The majority of the time taken in the first request is actually in fetching the image from the origin source, so once it's cached in our system it becomes a much faster operation: and of course delivering the cached image without it traversing our stack is even faster.

So yes, the initial request can take time, but all of the subsequent requests of that image are much faster than the alternative. And when you take into account that our service makes it possible to send the correctly sized image for the display (instead of loading a preset size and displaying it smaller), and optimal file types based on device and browser (webp for chrome, etc), load times/page weights on all of those requests are significantly improved.

In general, anyone who serves multiple requests for their images over time will see a marked improvement on page weight/speed, compared to rolling their own solution where they have preset image sizes and deliver jpeg only.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501800

Look at the current state of Mackintoshes. People are having kernel panics and struggling to keep their machines running with current software. OS X moves pretty fast, possibly faster than Linux, and Apple builds it to support Mac hardware.... the teams who are porting hackintosh code have to support a lot more hardware variety and they have less resources than, say, linux.

Running mackintoshes in production makes no sense.

And I challenge the claim that you would save money.

Looking just at off the shelf costs of low end hardware does not tell you the TCO of serious machines that need to be running all the time.

To get comparable hardware quality to Apple products you have to spend more, generally, when going with "commodity" hardware.

The idea that Apple is expensive is a myth, born of two things-- people perpetuating it since 1980 (yes, 35 years this myth has been spread), with the vested interest of rationalizing their dislike of Apple... and the fact that Apple doesn't compete at the very low end.

In production, TCO is much more about reliability and other things than initial hardware cost.

Legally? Yeah, good luck.

Edit: I think the more obvious answer to this is that they would rehouse these babies in a more convenient, albeit likely custom form-factor.