“Haven’t ever” is simply not true. Apple has had plenty of historical server products, including dedicated rack servers with the Xserve line. That’s not to say it’s likely but it’s not unprecedented ;P
I don't think they were really interested in the market honestly. They did it because they felt the needed to, to support use cases like CI for macOS and iOS apps. It was all about supporting the Apple developer community. They cut it as soon as it wasn't necessary, IMO.
> They did it because they felt the needed to, to support use cases like CI for macOS and iOS apps
Actually, the Xserve platform really had nothing to do with that. Xserve’s were partly designed and built for the high end video production industry (as an extension of the Mac Pro hardware) and partly as a general purpose small to medium size business file server / web server (which the Mac Mini has subsumed what’s left of that space).
And they scrapped them. That's exactly my point. They were not committed: they made an uncompetitive product for a few years and bailed instead of trying harder. Compare to the Mac.
yes, yet cloud changes it as the naturally non-consumer thing - cloud datacenters - are needed by the Apple itself to serve the consumer oriented cloud based functionality. So, it may so happen that the major money saving from their own chip would be not on the consumer devices, instead it would be Apple's datacenter/cloud costs/density/efficiency/etc., and that improvement on those metrics can also enable and push Apple further into cloud business.
