Apple's MacOS Server has a 1.5/5 rating on the Mac App Store

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/os-x-server/id883878097

by ethanpil • 6 years ago

328 141 6 years ago

apps.apple.com

rvz• 6 years ago

Changelog for 5.10:

Device Enrollment: Enable FileVault support on first user login
Send all traffic through VPN

Great work Apple!

Release date: Apr 1st 2020

Oh dear, Nevermind.

m4632• 6 years ago

why would they want to compete with their cloud strategy?

aquabeagle• 6 years ago

Because macOS Server was a large reason why companies bought the Mac Mini.

kstrauser5• 6 years ago

Think so? I didn’t know Apple even made a server package since 2010 or so. I bought a Mini so I could have a low cost, decently specced desktop Mac hooked up to my two large monitors at home. An iMac was too expensive and I’d rather use standalone displays anyway. We also have lots of them in my wife’s office for the same reasons.

bsg75• 6 years ago

Companies maybe. I bought the last of the previous generation to have a small desktop with redundant internal drives. A Mac Pro would have been budget overkill.

At the time is was useful, as the Mac desktop was my daily driver. Unfortunately current macOS versions are really sluggish, so its currently a home "server" running Fedora 31.

The 16GB RAM limit is becoming a bit of a problem, so I will likely replace it with an Intel NUC.

pwthornton2• 6 years ago

I don't think this would actually compete. It would more likely be a compliment for certain kinds of usecases.

Apple just doesn't seem to care to put in the effort. I don't think their neglect of MacOS Server has anything to do with trying to protect their cloud offerings. Even a wildly successful MacOS Server strategy wouldn't be that much revenue versus some of their other lines, but it could provide real value and help to certain kinds of businesses and users.

wkearney99• 6 years ago

I'd venture it had more to do with not being able to actually compete at an enterprise level. Far more profitable to sell to individual users than take on the much greater cost of sales for server products. If it's just a server they couldn't compete anywhere near as profitably.

toyg• 6 years ago

Cook takes Jobs’ zealotry for pruning (which he probably developed in reaction to the struggles of “first” Apple) as religion. Anything that doesn’t make boatload of money gets cut or left to rot.

Macmini and OSX Server were products for niche markets that “second Apple” is completely disinterested in.

m4632• 6 years ago

Apple could - in a very short time - revitalize os x server just by allowing icloud to redirect to the server.

Think "apple id/icloud in a box".

That would be actual privacy.

xd1936• 6 years ago

They've taken out so many features, what's left in it? User credential management/enrollment and...?

mrpippy• 6 years ago

and Xsan. Everything else is either in the base OS (Content Caching), or open-sourced/abandoned (Calendar/Contacts Server)

jsjddbbwj• 6 years ago

Why was this submitted? To prove Apple does not manipulate the ratings of their listings? :P

pwthornton2• 6 years ago

I assume to show how neglected this has gotten. MacOS Server used to be a lot more popular and a lot more loved.

I understand this isn't a remotely core part of their business, but I don't understand why you would want such a quarter-assed product out there with your name on it.

A small team, which Apple can afford, could keep this a good offering that helps out certain kinds of Mac users.

mywittyname• 6 years ago

This seems like a great opportunity for some small team that wants to get acqui-hired by Apple in a few years for a cool billion. I doubt the domain will get much love because it is a niche product that lives and dies on the whims of a mega-corp. But a small startup could probably bootstrap itself to profitability. Worst case is they get a good five-ten years of being your own boss until the market dries completely or Apple finally decides to compete (but not buy your company).

oneplane• 6 years ago

To be fair: while they did leave all the classical 'server' type use cases out in the cold and are making it worse every release, it's not actually the future or the best practice to still roll out.

We are in between the legacy 'directory' based networks with authentication etc, and the more robust and expansive beyondcorp type setups. Do you really still need classical 'user' and 'group' membership things? Network accounts? Local web servers? Pretty much anything of significance is in a private or public cloud, if only because the fast pace and scaling. All that is left is basic file sharing that is sometimes done locally, and even that is becoming more and more stupid to implement in a workflow or business process. (regardless of your OS or vendor)

There are of course still some true file-based processes where Apple is still used a lot, but even that is no longer local-file-only; a lot of the still and motion processing is done either super small locally or simply distributed to dedicated systems like render farms. And for the 1-man-photo business all of the local stuff still works and you really wouldn't have gotten anything out of 'server' anyway.

The most problematic holdouts are the likes of Adobe who refuse to write applications that play nice with NAS-type filesharing so that just leaves you with file syncing instead.

