A full OS for all agents' workload could be overkill. for things like monitoring, research, or transforming data, a WASM sandbox is often enough.
kccqzy 9 hours ago [-]
Amazing article. It just goes to show how many problems they are solving just to work around bugs and limitations within Apple itself. I’d wager a guess that if Apple made a new Xserve with the same performance as a Mac mini but twice the price people would still buy them, because figuring out data center operations is expensive.
lrvick 4 hours ago [-]
Apple still runs iCloud with Puppet managed unhardened desktop Linux distros last I heard with most devops engineers having plaintext God access to all of it from their individual engineer ssh keys.
They are one of the last companies we should be trusting with hosting infrastructure.
greggsy 4 hours ago [-]
Like most bold claims about security, it omits a whole swathe of controls that allow that to happen.
fastily 2 hours ago [-]
Citation needed. Would love to hear more about this if verifiably true
lrvick 1 hours ago [-]
Apple does not brag about using Linux, and while I will not call anyone out directly because it is a great resource, resumes of current and former Apple DevOps/Security engineers describing what they worked on are quite telling.
All sorts of intel you can get about all sorts of companies that way.
paul_h 3 hours ago [-]
Cattle-pets: smart!
lrvick 59 minutes ago [-]
Any server with a shell and opensshd is a pet, and has no business being near sensitive production workloads.
Add to that aging and wildly insecure ssh-based centralized ruby based infra management solution and I can only conclude everyone invovled has been asleep at the wheel on industry best practices for a over a decade.
Production servers should be immutable once deployed, remotely attestable at all times, with quorum signed secret management that trusts no single admin, with every workload in a dedicated vm with only a kernel, reaper, and target daemon, under an inaccessible offline base OS with TPM gated full disk encryption that fails closed if the system is ever modified after first boot.
And all of that is the bare -minimum-. Unfortunately negligence is industry standard since security engineers that actually know how to do system hardening are crazy rare in the bay.
kccqzy 47 minutes ago [-]
People love to throw out these buzzwords describing their ideal “maximum security” setup suitable for “sensitive production workloads” without ever defining what the threat model is.
The most grating thing is requiring every workload to be in a dedicated VM. You are throwing so much performance away. What kind of threat model would justify this? Usually there’s no threat model analysis at all.
Banning opensshd is again mostly a fool’s errand. It’s much more productive to design a system that writes the authorized_keys file read by opensshd. For example you can design a system that requires peer approval before your own key gets written to authorized_keys.
doctorpangloss 4 hours ago [-]
i think they run icloud on gcp dude
madeofpalk 4 hours ago [-]
“icloud” is not one single piece of infrastructure that runs in one place.
lrvick 4 hours ago [-]
Sure for bulk storage, but at least as of a few years ago Apple controls a lot of their own metal for the trusted backbone. I would not be shocked if they are crazy enough to manage GCP with puppet too.
adgjlsfhk1 8 hours ago [-]
I feel like the ideal would be a 2U, 8 mac mini with dual 10Gb ethernet, shared dual power supplies, actual datacenter heatsink layout would be such a great CI platform.
brianwawok 7 hours ago [-]
How many would they sell per year, and how would the total revenue compare to iPhone revenue?
542458 7 hours ago [-]
> how would the total revenue compare to iPhone revenue
That's not a useful watermark, most of Apple's own offerings are nowhere near the iPhone revenue level.
brianwawok 7 hours ago [-]
Well it means why Apple doesn't care about the market lol.
adgjlsfhk1 7 hours ago [-]
If they can sell them for higher margin than a mac mini/macbook it seems sensible enough.
fauigerzigerk 5 hours ago [-]
The very purpose of these hosted Mac instances is to help people not buy a Mac of their own. Any higher margins would have to compensate Apple for this cannibalisation.
adgjlsfhk1 3 hours ago [-]
Not really. The main purpose of this is to run CI that never was going to be a personal machine anyway. This is just making it difficult for devs to have automated testing of their software on macs.
greggsy 4 hours ago [-]
That’s like saying Apple didn’t listen to the market when it deliberately avoided going all in on a solo AI play.
