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Apple DTK teardown
- Thread starter tripleintegral
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I believe the developer agreement expressly prohibits disassembly of the DTK, just like it prohibits benchmarking of the units. I doubt any developer will tempt Apple's ire on that one, especially since the DTK will have no bearing on what the first AS-based Macs will look like inside.
I'm honestly surprised that no DTK teardowns have come out.
I think it's safe to say hundreds if not thousands of people have them, and surely someone would be willing to take the risk.
If distinguishing marks like serial numbers are blacked out, how could the leak be tracked down?
I think it's safe to say hundreds if not thousands of people have them, and surely someone would be willing to take the risk.
If distinguishing marks like serial numbers are blacked out, how could the leak be tracked down?
Well for starters, all the DTK's will eventually need to be returned to Apple, and if there are signs of tampering Apple isn't going to be happy.
That is a very good point, covert tamper-proof seals could be in place. That said, there are still PowerPC -> Intel DTKs floating around in the wild. Compliance isn't going to be 100%.
Doesn't have to be a covert temper-proof seal. Ones that can plainly see are even more effective.
Apple wasn't running a multiple billion dollar per year apps store of which they can kick up out of either. There is more financial teeth here for little other than bragging for cheap web clicks. It really isn't all the relevant or important since going to be a different SoC anyway. ( this "mini" is missing stuff like Thunderbolt . ) . There are developers independent of the app store , but lots are and little good reason to jeopardize that. Effectively that keeps the compliance numbers up.
Wouldn't be surprised if more than a few of the Intel DTK trickled out of Apple after they got back that stockpile. If teardowns surface after the first Apple silicon Mac ships it isn't going to matter much.
Nobody bought these. it is more payment for a lease/rent.
P.S. Apple also could have covered much of the components on the logic board with a big black cover to both spread heat and basically reveal very little. Crack the seals and get busted for not much to show... that is a low value proposition.
I guess if they strongly suspected someone, they might inspect a particular unit. For everyone else I doubt Apple will do much more than chuck the returned DTKs into an e-waste dumpster. By the time they're returned Apple Silicon Macs will be shipping and any secrets they could tell will be public.
Don't have to. Apple has some large data centers. Rack them up and they'd have a decent compute cluster for some 'embarrassingly parallel" workloads. Run them for a year or two until there is a surplus of Apple Silicon Minis and incrementally swap them out of the cluster(s).
Similarly I suspect more than a few of these were in use at Apple for internal developer build aids before handing them back out (maybe a new case ). The design is probably been around for more than a year or so.
Given the state of macOS Server, I would be borderline shocked if Apple's data-centers actually ran on Macs.
(Sad but true
)Given the state of macOS Server, I would be borderline shocked if Apple's data-centers actually ran on Macs.
(Sad but true
LOL they don't, they run on Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
All developers are assigned a specific DTK that needs to be returned. If you open up your machine and Apple finds out, they could sue you, remove your App from the App Store, blacklist you, etc.
It’s just not worth it to lose your job, sever ties with Apple, get sued, maybe lose money, and get blacklisted, just to see the inside.
I would like to see what's inside (I took apart a HomePod out of curiosity) but I wouldn't risk financial ruin by Apple over a DTK.
They do also have some of their own datacenters though, don't they? For instance: https://9to5mac.com/2015/02/23/apple-european-data-centers/
(I still doubt they contain Apple hardware, especially post Apple Silicon transition.)
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Given the state of macOS Server, I would be borderline shocked if Apple's data-centers actually ran on Macs.
(Sad but true
Not about the "outward" facing web services that Apple runs. Apple has relatively large and substantive inward facing servers too.
For example for chip development. Backdrop in this picture.
The Most Important Apple Executive You’ve Never Heard Of
Don't necessarily need MacOS Server for distributed computational modeling. ( Above are boards that have decent chanc e of having from FPGA attached to them, but indicative that Apple has internal needs that span past generic 1U - 2U generic rack models. That rack set up there is custom, not generic. )
Apple has more than few Apps for macOS and iOS that they distribute. All of that needs to be run through a QA testing. ( Continuous integration has side of effect of requirements for continuous testing. ) The DTK is a developer testing box. Which means is more than quite capable of doing development testing tasks. Got 10,000 QA tests want to run on an app... sent it to the "farm" to get worked over. For example, here is a set that Mac Stadium has.
Cloud-hosted Bare Metal Mac
MacStadium Bare Metal is dedicated, genuine Apple hardware hosted in MacStadium data centers.
www.macstadium.com
About 23 per shelf. and 10 shelfs. So 230 Minis per. 10 of those racks on either side of an aisle isn't going to fill up a whole large data center but would soak up around 4,600 minis.
There is little to no evidence that Apple is spending too much money on QA. Yes, they need to have well composed tests to find more bugs earlier in the process, But with longer deeper regressions testing also will probably more hardware to execute the tests so the time to completion stays about the same. When these DTK's get to "too slow" to do that job then sure , eWaste them. But if they have decent performance then just chucking them is a weste.
[ There could be a hyper paranoid factor where Apple is afraid of trogan horse system coming back with "bad" firmware. Or something driving that as a security measure. ] Preformance wise though, doing iOS and iPadOS testing with this as a mule... it isn't going to lacking for more than a few.
If Apple wants disaster recovery, then one aisle in 2-3 data centers means they can "fail-over" if necessary with a 1-2 regional events.
Can Apple find a "home" for every one of the DTKs returned? Probably not. Can they find a use for more than several thousand of them? Probably yes.
