On Friday, Apple revised its list of “vintage and obsolete products,” for which it has discontinued support. Vintage products are those that were discontinued more than five and less than seven years ago, and which still have limited support in California due to statute. Obsolete products are those that were discontinued more than seven years ago, for which Apple has discontinued all hardware service with no exceptions. Service providers can not longer order parts for obsolete products.

With the recent demise of XServe (Apple’s flagship server product), technology bloggers have been abuzz with speculation that OS X Server must be next on the chopping block. Has Apple completed a mystical transformation into a consumer electronics company, devoid of concern for desktop hardware? Does Apple not care at all about data centers? The answer is resoundingly “no,” though the justification for the move is not quite so simple.

If you’ve been wanting Xserve, act quickly. As of January 31st, 2011, Apple will be discontinuing the sale of this server line. While they say they will still fully support the product, they have put a transition guide up on their website that points customers towards other options. This isn’t all that surprising. It’s clear that Apple, Inc. as a company is not in the hardware server market and shouldn’t attempt to be anymore.

Yesterday morning, the Apple store was once again down, sparking some new rumors about what could appear. The store soon returned to normal, but with a new Xserve available, this time sporting the Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor, the same that the latest Mac Pro uses.

Psystar is now branding themselves as “the leading provider of Mac-compatible computers,” and they’ve released server grade machines. Server-grade machines are all well and good, but “the leading provider of Mac-compatible computers?” Really? First of all, every computer on the market today—HP, Dell, and tons of others—is Mac-compatible. After all, the Mac is a computer, more »

Extensis has announced its next generation server based font management system for Windows and Macintosh. The system is titled Universal Type Server (UTS), and is shipping on June 18th.

This program provides users with a new way to manage fonts and font metadata all on a server. UTS is designed to be used in IT and Design environments, and uses web based programs to distribute package based installers to specific clients from a single location.

Details after the break.

After announcing their new Xsan 2 software, Apple has terminated production as the Xserve RAID. Apple has been promoting this solution of RAID storage for pro environment for many years, but that time has come to an end. If you head over to the page on the store, you won’t be greeted with pictures and more »

In the midst of all the Mac Pro frenzy, the other update that Apple released today, an update to their XServe was largely overlooked. The new XServes were updated with the same architecture as the new Mac Pros. The standard configuration is as follows [from Apple.com]. One 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 series processor 2GB more »