It’s not all about what you think consumers think they want. There are other more pressing factors, like ability to deliver and supply chain management which have strategic impacts in the longer term.
newsclues 6 hours ago [-]
How much would they save for internal serve purchases?
ttul 7 hours ago [-]
I have no idea if this is true, but I would not be surprised if Apple has its own unreleased server variant based on the Mac Mini or Mac Studio platform that is deployed in data centers for specific clients.
chippiewill 7 hours ago [-]
They do. They have their own custom 2U rack machines which they use for AI and private cloud stuff.
pnw 4 hours ago [-]
Apple published an article about the design of those servers in 2024. Custom hw with a custom OS.
Ok, I work for NoMac cloud hosting, and it might be interesting how we do it, in short:
A 21U rack at a datacenter (currently 2 in EU). It holds three MyElectronics 1.25U steel mounts at 2U pitch (3 Mac Minis each, rear ports, open floor for the bottom intake, 18 slots in all). 12 M5 Pro 15-core/24 GB/1 TB/10GbE NoMac Sendbox hosts at two 6-vCPU/8 GB VMs each, four M5 Pro 48 GB NoMac Simulator hosts at about 20 phones each.
Power comes from two Netio PowerPDU 8KS units (8 × C13, per-outlet switching and metering over an API) on the A and B feeds. Hosts are split evenly across the two feed and connected with C14-to-C7 cords, and an APC AP4421 transfer switch feeds only the network gear. The rack peaks around 1.3 kW and averages about 0.3 kW.
The network is a MikroTik RB5009 holdin the only public IP, doing outbound NAT and inbound WireGuard only, plus a MikroTik CRS312 giving 10GbE to every Mac on a 1 Gbit/s uplink. It has three VLANs: management (PDUs, KVMs), hosts with port isolation so they can only reach the gateway, R2 and the public internet.
Every host is commissioned with FileVault off and pmset autorestartatconnect 1, autorestart 1 and sleep 0, with auto-login on the phone hosts, hostd as a LaunchDaemon, zero-touch MDM enrollmen through Mosyle, and updates deferred 90 days.
Basically that's it. Fortunatelly, we did not have supply problems, but we are also smaller.
throwaway_1016 14 minutes ago [-]
Do you have any recommendations for 10G external ethernet for macs?
daniban 5 hours ago [-]
It's actually rumored that Apple is working on a new server product:
I also get my trustworthy news from naked men on Twitter.
233mhz 5 hours ago [-]
It's a screen grab of Fight club, in case you're serious
0c3ca83 2 hours ago [-]
Correction noted. I also get my trustworthy news from naked fight club actors on Twitter
FishAngular12 5 hours ago [-]
Lol that guy just reposts news posted on the Bloomberg terminal
ipsum2 5 hours ago [-]
No, he's actually crazy, if you read his website. He was claiming that the US would be destroyed a few years ago.
NSUserDefaults 4 hours ago [-]
So… was he wrong?
neal_jones 5 hours ago [-]
Yea, I would hit his website every once in a while years ago but came to the same conclusion
lrvick 4 hours ago [-]
Anything posted on X already should be assumed low credibility by anyone, but someone willing to actually pay Elon a subscription for a blue checkmark I immediately assume is an idiot.
flanz_10 8 hours ago [-]
they could charge 8x if they packed 4 in a rack.
Zotta 8 hours ago [-]
The plants have grown over the edge of the walled garden. The walls will get higher.
kyralis 20 minutes ago [-]
Just a random anecdote:
For years, "code review" in iOS meant "email your patch set to a particular email address, which would format your patch and send it to a mailing list". That list would be populated with people who could approve or disapprove it.
The server that ran that conversion was a MacBook sitting in a pretty random "server" room that included MacBooks, iMacs facing a wall, and other Mac devices used as headless servers.
Useful more than a decade ago, still useful now!
borschtplease 8 hours ago [-]
Apple still lives in the world where software developed in IDE on a personal computer and shipped as a boxed software on a disquette with a licence key. Xcode cloud is a joke. All their automation is a joke. It’s not surprising even their own software development stuck because of their ecosystem because they use same tools, same cryptic software signing with their plists, p8, chains, certificates, lack of ui testing, horrible cpp, objc legacy. You just drowning in this environment. How I wish we have proper web app apis at last
jadar 7 hours ago [-]
In my experience this is only partially true. Apple has come a long way and their code signing experience is leaps and bounds better than Android at this point. Their UI testing is actually pretty solid, and Swift is a wonderful language to program in. The IDE part is partially true, but to be fair they are opening things up to coding agents (they're using Claude Code themselves) so I feel like this is only going to get better from here.
plqbfbv 3 hours ago [-]
> Apple has come a long way and their code signing experience is leaps and bounds better than Android at this point
"Apple has come a long way and has made a very inconvenient and complex process only slightly less inconvenient, and people somehow are happy and pretend Android sucks."
