try as I have, I can't imagine how Apple wouldn't sell more servers if they bought Ampere than the entire generic ARM server OEM industry can collectively. By generic, I mean to exclude custom silicon per AWS, Azure, et.al., but I'm tempted to think that the only reason why there's been nothing from Apple in the server category, simply because they're quietly waiting for a good candidate for acquisition to emerge. Ampere looks very interesting at the moment, but combine the Ampere chips with proven track record of optimisation and integration with the OS, and fast forward a few years to a time when we're more accommodating of vendor OS control in exchange for getting back some independence from the cloud hegemony players, oh, why not sprinkle over it all some fairy dust from a reincarnated Web Objects offering, and checkout process management provided by Apple, and I can just about see the next two decades of extraordinary growth that's presently challenged by the sheer scale of Apple's business, coming to fruition in ways that we'll be mostly very happy with for giving us all jobs back that are dying out in the white heat of today's oligopolist clouds now gathering and blocking the sun.
And the many times they have tried it either flopped outright or fizzled with little notice. The xServe and xRAID were very cool looking and actually quite functional, but never did integrate well into overall datacenter operations and ultimately that's what did them in. Unless Apple wanted to take it on to eliminate reliance on AWS, Azure and others I don't see them as having much incentive to care about the server space.
Indeed, if you ever see rumblings of them bringing more datacenter operations to be entirely in house then at some future point I could see them leveraging that to sell externally.
Unless they got really ambitious and planned on supplanting AWS entirely and thus their hardware gives them a significant edge.
But Apple has been so bad at software in general for so long, especially on the server side of things, I'm not holding my breath for that. They certainly have the resources to do it if they had the right person to drive it though, so never say never.
