Enterprise Mac | Tom Yager » Apple to miss October Xserve delivery, will start accepting pre-orders today

October 25, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Apple to miss October Xserve delivery, will start accepting pre-orders today

TAGS: Politics, strategy and culture, Servers and storage

I'm camped out on Apple's Xserve page, breathlessly awaiting the emergence of Xserve Xeon from its "notify me when available" state. It's not going to leap from that to "buy now" as those in Apple's server program had hoped and planned. Apple can't make its October deadline, so it's taking the intermediate step of creating a pre-order queue. I know that practice strikes some as cheesy, but I'm glad Apple's doing it. Slipping a ship date creates a panic at Apple, probably a legacy of the bad old days when Freescale and IBM decided when Apple would ship a new Mac.

I see Xserve Xeon's slip this way: With IBM, HP and Dell homogenization of Core microarchitecture Intel rack servers, Apple's got to make its first shot at an x86 server count. In servers, the Apple brand carries no weight (yet). It'll all on the machine and OS X.

That's worth taking a little time to get right.

As for whether it's worth your while to get in line for your very own Xserve Xeon, I can help you with that. Keep reading.

Posted by Tom Yager on October 25, 2006 01:44 AM

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