We moved off GL/GH CI for iOS apps and switched to XCode Cloud only because of the pain that Apple is w.r.t. to signing. This is the other way, and luckily we have LLMs now: https://docs.fastlane.tools/actions/match/
Whatever we pay in runner-minutes/month is the price of our sanity so we don't have to deal with the nightmare that is their signing/release process, and their stupid CLI/XCode tools. Not to mention that even XCode Cloud seems to have been coded and shipped without any kind of second pair of eyes (QA nowhere to be found), and the XCode UI and Web UI behave in totally different ways for the same input. Of course without any kind of proper explanation for any errors, as in Apple's fashion.
georgel 4 hours ago [-]
Back in the early/mid 2010's when I was still a native iOS dev, I remember interviewers would ask how do you code sign an app.
And when they started trying to "automate" the process, it was a roll of the dice if it would work.
I have been out of that game for last 5 years, but I occasionally still open Xcode and it _seems_ it works most of the time.
solyin 2 hours ago [-]
I understand the technical difference between signing, stapling and notarization, but c'mon man, what the hell‽
well_ackshually 6 hours ago [-]
> their code signing experience is leaps and bounds better than Android at this point.
In which universe ? You generate a signing key, its password, configure the alias, the alias password and then just modify your gradle build script to say signingConfig.set(file("file/path.jks"))
Hell, if you want to go even further, give up on signing, use the debug signing certificate and let google sign for you with their own keys.
I've stopped counting how many issues you get on trying to build iOS apps because "whoops, sorry, xcodebuild just farted and can't sign"
xXSLAYERXx 7 hours ago [-]
I used to drown in this stuff in the when I first did IOS dev back in 2017. I recently got back into it and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I could setup a ci/cd pipeline. What used to take hours figuring out certs, debugging build issues, I can now even test my build against prod without even deploying.
I'm not building anything complicated, just a iPhone / watch app, but when I do get stuck with env its codex to the rescue. IMO relative to my experience many years ago its amazing.
jimbokun 4 hours ago [-]
So is Codex the real reason it’s much easier to setup?
xXSLAYERXx 3 hours ago [-]
Codex is definitely the reason I'm able to debug ops issues so quickly. For instance, I introduced a watch app into my iphone project. The build failed in xcode cloud but didn't give a reason. I gave codex some context and had it scan the project and it found the problem almost immediately.
odo1242 7 hours ago [-]
SwiftUI is one of the nicer UI frameworks to use imo. And fast
rafram 7 hours ago [-]
I assume you hit some limitations if you try to use Xcode Cloud for a larger project, but for small-scale use it’s pretty great. The setup is instant and seamless, builds are fast, and you get a bunch of minutes with your developer membership, which has been fixed at $99 for as long as I can remember.
therepanic 8 hours ago [-]
and what kind of world do we live in now
solatic 8 hours ago [-]
Android tooling is cross-platform and easily executed in your choice of CI provider with cheap Linux ARM minutes. Simulator-based UI tests are headless (there are headless tests for iOS but not macOS). It's not even remotely a close comparison.
mrtesthah 8 hours ago [-]
That must be why everyone’s trying to release Android apps now.
NoidFonsense 8 hours ago [-]
No, the apple ecosystem will always hold a monopoly over stupid upper class people to fleece. Apple will say "jump" and Developers will ask how high (if they know what's good for their wallet)
AnthonyMouse 6 hours ago [-]
It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out with their "no unapproved code" stance. The old excuse was that normal users don't know how to write code and so don't need to be able to run their own code.
But now normal users can have some AI thing write single-use code for them, and for relatively simple code like "show me all my pictures between these two dates that are in landscape rather than portrait" they'll usually get it right.
And now who wants a phone where you can't do anything like that?
