Probably, we all know a certain John Appleseed, that is, Juan Semillademanzana. A name that has featured in a multitude of Apple advertisements and promotional images. A name that honors one of America’s pioneer farmers, responsible for planting apple trees in large parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Ontario .
But that’s by no means the only pun Apple uses in many of its products and services. And one of the areas where more creativity is allowed when you think of names is in the servers that the company uses to provide the service to all your products.
Apple’s originality goes far beyond marketing
We don’t see it, but Apple devices communicate with company servers on a regular basis to perform their duties. Something as simple as updating information from the Weather app, receiving a push notification from any app, or uploading a photo from our photo library to Photos involves the use of servers.
Servers located in large data centers, but which they are divided into very specific domains and sub-domains for clarity when it comes to scaling the framework and enabling proper maintenance and operation of the entire backend. Regarding the main domains, Apple essentially manages five of them: apple.com, icloud.com, icloud-content.com, cdn-apple.com and mzstatic.com, the latter related to images.
Then, each of these domains is subdivided, never better said, into subdomains that meet different needs. For example, metrics.icloud.com is for telemetry, while р66-fmipmobile.icloud.com is for Find My iPhone. And so, we find areas of the most interesting.
Some that attract attention are those that have to do with iTunes. Recall that iTunes disappeared as software years ago and that, gradually, the various stores it housed — books, movies, ringtones and more — changed their names. Even the App Store moved the domain to leave iTunes behind. And yet, internally, there are subdomains like play.itunes.apple.com, bookkeeper.itunes.apple.com being translated an accountant
If you want to go into a long list of domains without making too much sense, there are several worth mentioning. They attract attention, for example, seed.siri.apple.com, one of the domains that Siri connects to. But not the only one, as it also connects to seed-diatryma.siri.apple.com. And what is a Diatryma? A small Eocene dinosaur that lived in New Jerseynothing less.
Other fun domains are pancake.apple.com; guzzoni.apple.com, an Italian surname; humb.apple.com, a proper name; dejavu.apple.com referring to the feeling of having already experienced something happening; albert.apple.com; and unlinkability.apple.com, which we can translate as unlinkability. A domain like experiences.apple.com is also striking and perhaps makes us imagine Craig Federighi and his team testing jetpacks in Apple Park.
Swallows are also present, with swallow.apple.com and also seed-swallow.siri.apple.com, while trees are also represented on sequoia.cdn-apple.com. Regarding health, we find the curious domino ontology.health.apple.com with a reference to ontologythe part of metaphysics which studies being in general and its properties.
We end this list leaving many, many other domains unmentioned, but we will stop at smoot.apple.com. A smooth is a fictional unit of measurement invented at MIT. This equals Oliver Smoot’s height at the time of the prank, as he repeatedly lay down on the Harvard Bridge to measure his length. One more curiosity among the many hiding on Apple servers.
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