It wasn't an absence of a market. Those of us that had to manage OSX Server soon found out the software was marked by several high-profile bugs, technical debt, and a perceived decline in reliability. I migrated a large number of Macs to Ubuntu Server software. The hardware was great.

I fear the quality of macOS is deteriorating today in the same manner than befell OSX Server.

https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/apple-blasts-mac-os-x...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

https://www.letemsvetemapplem.eu/en/2024/10/19/chyby-v-macos...

Mac OS X Server was..

.. macOS but with a utility to install apache/ldap/smtp/carddav and caldav.

very useful for a home server.

absolutely no benefit over Linux for the majority of the workloads it was designed to simplify.

It wouldn't really give you much unfortunately, certainly didn't run noticeably leaner.

(I think at some point "server" just became an .app that was available via the app store).

> very useful for a home server.

That sounds like a giant customer base, if paired with the right software for personal / small organization web publishing, blogging, and e-mail.

It's a shame that things turned out differently.

Right, but I could see an alternate timeline where OS X Server took off, and within a decade took a path similar to Windows Server (pared down services, headless flavor, etc)

Not very useful context considering that was before iOS development took off

I am not sure iOS popularity would justify macOS as a server. What would be the use case? It's not app development; that is done just fine on the standard desktop macOS. It's not backend; that is done just fine on Linux servers, even in Swift if that's your thing.

Builds

You don't need any feature from the old server OS for this, though. You just need your workstation to be on a network.

My workstation is ill-suited to be a CI runner, even if it is networked

Right. A way to rephrase this would be: what feature from the old Mac Os X Server is missing from the current macOS desktop to make it possible?

A network connected to what

Which Apple gladly sells their own Xcode Cloud infrastructure instead.

Yes. Somehow it’s actually even worse

> that was before iOS development took off

It was offered through the 2010s, iOS development had taken off by then, and the last release was in 2021.

In fact the number of unique apps available on IOS has declined since the 2010s