Spivak• 6 years ago

Uhh what? I'm with you that the days of the "trusted internal network" are coming to an end but you're insane if you think that directories are going away. LDAP has certainly fallen out of favor but every SaSS user management platform / service is just implementing what are essentially "noLDAP" directories.

What do you think is providing the authentication and user management in those private clouds? OpenLDAP, FreeIPA, ActiveDirectory, Keycloak?

And even when you move everything out of the office to a datacenter you still need all normal IT stuff that you needed in your little office rack just in the datacenter now.

The only part of the "old-guard" IT stack I see disappearing is the office file server.

whatsmyusername2• 6 years ago

Ironically the only thing we run locally is file server, and that’s just an AWS storage gateway backed by S3. Its the only reason we still have an ad server.

derefr3• 6 years ago

What do you think is providing the authentication and user management in those private clouds?

SAML. Yes, the provider's own network probably hosts a directory service as the default SAML backend, but for integrating with enterprise clients who already have their own directories? SAML. Now, rather than making ACL assertions about local users, you have to make ACL assertions about what ACL assertions each foreign directory is allowed to make on behalf of its own "guest" users in your environment.

arkanciscan• 6 years ago

"serverless" doesn't mean there isn't a server. Just because I don't need a user/group doesn't mean my cloud won't. Just that I don't need to run one myself. Which is true.

stcredzero• 6 years ago

every SaSS user management platform / service is just implementing what are essentially "noLDAP" directories

We need a buzzword for these. "lolDAP?"

https://xkcd.com/927/

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 6 years ago

Office file server isn't going anywhere as long as there are places where internet isn't at least dozens of Mb/s in each direction, and I assure you there are still many, many such places.

briffle• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, most compliance policies (SOC2, PCI, HIPAA, SOX, etc) remain very outdated, and make this a challenge for anyone that needs to meet compliance needs.

closeparen2• 6 years ago

There are large, serious, public companies on Azure AD, OneLogin, Okta, etc. They often like those services because they eat some of the compliance burden. This doesn't ring true.

kube-system• 6 years ago

Do you really still need classical 'user' and 'group' membership things?

The move to the cloud has largely made identity management and directory services more widespread, not less.

detaro• 6 years ago

Small on-site server deployments still make a lot of sense in many cases. Not every business needs scaling so badly it has to make itself dependent on online services, and in many parts of the world "reliable, fast internet at every business location" is still not something you want to need.

swiley• 6 years ago

1) yes software companies, especially ones that host any kind of public facing app, need to be able to manage authentication.

2) every business is going to have internal applications wether bespoke or something on top of ERP/CRM software so the same applies here.

3) when you use an app (either professionally or personally) you need to have an exit strategy, you’d think Oracle’s latest games would teach everyone that. All these SAAS apps have nothing, so self hosting with directory/file servers is the way to go.

3) MS and Apple OSes really need some of these things to function in a corporate environment. Unless you’ve got everyone on Linux or are doing BYOD then you’re going to need directory servers to coordinate IT.

minikites• 6 years ago

I'm beginning to think Apple isn't very good at making software that its users want or need because their focus is flashy fluff that demos well on stage.

droopyEyelids• 6 years ago

True... but who are you comparing them to?

ulfw• 6 years ago

I can't remember a Server demo on stage. Must have been more than a decade ago. So I am not sure what you're getting at.

mattl• 6 years ago

Mac OS X was first released as Mac OS X Server 1.0, the commercial release of Rhapsody, and then released as Mac OS X Server for Cheetah, Puma, Panther, Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard, before being released as a standalone update to Lion, and then hitting the App Store for $19.99 for all future releases.

Aqua_Geek• 6 years ago

I think the team that was working on this has been disbanded.

shp0ngle• 6 years ago

What was XSan exactly?

The only thing I know is that it had a really nice icon and box art.

reaperducer2• 6 years ago

"X" because it was MacOS X, and "SAN" for Storage Area Network.

Shared local storage, like for video production houses. At the time, it was ludicrously fast.

It also worked with Windows, Linux and Unix machines. Pretty much anything that supported Fibre Channel connections.

sabujp• 6 years ago

ohh i remember those days. Was using Xsan with 2 xserves attached to infortrend eonstors. I spent so long trying to get it stabilized and reformatted the entire FS so many times. Eventually got rid of osxserver and learned how to install gentoo linux on the xservers. Tracked all the issues to a faulty riser card in one of the boxes (but had to use linux to get the low level details)! Eventually went GPFS and trashed the xserve hardware as well.

larkost• 6 years ago

It is Apple's rebranding of StoreNext's SAN product. I used to run a setup, and other then a ton of knobs to turn for tuning with little explanation, it was a pretty good product. I wish Apple had really run the ball there (e.g.: ad-hock clients), but for a server setup my memories of it are nice.

