There’s also an issue of margins. Apple sells attractive hardware and provides a software ecosystem, and they charge high margins for it. Big server users use a large numbers of servers, and they want a lot of bang for their buck. This is not a game that Apple has historically played very well, nor do I see why they would want to.

Darwin, macOS Server. This sounds fun.

Yet Apple has quite the powerful chip family. If they were to spin off a subsidiary without the consumer-focused mission...well, that's what I would do!

So are there any tells/indications that Apple's silicon took this into consideration from the beginning, or is virtualization something they had to retrofit into the core? It would be pretty amazing if say, way back in A1 days, we could point to something in the core that indicated they already started laying the groundwork to make virtualization feasible later.