NoidFonsense 3 hours ago [-]
year of the linux mobile
bensyverson 8 hours ago [-]
A world where people use Claude to operate doomed SaaS products
f1shy 8 hours ago [-]
Which are developed in jails, in virtual containers in other containers in virtual machines on top of hypervisor cloud system
4 hours ago [-]
mrtesthah 8 hours ago [-]
>How I wish we have proper web app apis at last
You mean APIs that inconsiderate developers use to release a
simple calculator in the form of a 300+MB binary that eats a quarter of my RAM?
jimbokun 4 hours ago [-]
I’m not active in mobile development, how do the iOS and Android development practices differ?
lenerdenator 8 hours ago [-]
They might still be living in that world, but they also live in a world where they can do exactly $0 of R&D of actual rack server SKUs and still have people buying their high-end MBP SKUs at halfway-decent used car prices.
So I get why they don't care.
throwaway_1016 15 minutes ago [-]
I wonder which 10G external nic do they use? And any recommendations for 10G specifically?
What interests me is the miniaturization and thinness of the mainboard. Imagine if the mainboards were produced en masse and mated with a perfectly-fitting (liquid-cooled) heatspreader. That could be a very space-efficient blade server for very high density compute.
00deadbeef 9 hours ago [-]
This article is dated November 3rd yet I've read it months ago, it was already in my history.
vadepaysa 5 hours ago [-]
I run a mac mini server at home and it was quite a culture shock getting that thing to do anything like linux. The password retirement at boot is a hard gate and your server will just not do anything until you unlock it. GREAT feature for desktop and laptops, not so much for a server.
defied 4 hours ago [-]
At TestingBot we’ve recently deployed Mac Mini M6 instances for (automated) testing on macOS using Virtualization.Framework.
Never considered Macbooks; what about the battery hazard in a rack? We also host iOS devices, after a couple of months of intense use, the batteries tend to swell up and bump up the screen of the device.
corvad 8 hours ago [-]
Hmm hundreds of laptop batteries in a datacenter doesn't seem too smart.
tgtweak 7 hours ago [-]
With that kind of airflow and consistent temperature I would suspect the failure rates to be incredibly small on those batteries - typically what kills them is extreme temperatures and high C charge/discharge at high temperature deltas (as measured from 25'C) which is where the cells have lowest degredation, which they should see very little of in this environment.
What would be more pertinent is changing the charging logic so the packs are held at 50% state of charge vs being always charged up to 100%, that will significantly decrease the chance of pack issues while greatly increasing the longevity of the battery itself. If you hold a lithium ion cell at 50% SOC for years without varying it and keep the temperatures flat, it can last for a very long time without capacity degredation. If you leave it at 100% it will be degrade in a few short years and can swell, at which point it has twice the chemical potential to flame out. Also if it's charged to 100% when the datacenter is at 20'C ambient and datacenter cooling fails and temps go up, having the pack warm up to 40'C can overvolt it and that is usually where they swell/fail.
Also fair to note here that Apple is probably at the frontier in terms of using the highest safety cells and battery management logic so I'd feel better about this than I would putting a lesser brand's lipo pouches in datacenter environment.
traceroute66 6 hours ago [-]
> With that kind of airflow and consistent temperature I would suspect ....
A lot of words, many of which might well be true. But it ignores the fundamental point.
I think we can safely assume its not their building, not their datacentre.
As a result, they need to play by the rules of the datacentre operator.
The datacentre operator has fire suppression systems build to a certain spec.
The datacentre has risk assessments and insurance covers to think about.
The datacentre has other customers to think about.
The datacentre has its own staff to think about.
Yes, datacentres have some of the most advanced multi-layer fire detection and suppression systems in the world.
But a fire caused by multiple racks stuffed full of LiPo batteries will likely result in very hard to control results, especially if it becomes a cascading event.
Yes, it is arguably highly unlikely to ever happen, especially with Apple hardware as you say.
However at the very least the guy should fess up and have a chat to the datacentre operator to at least give them a chance to say (preferably in writing) "ok, no problem, we'll just add it to our risk register".
Its The Right Thing To Do (TM).
tgtweak 5 hours ago [-]
We run lithium ion UPSs in our racks and have for many years - I think you're taking the airline approach here but the reality is the environment inside a datacenter is much more stable than almost everywhere else lithium ion batteries are employed today, and the fire suppression detection and suppression systems add on top of that.
chakintosh 2 hours ago [-]
When the MacBook is fully charged and still plugged in, it bypasses the battery and runs directly off power from the wall adapter. So those batteries are hardly doing anything.
cadamsdotcom 5 hours ago [-]
Chock full of technical details, thank you to the authors! Got a few takeaways for using my own mbp remotely.
But if you read between the lines it is fascinating what isn't said - about Apple's customer focus.
