Orihi Lawson
Apple announced today that it is officially discontinuing macOS Server after 23 years. The app provides device management services and some other features for people using multiple Macs, iPhones, and iPads on the same network, and can still be purchased, downloaded, and used with macOS Monterey. It’s still available at its regular $20 retail price, but will no longer be updated with new features or security fixes.
Server has never been as widely available as the consumer version of macOS, but macOS Server has a long history dating back to Apple’s acquisition of NeXT and its NeXTSTEP software in the late ’90s. NeXTSTEP was adapted into a project called “Rhapsody”, which added support for some long-standing Apple software and a more Mac-like user interface, and was originally released as Mac OS X Server 1.0 in March 1999. This initial version of Mac OS X Server shared many foundations with later Mac OS X, but predated important user interface elements such as the Dock and the Aqua theme, which would be introduced in the first consumer version of Mac OS X two years later .
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From its original release until Snow Leopard Server (version 10.6) in 2009, Mac OS X Server has been its own completely separate version of the operating system. Beginning with Mac OS X Lion, Apple began selling the Server software as an add-on app for any Mac in downloadable form, coinciding with the demise of Apple’s last rack-mounted Xserve hardware. This shift has also lowered the price of software. A single Snow Leopard Server license costs $499, and the Server application costs just $50.
Over the next few years, Apple continued to develop the Server app, releasing major new versions roughly in sync with the annual Mac software updates. But the software gradually began to shed functionality, starting with services like DNS and mail that weren’t Mac-specific.apple did Still in the server with unique features for Mac and iDevice users: mobile device management for IT administrators; Time Machine backup service, which can enforce per-device storage quotas to prevent one Mac from filling up the server’s entire hard drive; and A caching service, which saves bandwidth by storing application and operating system updates and serving them to other devices on a network of servers, rather than downloading content multiple times from Apple’s servers.
Apple notes that Time Machine, caching, and file-sharing services are now included with all macOS installations, and they’ve been around since High Sierra was released in 2017. For mobile device management, Apple points to a pair of pages about choosing a third party MDM software and migrating from one MDM service to another, rather than making more specific recommendations or offering an MDM service that can expedite the transition from Apple Specific tools for migrating to different services.
