The bulk of the work wouldn't be bringing the chips over, it would be having the sales and support structure around it. See how hard it was for AMD to get a foothold.
Exactly... most technical folk have no idea the kind of deep expertise MSFT has in selling software. Its why they are catching up to AWS. Its why they killed slack within a year. MSFT and Salesforce have the best biz ops and sales people to sell software and that itself is a huge overlooked moat that would probably take a decade to fully disrupt.
And all the certifications for both hardware and software. And what OS are they going to run? MacOS would be a big hurdle on servers--to say nothing of the fact they already tried that. Their own chips may go into servers but probably just for in-house use/services delivered to customers.
Considering MacOS seems to be an aging spaghetti-BSD under the hood, there's no doubt any serious attempt at the server business would come with Apple submitting patches and documentation to major kernels like any other chip company. AFAIK the M1 architecture can be targeted by Clang and GCC and some people have reversed engineered support for the Linux kernel[1].
> Their own chips may go into servers but probably just for in-house use/services delivered to customers.
Hetzner is already renting Apple M1s[2] ! It was on HN not too long ago. Although it seems aimed at devs who need to test against that environment.
