Apple building server farm, secret lair in North Carolina

all speculation at this point. could possibly be an all in one
design/manufacturing facility of military-spec'd wares, shh.

Please note that you were counting $1 billion in selling prices of Xserve. Apple is not selling to itself, so after deducting its margin we are somewhere at $2300 each Xserve and that would make roughly 430 000 of them and not 330 000 as stated in the article ;)

It's to support streaming Free Ad Supported TV Shows.

Is Apple finally considering one of the options we were all guessing at in the build-up to the iPhone, amidst all the rumours: becoming a MVNO?

Wikipedia definition:
A mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) is a company that provides mobile phone service but does not have its own licensed frequency allocation of radio spectrum, nor does it necessarily have all of the infrastructure required to provide mobile telephone service.[

i'd say if this rumor is true, it's going to be for apple's massive cloud computing efforts that are now in the planning stages - so it makes sense. however, the dollar amount does not, as that seems like a massive investment.

also, n.c. is prone to hurricanes, so it couldn't be too close to the shore, or where it would be susceptible to inclement weather of any kind. also, if they're smart, there would be a zero cost on the electric, as they should follow the lead of the fedex center in cali and make the entire roof solar [and/or wind] powered. the fedex facility produces so much power that it has to sell it back to the elec co., while the footprint of it is the size of a very small room and produces zero noise as well.

*think different*

Appstore for the Mac would not make sense because they already have one "http://www.apple.com/downloads" It's been up for decades ya know?

My guess is they are making the allspark cube...

I think this is more than the existing services MobileMe, AppStore etc ... are too small for such a massive computing investment.
Like an Oracle, Apple is building something way better than push email.
Not willing to say more but imagine the iTablet embedding a brand new instant collaborative environment with very cool features. i mean the end of email as we know it. A huge service, of course based on Cloud computing.

Second insight : Apple will not let the mobile operators decide data charging price plans typically when roaming. just like blackberry, the bundle prices will include everything so that when travelling abroad and using ur tablet, no silly roaming data charege will apply.

I have another Oracle insight on how it will be integrated with the iPhone. but

Heh, screw xserves, if Apple pays as much as $250 per Mac Mini then they could put 4 million of them in a farm. Now that's a massive farm. Of course they are not very dense so it will take a Pentagon sized building ;p

On a serious note, I am glad that the farm is coming to North Carolina since I live here. It would be nice if the Google and Apple farms and the requisite broad backbone connections to feed them will spill over to the consumer in the form of better bandwidth for all.

Hopefully they are planning to upgrade the iTunes servers from molasses speed