These folks have no advocate at Apple; they worked all this out on their own. At this scale with hardware from Framework or Lenovo or Dell, there'd be a 24/7 hotline with a human to reach.
With its market power Apple can ignore these people - let them suffer, as it were.
I wonder if Ternus' Apple will.. think different.
olalonde 5 hours ago [-]
They really don't care about developers it seems. I've literally been trying to give them money for an Apple Developer membership for over a month. Ten support emails later, I'm still stuck. I'm starting to think the only way is to buy an existing iOS development company. Plenty of similar stories in their developer forums.
andai 9 hours ago [-]
Title should be edited to "Putting hundreds of MacBooks in a data center (because Apple is silly)" imo
giancarlostoro 5 hours ago [-]
> Under certain conditions, an external USB NIC stops working and acts as if it is not powered and shows no link. Trying another cable, another NIC, another switch port, no luck. But a quick visit to Network Preferences, deleting and recreating the “network service” in MacOS Settings brings it back to life
I too have this really annoying issue where my Mac decides a USB-C or Micro-SD peripheral is no longer readable if I am working through multiple SD cards and backing them up, not sure why. Would love to work at Apple for 2 weeks with Claude to fix it and then quit and come back home, tbh would love to just work at all sorts of companies to fix really obnoxious "never to be fixed" bugs, Discord's abysmal roles stack would be on my list as well.
willmeyers 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah Apple needs to fix this by either making Xcode Cloud better, make more Mac minis (or just dedicated server hardware), or even loosening the two-VM limit. This kind of thing is bad for the average consumer and just plain wasteful.
xp84 7 hours ago [-]
They literally don't care. To them, either it's 1999 and your Macs should all be on desks at your physical office that you definitely have, or, you can "just" use Xcode Cloud[1], which is definitely fully featured and surely addresses the only possible 'headless' use case.
Plus, since the desperate are willing to do crazy-looking things like this, bulk-buying $6,000 premium laptops with batteries and screens, at enormous margins, Apple is even more incentivized to keep (not) doing exactly what it's (not) doing.
Isnt it against the Apple EULA to sell VMs of Macos? Love the creative problem solving with the HW.
hmartin 9 hours ago [-]
> A well-known limitation is that Apple only allows two macOS VMs per physical Mac. It can be a Mac Pro with 24 cores and 192 GB memory, yet it is limited to running only two guest VMs. This limitation leaks into our product offering: we can only slice Mac resources in two halves. So we run instances with 6 or 12 cores on 14-core Mac Minis and 8/16-core instances on 18-core MacBooks (we reserve a couple cores for management overhead).
3 hours ago [-]
kylec 9 hours ago [-]
I don't know about selling, but Apple permits up to 2 virtualized Macs to run on a Mac. If they are circumventing this limit that would be an issue, but it doesn't sound like they are.
miniman1337 9 hours ago [-]
Ah okay - and the 24 hour minimum rental time doesn't apply to VMs? Im just curious how they are getting around the limits that Mac Stadium and AWS have.
solyin 3 hours ago [-]
The hack for the 24 hour thing is, of course, as a data center, to form an s-corp and hire employees to work 1 hour per week racking servers and give them a W-2 for a princely sum of just $16.90/week which works out to $878.80/year. Then as a perk of the job, those employees get to access the cluster as a perk of their employment. You can't charge an application fee since it's California, so then you sell interview prep courses for $1,000, and encourage graduates to apply.
zamadatix 8 hours ago [-]
They aren't getting around any limitations. How you decide to bill for meeting the limitations is a business decision, and you can do it via either higher average rates and allow more granular rentals to be financially covered that way or by requiring a 24 hour minimum.
I.e. just because Apple requires you to do things in 24 hour increments does not mean your billing has to expose it in exactly the same way.
If a business reserves a Mac for 24 hours (and allows no other users for that window), it complies with the EULA, no?
That doesn't mean the business has to charge the user for 24 hours. You could charge for 6 hours and then just let the Mac sit idle and unused the remaining 18.
You're eatting the cost of that unused time, but if its a differentiator that leads to more business than it might still be worth it.
EDIT: To be clear, imagine a case where the user has 24 hour sole access to the Mac. They could use up 24 hours if they wanted. But usage is tracked per hour, and they're only billed after the fact based on how much time they actually were running something during that 24 hour window.
pvtmert 3 hours ago [-]
From the wording of the parent comment my understanding is that 24 hour period applies to the MacOS VM, not the hardware itself. Since they split each physical host into at least 2 different VMs the 24 hour period is for that VM. Even stronger case if they also lock the core affinity to the physical layout like Max editions having multiple Pro chips/dies within...
