed (lack of) by apple to replace current mac mini racks but ideally this thing can be as tiny as a 3rd gen apple tv and a rack of 10-20 could be as small as a mac pro ...
Well thats what we need from Apple next. The Mac Rack of 10 M1 chips (aka. Mack). Not sure how useful that would be for me personally though. My reasoning being, if 1 chip takes 30W, why not double the number of chips or do something to the chip to get more from it.
it's going to be interesting with the 16 inch macbook pro the imac and mac pro. of course apple has the full licence with ARM to do almost anything they want but based on my understanding the X ARM cores the 7 series and 5 series can be clustered. My guess would be apple moves to a cluster based design eventually like in m1 but with more cores for higher end machines but right now i'd say just a chiplet version of current m1 chips would still be a great option with higher frequency. A 4 or 8 chiplet design would still be only 150w or so with gpus disabled or somehow using all gpus as one. This is the strategy amd has gone with obviously with chiplet without gpus but I think this also makes sense for apple to reuse its designs.
I have no idea why it was canned, but it was a very expensive server with a very expensive SAN solution. I think it just didn't compete well with other enterprise class machines on price.
People are willing to pay more for a Mac Laptop/ desktop because the overall experience is nice. The screen, the construction, keyboard (save the shitty one), trackpad, Retina display, high speed SSD, etc all significantly affect user experience.
When the primary use case is sitting in a closet and serving up bits quickly, it quickly boils down to bang for the buck where the Mac has always lagged. The M1 could very well change this though. Particularly since power use is significantly better.
Also, when the Xserve was around, there weren't nearly as many iPhone developers looking for CI solutions. Seems like now there would be a pretty healthy demand for that alone.
If you have, for example, a profitable cross-platform mobile app, but your developers primarily use windows/linux and test on Android, then it might make sense. If all you need is to spin up a mac for the occasional build/test/deploy, then paying $85 per month is easier than having to maintain an M1 in the office that no one is going to regularly use, especially if your team is distributed and/or remote.