animalnewbie• 6 years ago

Apple underestimates the intelligence of it's professional users.

rch• 6 years ago

Not really, Apple has simply pivoted to focus on the much larger consumer (or prosumer) market.

cjamesd• 6 years ago

Ironically, this leads me to trust the rest of the reviews on their site. Maybe they're not all fake.

sleepless• 6 years ago

True, but in germany they disallowed rating macOS Catalina. That's a very shady policy - having a rating system for all developers, but excluding your own most prominent and important software from store reviews. Just one of many hilarious Apple moves.

dolguldur• 6 years ago

Also, if you cancel any subscription (maybe just to make sure it doesn't accidentally get renewed), you get to keep however many days you have left. Not so with their own free one year Apple TV subscription that came with the latest phones. If you cancel that, there's an alert telling you you'll lose it immediately. Clearly tilting the playing field again and again.

code4tee• 6 years ago

Former big time user here. The product slowly declined from its own operating system to a buggy app.

We really had no choice but to migrate onto other products and these days even hard core Mac folks use AD for directory, Exchange for email and 3rd party products for device management.

derefr3• 6 years ago

IMHO, the direct competitor of Server.app in the "SMB office server" use-case is actually a Synology NAS appliance. Synology's set of first-party OS packages has 1:1 feature parity (and then some) with every function Server.app either has, or used to have.

And that's the key-word here: appliance. A NAS is a standalone box that receives automatic updates, is 100% remote-management enabled by default, can be easily reset to factory settings, and can't be messed up by employees who think it'd be neat to run local native apps on it, "since it's a computer just sitting there."

Plus, since a NAS isn't going to be doing any desktop-OS things, the software for it can be slimmed down enough to run on lower-specced hardware, making the appliance itself much cheaper than the sort of machine required to run Server.app smoothly.

No SMB office-manager who needs this kind of functionality these days would buy a Mac or PC, to set up server software on it and leave it sitting there headless in the office. They'd buy a NAS.

And, IMHO, that's why Apple haven't kept Server.app up to date. There's just no demand for it any more. Not because of the cloud (which is mostly a complementary use-case) but rather because this software-solution vertical has now evolved into a turn-key hardware-appliance solution vertical. And it's one with slim-enough profit margins, that Apple doesn't want to compete.

_bxg17• 6 years ago

And, IMHO, that's why Apple haven't kept Server.app up to date. There's just no demand for it any more.

This seems to be a primary driver of the software-rot found all across Apple's ecosystem. iOS is generally pretty well-maintained; macOS less-so. Apps like Music are kept in better condition than, say, Podcasts. Etc. You can almost directly correlate how unpopular a piece (or feature) of its first-party software is with how buggy it is. Which I guess makes some amount of sense, but it really tarnishes Apple's image as a company selling high-end products.

smnrchrds• 6 years ago

Research In Motion (RIM) later renamed to BlackBerry Ltd. 37Signals renamed to Basecamp. I wonder if at some point Apple Inc. would rename to iPhone Inc.

mattkrea• 6 years ago

I definitely used it as a DNS server internally and a few of the other functions. I was totally bummed to see them strip effectively all useful functionality from it. :-/

CivBase• 6 years ago

Apple: We want to have full control over the hardware and software ecosystem so we can guarantee everything will be high quality.

Also Apple: We don't want to invest as much in parts of the ecosystem that have relatively low returns.

There's a lot to like about Apple, but their closed ecosystem and adversity to consumer repair rights ensure I will never buy one of their products.

ethanpil• 6 years ago

Apple: "let it rot until it dies" Google: "just kill it and put it out of its misery"

I wonder what results in these dissimilar approaches? Are these cultural? are these youthful company versus decades-old bureaucracy?

lowdose• 6 years ago

Podcasts are the fastest growing category of content at the moment. I do agree Apple could do a better job.

forkLding• 6 years ago

I feel like Apple has done the same thing to Safari and web-based Apple stuff, just always banging my head when developing for Safari browsers especially in a production environment when everything counts.

toxik2• 6 years ago

It really pains me that Safari has become the new MSIE 6.

api• 6 years ago

Yeah this. We have a Synology NAS and it's been running for four years trouble-free. It's a little sketchy for use cases other than its core purpose, but if you only try to use it as a smart reliable RAID disk with an Ethernet port you are going to have a great time.

Their Synology Drive app is a drop-in Dropbox/GDrive replacement too. Works great on Mac at least. Haven't tried Windows yet.