Similarly depending upon how much code inspection and QA they run on App store submissions. That is a also a steady stream of stuff that doesn't require classic macOS server services. ( and closer to scaled developer build services. )
All of that has nothing to do with running iCloud drive services for 300M people. Or iMessage transaction brokerage . Or the other , "outward" , end-user Apple web services.
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Not about the "outward" facing web services that Apple runs. Apple has relatively large and substantive inward facing servers too.
For example for chip development. Backdrop in this picture.
The Most Important Apple Executive You’ve Never Heard Of
www.bloomberg.com
Don't necessarily need MacOS Server for distributed computational modeling. ( Above are boards that have decent chanc e of having from FPGA attached to them, but indicative that Apple has internal needs that span past generic 1U - 2U generic rack models. That rack set up there is custom, not generic. )
Apple has more than few Apps for macOS and iOS that they distribute. All of that needs to be run through a QA testing. ( Continuous integration has side of effect of requirements for continuous testing. ) The DTK is a developer testing box. Which means is more than quite capable of doing development testing tasks. Got 10,000 QA tests want to run on an app... sent it to the "farm" to get worked over. For example, here is a set that Mac Stadium has.
Cloud-hosted Bare Metal Mac
MacStadium Bare Metal is dedicated, genuine Apple hardware hosted in MacStadium data centers.
About 23 per shelf. and 10 shelfs. So 230 Minis per. 10 of those racks on either side of an aisle isn't going to fill up a whole large data center but would soak up around 4,600 minis.
There is little to no evidence that Apple is spending too much money on QA. Yes, they need to have well composed tests to find more bugs earlier in the process, But with longer deeper regressions testing also will probably more hardware to execute the tests so the time to completion stays about the same. When these DTK's get to "too slow" to do that job then sure , eWaste them. But if they have decent performance then just chucking them is a weste.
[ There could be a hyper paranoid factor where Apple is afraid of trogan horse system coming back with "bad" firmware. Or something driving that as a security measure. ] Preformance wise though, doing iOS and iPadOS testing with this as a mule... it isn't going to lacking for more than a few.
If Apple wants disaster recovery, then one aisle in 2-3 data centers means they can "fail-over" if necessary with a 1-2 regional events.
Similarly depending upon how much code inspection and QA they run on App store submissions. That is a also a steady stream of stuff that doesn't require classic macOS server services. ( and closer to scaled developer build services. )
All of that has nothing to do with running iCloud drive services for 300M people. Or iMessage transaction brokerage . Or the other , "outward" , end-user Apple web services.
Interesting photo. Those boards look like they have the older style MagSafe connector on the providing power. I’d be curious to know the specs of those.
There is another photo further down in the article. This is the "chip durability" lab. They are "flogging" A-series chips here in a test harness. It isn't a "product", so they are using a "Frankenstein" hodge podge of stuff they already have off the shelf "for free" plus the custom stuff for the test harness specifics.
It is more a testing device than an end user product.
But is illustrative that Apple has/uses stuff to make Apple products that general end users don't use the same way.
Yes but they probably are operated by Google/Microsoft. I think they might be one of those on-premises solutions.
Report: Apple designing its own servers to avoid snooping
Apple suspects that servers are intercepted and modified during shipping.
arstechnica.com
Report: Apple designing its own servers to avoid snooping
Apple suspects that servers are intercepted and modified during shipping.
".. Internet giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook have been designing their own servers for years in order to improve efficiency. Apple has used both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure to run parts of iCloud, and recently the company began using the Google Cloud Platform as well. ... "
Apple doing about the same thing Google does with their custom and Titan augmented boards.
As Apple builds out a giant video streaming infrastructure with constant high bandwidth demands it gets cheaper to build it yourself at some point rather than "renting it". Apple doesn't have to design their own from scratch.
https://www.opencompute.org/
Global Infrastructure | Microsoft Azure
Get global reach while maintaining a local presence, safeguard your data, and promote sustainability using Azure's global infrastructure.
azure.microsoft.com
Apple has web services on multiple data centers run both "inside" (by Apple) and outside.
To do content delivery with low latency need to source a copy closer to where it is being view. Can't just run everyone possible into one or two gianormous data centers. Need "more" data centers ( or at least colocation placement in "more").
That is way different that doing backup storage for 600M users. Mostly write once (from users) and stored idlily for a long time.
In the past they ran solaris and aix.
www.macworld.com
pretty sure they’ve run linux as well.
Help wanted: Apple using Oracle, IBM servers in data center
Apple is running servers from IBM and Oracle with flavors of the Unix operating system at its Malden, North Carolina, data center, according to a job entry posted on the company's website.
www.macworld.com
pretty sure they’ve run linux as well.
I am really curious to see a teardown of the DTK too. or at least a sticker on a screw that prevents developers from unscrewing.. Seems we are getting none of that and in this age, i find it fascinating and amazing..
Considering how easy it is for Apple to trace any leak back to the original developer who leaked it, I doubt any developer would want to risk their developer account over it.
Even a teardowm won't tell us anything, as the DTK is not representative of the AS Macs. The DTK uses an old, off the shelf A12Z. I don't think you could have had 16GB of on SOC RAM on that device, so even if the RAM was off SoC, it says nothing about the AS Mac's SoC. Even if it were [pssible, Apple probably wouldn't want to create a new SoC just for the DTK.
Though I doubt we will ever see inside, it would tell us some stuff: Is there a fan? Is there user accessible RAM modules? How much unused space is there now? (apples SoC’s typically require smaller mobos which either means a smaller mini coming in the future, or maybe more storage options? Better cooling?).