For Amazon EC2 the case is different since it doesn't allow VMs but only possible to get dedicated bare-metal hosts. Obviously Amazon could offer VMs but they would not because the current way allows them to charge 24 hours even if user uses the host only 1 hour. And obviously no body big enough challenging the status quo and impacting AWS' revenue hard enough.
saagarjha 5 hours ago [-]
I don’t think they are doing this.
GeekyBear 7 hours ago [-]
To be fair, it was against Microsoft's EULA to sell the OEM version of Windows to individuals who built a computer from parts.
Nobody cared.
matt-p 7 hours ago [-]
I thought you could also only sell exclusive use e.g only one vm (or two vms to same customer)
traceroute66 8 hours ago [-]
Honestly, my first thought was "does the datacentre know ?"
12 MacBooks per shelf, if we say roughly 5U per shelf (21.12/4.445 rounded up), so roughly 9 shelves per 47U rack, so 100-ish MacBooks per rack.
That's a scary density of LiPo battery.
The author complains about the lack of redundant power in Mac Minis, but there are other ways to get redundant power into one AC input.
tgtweak 7 hours ago [-]
the issue is the internal power supply is not redundant, even if you supply it with an ATS or UPS, that component can still die taking out the entire thing.
traceroute66 6 hours ago [-]
> the issue is the internal power supply is not redundant, even if you supply it with an ATS or UPS, that component can still die taking out the entire thing.
I mean, its basically the same thing in the MacBook, no ? The SMC ?
After all, there needs to be a magical chip inside to make sure you don't, for example, fry the laptop because it accepts charge via both USB-C and the MagSafe port.
Sure SMC failure is incredibly rare, but it doesn't mean the theoretical SPoF is not there.
Also when was the last time you had an internal PSU on a Mac fail ? Its been a very long time since I've ever seen one, and that's even thinking back to the old days with the old-school canister capacitors. Say what you like about Apple, but on the whole they do a decent job on their BOM selection.
7 hours ago [-]
cloudengineer94 6 hours ago [-]
This is quite an amazing setup and shows the current limitations of Apple supporting their enterprise customers, which end up buying MacBooks to make their products available...
brokencode 6 hours ago [-]
It’s kind of an interesting benefit though that you get a UPS on each machine.
Also you can pull one out and work on it with the integrated keyboard, trackpad, and screen if it has problems.
Obviously it’s super inefficient to need to do this, but there are some upsides.
k0dyn 5 hours ago [-]
There've been many words spilled over Apple's... studied disinterest, in enterprise customers.
It's kinda hard to argue with their results, though. They handed the enterprise market to Microsoft 40 years ago, and have shown few-if-any signs of changing their mind.
js2 8 hours ago [-]
> Another source of pain: FileVault disk encryption. Or rather decryption.
Amazon solves this by disabling FileVault and warns against enabling it.
Amazon also has much tighter integration and offers the Macs bare-metal. This has the downside that you can only gets Macs as dedicated hosts, so it's another layer to manage, and that it takes around an hour to wipe the Mac whenever you shut it down, even if you're not going to release the underlying dedicated host. Also for the last year, even grabbing a Mac dedicated hosts often runs into "None available" for hours at a time. Amazon tells you "try this other zone" but even that is no guarantee. I wasn't even able to get our TAMs to tell me whether trying other regions was likely to help. Besides that, it takes 5-10 minutes to launch a Mac, and once you acquire one, there's a 24 hour minimum billing period due to Apple licensing restrictions. Which is all to say, as a single customer, you can't really build an elastically scaled Mac CI/CD farm on top of AWS. You really need to size for your peak load. Which is expensive compared to just buying your own Macs, but $former_employer didn't want to be in the datacenter business.
FWIW, I believe MacStadium was the first to offer Macs in datacenters as a service:
"Luckily by now we found almost perfect cables that bend exactly as we want them to bend. And we bought the entire supply of them. There are zero more of them available to order on Amazon." Everyone is hoarding at any cost...
giancarlostoro 6 hours ago [-]
Dang, I hope they sell the older laptops for cheap (less than what they were at time of purchase obviously) on Ebay once they're phased out, wouldn't mind buying a "datacenter mac" if its still viable...