We maintain an official ZeroTier package for it too, so it works anywhere.

lostlogin2• 6 years ago

and can't be messed up by employees who think it'd be neat to run local native apps on it, "since it's a computer just sitting there."

Synology actually encourage this. In particular, the Docker package is great and all sorts of uses have cropped up. There are some gnarly rough edges that I have encountered but that package and others make the unit very useful. I’m a home user so it’s a different use case, but my 918+ is probably my favourite machine ever.

matthewmcg• 6 years ago

It's our digital Swiss army knife! Need somewhere to run homebridge or pihole and don't want a pile of raspberry pis sitting around? Get the docker containers for these. Ditto for Plex and Roon servers. I even found a container that works as a replacement for the deprecated software that my ancient multifunction printer needs for its "one button" scan functionality.

mrzool2• 6 years ago

Synology's set of first-party OS packages has 1:1 feature parity (and then some) with every function Server.app either has, or used to have.

That’s a strong statement. Care to articulate? Server.app used to have services for Calendar, Email, Contacts, Wikis, a profile manager (basically an MDM server), Open Directory, VPN, DNS, DHCP and, well, a web server. Would a Sinology really cover all these features?

input_sh• 6 years ago

Yup, pretty much. See for yourself the list of packages they offer: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/packages

Qnap isn't far behind neither: https://www.qnap.com/en/app_center/?top_place=1&qts=4.4.1

reaperducer2• 6 years ago

Synology's set of first-party OS packages has 1:1 feature parity (and then some) with every function Server.app either has, or used to have.

We've seen this a number of times with macOS, and some other Apple adventures. Apple will put out something, then if a third-party offering comes along that is equal or better, it cancels the Apple product expecting everyone to switch to the third-party solution.

Off the top of my head, Aperture comes to mind. But I've had this thought before and came with several other examples at the time.

Apple also works the opposite way. If third-party offerings for a particular function are OK, but not great, it will make its own version. Stocks, and several other apps for iPad come to mind.

When the first happens, people complain that Apple is fickle and abandons its customers. When the second happens, people complain that Apple is stifling competition.

Apple is either more schizophrenic, or less predictable, than other big tech companies.

zrm• 6 years ago

Plus, since a NAS isn't going to be doing any desktop-OS things, the software for it can be slimmed down enough to run on lower-specced hardware, making the appliance itself much cheaper than the sort of machine required to run Server.app smoothly.

Really Server.app would run fine on the same slimmed down hardware, but Apple doesn't make that. The cheapest Mac is what, $800 for a Mini? $250 in PC hardware would more than suffice.

If you're on an even tighter budget you hardly need to buy new hardware at all, just set aside one of the old machines the next time you do a desktop hardware refresh and install any of a dozen free Linux or BSD NAS solutions on it.

wraithm112• 6 years ago

That and people have completely switched to MDMs to provide a lot of the old functionality that macOS Server used to provide.

The popular ones for macOS are Jamf and Mosyle. There are some other ones as well that are more cross-platform oriented, but both Jamf and Mosyle more or less cover the features that macOS Server provided for administration of a set of devices.

Tbh, I don't think Server was popular as a NAS service ever. The only thing I've ever used Server for was managing devices.

fulafel• 6 years ago

A NAS is a standalone box that receives automatic updates, is 100% remote-management enabled by default, can be easily reset to factory settings,

Most NAS fail at one or more of these.

In addition 90% of them are very bad about security, and putting these kinds of devices on your company or office network transforms it from an internet access network into a garden for insecure appliances to be coddled, a stepping stone that must be vigorously firewalled, scanned, and monitored.

justinclift• 6 years ago

TrueNAS (was FreeNAS) is pretty decent:

https://www.ixsystems.com/truenas

Also, it's Open Source.

bluedino2• 6 years ago

Performance was mediocre compared to Linux. Everything that it shipped with was outdated. There was a weird mix of GUI tools and commandline to get anything done. And to top it off, things were (at the very least) just-different-enough to confuse someone who thought, "I know Linux this will be easy."

monadic2• 6 years ago

This is the first time I have heard a kerberos/ldap setup referred to as “easy”.

mrweasel• 6 years ago

Well 2.3 now, but that’s based on 4 reviews.

nemacol• 6 years ago

I setup a mac mini with this software (3rd quarter 2019) and I can tell you it deserves every bit of that 1.5 rating.

No magic left in there at all.

Ended up dropping it and using the functionality of Airwatch.

