[yazaddaruvala]

Apple took the first steps to an AWS competitor in 2010 when it started working on phone CPUs.

Apple is very unlikely to build a “general cloud” offering. This is built and sold on differentiated services (eg BigQuery, Lambda, Kinesis), not on undifferentiated compute units (ie Apple Silicon even if it is slightly cheaper for the raw hardware).

Meanwhile, every time a developer uses local inference with CoreML, that competes directly with AWS’ revenue.

Apple’s “cloud” offering will be hosted in people’s pockets, powered by electricity consumers pay for, and hardware that Apple sells for a fat profit. And they will keep empowering developers to move more compute over to “the client”.

[Cthulhu_]

I think that IF they were to do any kind of cloud offering, it would be services for apps - storage like Firebase, push notifications, analytics, in-app purchase management, that kind of thing.

[yazaddaruvala]

My guess, they’ll contract this out to a player like Cloudflare (like with iCloud relay).

e.g. I can see Apple building a framework for “isomorphic” Apps. Where the front end in SwiftUI and backend in SwiftStateful (a hypothetical framework for permissions/auth and connecting to cloud databases) compiled and deployed to CF Workers or some other edge deployed service.

I think they might even take this one step further and make some future version of MacStudio+WiFi that downloads and executes CFs Workers. If they went this route, it’s unclear if they’d need or want a partner like CF just to deploy and cache the workers.

Disclaimer: I have an investment in Cloudflare. I have no real idea about anything really.