My first job was for a startup created by Henk Rogers (Tetris). He was an avid photographer (our company set out to make photo management easier) and so he had a lot of photos. In the center of the office we had a server closet and it was the first time I ever saw xserve and xserve-raid racked up in person. I believe they were 100% dedicated to storing Henk's photo collection. Really really gorgeous hardware.
If they’re built anything like AWS’s servers, their cryptographic key chip that’s required for boot will be destroyed the moment it’s removed from the rack it’s in, rendering it useless. They’ll be scrapped.
agreed that Apple will scrap these, but surely some of these will escape (even in a non-functional state) and with enough effort folks will figure out how to boot them.
I have a few prototype apple devices in my collection. Especially with the sheer number of these AI servers it's just a matter of time before they wind up in public.
obviously not framed in terms of "here is how we create more e-waste" but you can see the additional barriers to attempting to reuse decommissioned hardware
Interestingly I am getting an access denied error on that page.
Anyway your comment basically answers my question because I wondered how they would perform maintenance when the server breaks the moment you pull it out the rack.
I'm excited for these to fall into collectors hands in a decade or two.