Hey, who remembers the Apple Network Server? Anyone? Bueller? If you pride yourself on your encyclopedic knowledge of all things Mac and you're drawing a blank, don't beat yourself up about it-- the ANS wasn't a Mac. In fact, there wasn't much Mac-like about it at all, aside from that classic beige finish and the little rainbow Apple logo. Other than that, it was a huge, hulking behemoth of a server with redundant hot-swappable hard drives, power supplies, and fans; seven drive bays and three SCSI channels allowing for up to 340 GB of storage (this is back in 1996, remember!); two PCI buses; a locking cabinet-style front; and a then-blazing PowerPC 604 running at 132 or 150 MHz, all powered by AIX-- IBM's version of UNIX. Trust us, it had its own share of geek appeal. This wasn't something you stick under your desk, though; this had Big Business written all over it. (Well, not literally.)

Anyway, by the time the ANS bit the dust, Apple had pretty much given up on the enterprise market and went after consumers instead. But now that Mac OS X is here and it makes for one seriously hefty enterprise-class server platform, some people think that Apple should get back into the game and go for the throat with an ANS-type heavy-duty super-redundant server with a decidedly more-Steve-less-Gil design sense. According to Mac OS Rumors, Apple has indeed been working on such a unit which is rumored to be like a Power Mac G4 on steroids. Take a standard G4, hit it with a Bigulator Ray, give it "dual redundant power supplies and hot-swappable FireWire drive bays," snap in four, count 'em, four FireWire buses, pop the whole monstrosity into an as-yet-undetermined Jonathan Ive enclosure, and voilà: Son of Apple Network Server. All the oomph of the original and then some, but none of that AIX aftertaste.

But what's this? If MOSR is correct, then this pituitary case of a server may never actually see the light of day; reportedly it's "widely believed to be the next target for Apple's quiet fat-trimming program"-- the one that just nuked several jobs in the iServices division. Drat this flailing economy! Hopefully at most the GigantoMac will just be shelved for a little while longer, because after this whole "lighter/thinner/smaller" trend, we've got a hankering for a Mac with some heft. And given the fact that any push into the enterprise market relies on the success of Mac OS X, we think Apple would be wise to wait for a year or so anyway. After all, the big Mac OS X release isn't until this summer, and the operating system will need a while to build its reputation for rock-solid stability before big business will consider Apple gear for its mission-critical applications. So keep your fingers crossed: Big Mac, 2002.