[13of40]

Considering a couple years ago, "Apple Hardware" was an intel CPU with an nvidia GPU I've always wondered why you couldn't just throw a million dollars at them so they could stick apple stickers on your rack and let you run MacOS VMs. The company I used to work for had to do crazy gymnastics just to test software and scan for malware on their OS.

[mulmen]

There’s more to a mac than the sticker. It’s specific hardware that is tested and supported by the software. That’s worth a premium. Verifying your rack is a cost Apple doesn’t want to take on. iCloud doesn’t run on MacOS. It runs on Linux. Just buy the right hardware for the job.

[buzer]

Does Apple dogfood their OS X/iOS CI pipelines, i.e. are they running them on some off-the-shelf Macs like they expect everyone else to do? I remember reading that at least in the past they were running virtualized OS X on regular servers for those (actually found following: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18117885).

And it's not like Apple would need to verify anything. They can grant the license, but say that the only supported configuration is Mac, it's up to VMWare and such to provide the support if they want to say that you can run OS X on their platform.

[my123]

> are they running them on some off-the-shelf Macs like they expect everyone else to do?

No. Last time I poked into Xcode Cloud, it was running on Ice Lake server Xeons, which didn't ship on any Mac.

[mulmen]

Azure doesn't run on Windows. Why would iCloud run on MacOS? There's exactly one organization in the world that needs to run iCloud, why would MacOS target that use case? I doubt Apple eats their own dogfood.

[tiernano]

Azure does run on Windows. It's HyperV server below the rest of the hardware. It's a custom Windows install that you can't purchase, but it's Windows none the less.

[ayewo]

That's interesting. Do you have a public source for this handy?

I remember seeing an article [1] proclaiming that more than 50% of Azure's workloads are on Linux, so I'm guessing their hypervisors are running an optimised Linux kernel somewhat.

1: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23156222

[freeman478]

You can see it mentionned on this page: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamental...

[tiernano]

that 50% is the guests, not the hosts... I think they even have Hyper-V, along with the Windows Server Kernel, running on ARM, since they now have ARM VMs... Only a matter of time before thats released in the wild... [1][https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-virtual-machine...]

[knome]

Azure Devops Services is an updated version of their old Team Foundation Server stuff. You can't create projects, teams, or workitem areas/iteration paths that are any of the microsoft magic names ( con, nul, ...etc... ), presumably because they store the data on a windows drive and it would implode. git repos, too, but that's just good planning for any git service since allowing microsoft reserved names would make the repo unclonable to microsoft systems.

[matja]

Interesting language, "more than 50%". I guess the real number doesn't look good for marketing.

[throwaway2990]

Nvidia? Which apple product had Nvidia in it?

[Fuzzeh]

My Mid 2014, 15" Macbook Pro has both Intel and Nvidia.

Chipset Model: Intel Iris Pro

Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M

This Macbook pro was a free upgrade from Apple after I'd had 3 mainboard replacements because they'd had faulty GPU's on my 2011 MBP ( see https://web.archive.org/web/20170119031155/https://people.ca... for background) - Basically after I found out what was going on I took my 'repaired' machine home and stress tested it until it failed. After the very quick repeated failures Apple decided to replace my machine completely.

[throwaway2990]

So more than “a couple of years ago”

Cos been almost 10 years since apple ditched Nvidia.

[Fuzzeh]

I have no idea when they last used nvidia. I'm just answering the question "Which apple product had Nvidia in it"

[throwaway2990]

I asked cos the person I replied to stated that it was a couple of years ago. I thought maybe there’s some other apple product other than macs that have Nvidia in them. But seems like there isn’t.

[cpuguy83]

MacBook pros did for awhile until they leaked some detail about an upcoming product and Apple switched vendors.

[windowsrookie]

I'm not sure where you heard this from?

Back in 2007-2009 Nividia shipped defective GPUs to everyone, including Apple.

Every MacBook Pro from that era was affected. Nvidia and Apple couldn't come to an agreement to who should pay for the bad GPUs. It cost Apple a lot of money and Nvidia din't seem to care.

After that, Apple slowly started removing Nvidia GPUs from their products. AMD also shipped bad GPU's around ~2011 and Apple went back to Nvidia for a generation or two until AMD sorted their issues out. From Then on it was AMD GPUs only until the M1.

[cpuguy83]

Can't reply to the child comment, but...

I only found one article about this from back in 2008. It was definitely a thing back then, I just can't find it.... But indeed likely second fiddle to the gpu issues around the same time, I totally forgot about that.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

The comment time stamp is clickable, you should see the reply button there.

[sumedh]

Oh wow, I have been on HN for many years, never knew this feature.

[alvarezbjm-hn]

Thank you! I need the cheatsheet for this site.

[ayewo]

Cheatsheet you say?

Here you go: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

[deecewan]

there was a point in time when you could run nvidia gpus in mac pros. there were first-party drivers for nvidia cards on macOS

[throwaway2990]

The Nvidia fanboys are out to downvote not knowing it’s been almost 10 years since apple used Nvidia. Lol