iCloud vs. AWS: Apple Has Considered Competing With Amazon in Cloud

Apple in recent years has considered competing with Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to The Information's Aaron Tilley.

iCloud General Feature Redux
In a paywalled report today, Tilley said that Apple was actively discussing the idea into the first half of 2024, but he does not know whether the talks have continued. A supposed key backer of the idea, Michael Abbott, left Apple in 2023.

Apple's potential cloud service would allow developers to rent servers powered by the M-series chips used in Macs. A service like this allows developers to power cloud-based app features without purchasing and maintaining their own servers.

According to the report, some Apple executives believed that the power efficiency of M-series chips would make its cloud service more affordable for developers compared to AWS and other similar platforms. This belief is apparently backed by Apple's own use of the servers for the likes of Apple Music and Apple Wallet.

If such a service were ever to launch, perhaps it would have iCloud branding, and it would help to boost Apple's services revenue.

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Top Rated Comments

dcjames Avatar
16 weeks ago
Unfortunately for Apple, AWS (as well as Azure and GCP) have a huge 20-year headstart on cloud computing. It's not just about letting people run VMs. Public Clouds offer managed databases, message queuing, video workloads, CDNs, object storage, TLS certificate management, IoT fleet management, Web Application Firewalls, managed Kubernetes and container environments - and so many other services that you can stitch together to build custom workloads. And it's generally very, very inexpensive if you know what you're doing. Apple does not do inexpensive very well; and based on how frequently their iCloud services go down, they unfortunately do not do reliability as well as required to offer a Public Cloud service with contractual SLAs. On top of that, Apple is a consumer-first company and Public Cloud is about business-first. It's not going to happen.
Score: 27 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Spock Avatar
16 weeks ago
I am guessing it will be like Siri competing with Alexa...
Score: 21 Votes (Like | Disagree)
MaverickCC Avatar
16 weeks ago
It's a great idea, but in the end it's just not where their passion lies... and that's always been a problem in the longer run for them with this type of offering.
Score: 19 Votes (Like | Disagree)
mhurron Avatar
16 weeks ago
They'd have a snowballs chance in hell, Apple has always been so great with the Enterprise offerings.
Score: 18 Votes (Like | Disagree)
BabyBoii Avatar
16 weeks ago
please do it. AWS needs a real competitor.
Score: 17 Votes (Like | Disagree)
tgwaste Avatar
16 weeks ago
Apple has always been terrible at all things cloud. They still are. AWS will eat their lunch.
Score: 16 Votes (Like | Disagree)