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I'm not sure I understand your point ... or how relevant it is to my original comment BUT


To "create product differentiation" amongst vendors you'd oh I dont know... create different products?

I'm neither for nor against xserves only being able to do this or that, I just wanted to check it out anyway. You might also wonder why I'm running it on a 450mhz cube... maybe that's because I never bought it?

Apple is changing its strategy now by buying out that semiconducter manufacturer... this will help prevent competitors reproducing x feature on their generic boxes (quicktime on a chip?) but the truth is, since Apple switched from PPC to Intel they have pretty much lost ALL their "product differentiation" to generic IBM compatibles the only thing that is left is the OS and the apple brand name.

In the olden days... manufacturers created better products to create differentiation between competitors.

Now the same OEM makes the same product and gets stamped with a different badge...

A bit like buying compaq ram for £2000 or crucial/micron ram for £200

Same memory... been tested more but your average customer doesn't care... and at £200 you could buy a box and keep some spare.

So... maybe you are right *shrugs* only the xserve head can control/monitor multiple nodes via hardware... but for the majority of people, who the f--k cares? especially when there are scary open source versions of xgrid etc etc.

I'm not saying btw that xserves are crap.... I was almost thinking of buying one but couldn't justify the cost a rack would save spacewise. (I bought a mbp instead) But neither can the majority of large datacentres (most of which house beige box pcs) because real estate since the dotcom bust has made DC space extremely cheap to buy.