I could see them flooding the used Macbook market and selling like hot cakes, but also giving them back "rack" space.
dangero 4 hours ago [-]
I recently setup my home lab in a way that kind of replicates their end goals and it wasn't hard:
1. Beefy M6 Mini as the server. UTM managed MacOS VMs with screen sharing enabled. 1 VM per project. Set the Mini and VMs to never go to sleep.
2. Secondary Macbook Air -- I screenshare into the VM for the project I want to work on and do work from there. I can close the laptop at any time and not worry about agents stopping.
3. With Tailscale on all machines I can work from anywhere.
ariwilson 8 hours ago [-]
I'm a little surprised that people would rather rent a Mac than buy one. Less so now that Apple raised the prices but for a long time a M4 Mac Mini was $599 which only works out to about 6 months at these prices.
Especially since they're not like a regular server, loud and power hungry. They're the definition of quiet and power sipping. I have one do all my background coding work when I want to keep my laptop clear (being headless helps with me moving around too).
jayd16 7 hours ago [-]
Some places are so cloud pilled they can't fathom it.
xur17 6 hours ago [-]
If you're a fully remote company with no offices, where would you stash your purchased mac server? This alone makes renting worth it.
saagarjha 5 hours ago [-]
Sometimes you need a Mac for just a bit.
nicvibe 6 hours ago [-]
It is mind blowing to me that a 1 trillion dollar company don’t have a way to support large customers with enterprise servers. Fun fact: they used to have.
Kuyawa 4 hours ago [-]
Try now stacking ten iphones, or as many as you want. The world definitely will get more interesting in the very near future
Yesterday I saw AI in a pendrive, which got me wondering if small set-top boxes isolated from the web, connected to TVs or your local WiFi will be the norm of tomorrow
nichtverstehen 8 hours ago [-]
Author here. Happy to answer questions.
throwaway_1016 11 minutes ago [-]
What are you using for external 10G nic? Any recommendations?
gnabgib 9 minutes ago [-]
You already have an answer[0], and have asked this twice [1] since.. are you automated?
Excellent article. Just the battle I'm fighting now in terms of virtualization.
Could you please share how you setup the host Mac? Which pmset settings, defaults, tips and tricks for it?
nichtverstehen 6 hours ago [-]
Thank you!
We have all the hosts enrolled into MDM, so we have all sorts of access ready: SSH, KVM, VNC, MDM. With Macs in the DC we found having all these ways to access the machines is really essential. Things break in unexpected ways.
In terms of settings, besides the obvous (do not sleep, do not auto-update, etc), disabling USB restricted mode helps a lot (Privacy&Security > Allow accessories to connect) - no need to approve connected devices via UI.
What are you building if it's not a secret?
egorfine 4 hours ago [-]
MDM is essential, yes.
I'm building a EU Mac mini hosting service. Very early stage, I have just bootstrapped the company.
egorfine 4 hours ago [-]
... and I'm slooowly very slowly thinking of creating a "mock Docker".
Think 80% of Dockerfile syntax supported for running "docker build" against macOS guests. I do have some pieces already done here and there and basically it all comes down to actually creating a product out of a pile of various working scripts (OSS obviously). That's the hardest part.
And then comes the final boss of the game: marketing. Not sure anyone needs this at all.
egorfine 6 hours ago [-]
Also: which solution you have chosen for the p2p deployment? I used to manage deployments on a large scale cluster and got it down from 2h to <1m using libtorrent.
nichtverstehen 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, as alluded to in the post, we have a custom p2p distribution, very inspired by BitTorrent. So you're on the right track :). We'll probably share more on that topic at some point too.
But honestly before we had that, we started with a system where nodes pulled whole images from each other (a decentralized algorithm without central coordination, but no chunking). It worked surprisingly well considering how simple the implementation was.
shambu2k 8 hours ago [-]
I remember seeing on X about someone building iOS apps on Omarchy - have you something tried similar?
nichtverstehen 7 hours ago [-]
That stack is based on xtool at its core (xtool.io). It's very cool, but still early for steady enterprise use IMO.
Also it doesn't have iOS Simulator, so automated testing is out of question. I doubt that porting the Simulator would be feasible, since it requires macOS kernel.
