Apple is a horrible example, with Apple when you have a problem, you often end up with an unfixable issue that Apple won't even acknowledge. You definitely don't want to taint Oxide's reputation with that association.

As for why I think Helios will become customer facing: Oxide is a small startup. They have limited resources. Their computers expensive enough to be very much business critical. You'll get some support by Oxide logging in remotely to customer systems and digging around, but pretty soon the customer will want to do that themselves to monitor/troubleshoot the problems as they happen.

Imagine you're observing a recurring but rare I/O slowdown that seems to trigger under some certain conditions, and tell me a competent sysadmin wouldn't want to log in on all the related boxes (client Helios, >=3 server Helioses for the block store) and look at the logs & stats.

Funny how you mentioning BSD got me to thinking of Sony Playstation and Nintendo Switch. Which are proprietary and not user serviceable. A Steam Deck, Fairphone, or Framework laptop is each less proprietary and more FOSS stack, and user serviceable. Which a user may or may not want to do themselves; at the very least they can pay someone and have them manage it.

Also, Apple is just the one who survived. Previously I'd have thought of SGI, DEC, Sun, HP, IBM, Dell some of whom survived some not.

Those three consumer products I mentioned each provide a platform for a user and business space to floroush and thrive. I expect a company doing something similar for cloud computing to want the same. But it will require some magick: momentum, money, trust. That kind of stuff, and loads of it. (With some big names behind it and a lot of FOSS they got me excited, but I don't matter.)

> When Apple supports OSX for consumers, they don't exactly surface the fact that there's BSD semi-hidden in there somewhere.

Or Linux running underneath all the Java-y Android stuff.

I am unable to do so.

Now imagine a multi-million dollar mission critical pile of computers running on premises, and your sysadmin being able to do so.

Oxide is closer to a rack of Supermicros than AWS.