Angostura• 6 years ago

I remember when it was first launched - at the same time as the Mini and it was absolutely awesome. Then it rotted.

mdread3• 6 years ago

One man shop pro fotog here. My macOS server 5.6.3 High Sierra is awesome, the last complete version... File Server with literally decades and multiple terabytes of raw photos… The ease of the email server is unmatched…. Websites and Nextcloud, invoiceninja, all just work with minimal php tweaking…. and all here IN MY OFFICE. I have linux droplets, and am more or less ready to make the move, but I won’t until it actually dies… but only when I have to. I hope the hardware (from 2010) holds out forever, but I do have a spare ready and daily CCC backups and disks rotated to firesafe… at least for me it just works. Knock on wood.

mceachen2• 6 years ago

Are you exposing any ports to the internet? The older library versions in High Sierra have numerous security issues (of various severity). You might be able to reduce your risk by disabling server features, but that's a dangerous game of whack-a-mole. (Also, as a fellow self-hosting fotog (that never went pro): you should try PhotoStructure! Details in my profile).

mdread3• 6 years ago

Yea, no kidding, I wish apple would open source server.app, so some of the old components could be updated without hacking it. It was just a perfect all in one solution. I will check out Photostructure.

cmurf2• 6 years ago

Unfortunately there's no data checksumming with APFS. Last time I checked, ages ago, CCC wasn't using a version of rsync that supports checksums. Newish versions (for a few years) of DNG compute separate checksums for DNG metadata and raw/image data, but to what degree applications use this to verify the integrity of the image file may vary.

Image silent data corruption via bitrot can be frustrating. Without a regime to prevent it, it spreads into all backups. And typical workflows depend on backups for eventual migration to new storage which allows any corruption to be replicated via the backup strategy. You end up backing up the corruption, unwittingly.

StillBored• 6 years ago

Few mac's have ECC..

Which was one of the big problems with the original G4 Xserve. They added it later in the G5 model, but I suspect much of the damage had been done. Most technical people, just ignored it after discovering that it didn't have ECC and the disks were low end ATA rather than SCSI. With the cluster/HPC version the stories changed to how unreliable the machines were.

At that point it seems only the diehards were willing to trust their data to apple server hardware and it died a couple years later.

mdread3• 6 years ago

I don’t use APFS on the big spinning drives where the pix are. But they definitely are on my iMacs and MacBook ssd’s. Yea Lightroom has a Validate dng feature... of course it locks you into Adobe.

cerberusss• 6 years ago

My solution is to create par2 files. This is a manual solution though, and doesn't help you when you go and edit the original pictures. But what's great about par2 is that you can it allows you to correct errors.

olliej• 6 years ago

it still exists?

ChrisMarshallNY• 6 years ago

Yup. It stinks. They made a decision to leave the backbone/infrastructure market. I don't blame them. The main thing about MacOSX Server, is that I don't trust it to be around too much longer. A Linux box will be around, in one form or another, forever.

However, it's easier for me to buy some canned solution; either pure software, an SaaS, or a hardware solution.

Razengan• 6 years ago

This is literally just a link to an App Store product page.

chipotle_coyote3• 6 years ago

While it's a shame that the OS X, er, Mac OS Server "app" has basically been killed over the last few years (maybe more than a few at this point), I suspect it just wasn't selling very well. I know it had some great tools for configuring and setting up some services, but if you're a engineering-focused company you're probably going to use Linux for office servers; on the business/office side, you're very likely going to just go with Microsoft; if you need web or server hosting, you're almost certainly doing it off-premises, not with a Mac mini stuffed in the corner.

That mostly leaves enthusiast and small office scenarios, most of which can get by just fine with "non-server" macOS. After all, they've always literally been the same operating system. My Mac mini is a headless media and file server and has, in the past, been the printer server as well -- and all of that's enabled just by clicking boxes in the "Sharing" control panel. (Heck, I could even turn on "content caching" to have it keep a copy of all macOS/iOS software updates on it, which would be great for a small-to-medium office.)

roboyoshi• 6 years ago

IMO Apple deserves all the hate on this one. It was good once. Thank god I moved on to proper servers with linux. They should just kill it and let the community take over.

divbzero• 6 years ago

For context, the majority of server features were removed in macOS Server 5.7.1, with a few features migrated to macOS High Sierra and the remainder left to be handled by open source alternatives. The initial announcement from Apple was discussed on HN in 2018. [1] [2]

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208312

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18113147

KiDD• 6 years ago

Real admins run linux anyways and should have no problem implementing common services. Supporting every little mom and pop that doesn't understand DNS, ports, file permissions or network users, which is generally looking for the cheapest solution will be be trying to integrate the lowest of the low end equipment and may cause even more problems beyond the control of Apple to be able to reliably support. What most small business need are just a NAS with network printer support.

Apple's MacOS Server has a 1.5/5 rating on the Mac App Store

Related Stories