Well, maybe with XNU in a VM and reimplementing parts of macOS userland. Would love to see someone try.
saagarjha 5 hours ago [-]
Psst…macOS images are IPSWs, not XIPs
nichtverstehen 2 hours ago [-]
Doh :/. An LLM would not make such a silly mistake.
Fixing, thank you!
allywilson 8 hours ago [-]
Do you think Apple will allow more than 2 VMs at some point?
nichtverstehen 7 hours ago [-]
I was hopeful that they might lift the limit with a refresh of Mac Pro (it even had a rack mount version). But with Mac Pro discontinued not keeping the hopes up anymore.
ppcdeveloper 4 hours ago [-]
I really need to leverage my JetKVM’s. Now it’s too expensive to deploy AI machines with them. I could have my own personal AI utopia.
ctmlr 6 hours ago [-]
Farming Apples :D
jakeydus 6 hours ago [-]
Disappointed they didn't call this configuration the orchard at any point.
fillskills 8 hours ago [-]
Man, kudos to the person or AI who designed their website. Easy to read, easy to find any information, with eye catching branding.
tgtweak 7 hours ago [-]
Perfect illustration of plan vs reality in terms of complexity divergence.
solatic 9 hours ago [-]
The cost of cloud Mac hardware is quite frankly ludicrous across the board. Namespace's minimum for an M6 is, what, $0.06/minute for 6 vCPU? And that's on the cheap end - Semaphore wants $0.09/minute for 4 vCPU and GitHub Actions wants $0.062/minute for M1 hardware (forget AWS pricing even which is even more atrocious).
If I run just a UI test suite for an hour, that's $3.60/run, which is now higher than what I'm paying for AI inference that made the change that triggered the run. That's crazy! If I ran even just one run per night that would run me more than $100/month. A Mac Mini is $900 - I break even in nine months by buying the hardware outright. If I run multiple UI test suites per day, I break even much faster. These ARM chips are so power-light that the cost of electricity is practically irrelevant, and after all, these aren't rack-mounted monstrosities with 90 dB fans - they're meant to cool themselves sitting on your desk. Maybe it's different if you need like 60 of them?
Is anyone even running the numbers before they sign up? Or are companies really running that many Minis and are paying the premium to outsource the DCOps?
GeekyBear 8 hours ago [-]
> A Mac Mini is $900 - I break even in nine months by buying the hardware outright.
When you take resale value into account, purchase makes even more sense than renting.
Used M1 Mac Minis from 2020 are currently selling for about $500 when they originally retailed for $699.
mike_hearn 4 hours ago [-]
Yep. I run a local CI cluster of Macs made up of old laptops, so the effective cost is "zero" (resale would be annoying and I probably wouldn't bother). It's pretty easy. No way am I paying those kinds of rates for cloud Macs.
MonkeyClub 9 hours ago [-]
> A Mac Mini is $900 - I break even in nine months by buying the hardware outright.
The clue to their decision may be right there, potentially going for an increase in sales.
But nowadays it seems they suffer from a lack of vision and drive; perhaps (hopefully) they’ll come around.
8 hours ago [-]
robin_reala 9 hours ago [-]
I have a test suite that needs to run on a Mac in a project that merges < 20 PRs a year. No point in provisioning our own Mac and maintaining it for that.
wereHamster 8 hours ago [-]
I looked at our GitHub Actions monthly expenses, then at the price of a M4 Mac mini (just when they were released, and still cheap), and decided to buy one as it would pay for itself in less than a year. There are definitely still cases when buying hardware still makes sense, over renting in the cloud.
ghboo0927 8 hours ago [-]
the problem of buying machine is that it doesn't scale. you have to buy another one if the test gets heavier.
solatic 7 hours ago [-]
Mac Minis are small and power efficient. Scaling questions are always a question of degree. Several Mac Minis, Ethernet cabling, a KVM switch, maybe a simple MDM to make your life a little easier, scales just fine.
garymiklos 6 hours ago [-]
NoMac is just $0.015/min or $0.90/h, it is the cheapest one.
skrrtww 9 hours ago [-]
> You can't build iOS apps without a Mac.
I'm not sure this is true anymore.
graypegg 9 hours ago [-]
xtool [0] came up on here a while ago [1]. I think it still requires you get a big xcode app bundle off a macos machine and drop that into xtool, since there's no other way to get the iOS library header files from Apple. The other parts of xcode just aren't used as far as I know. Other than that caveat, you're running builds in xtool's own environment on whatever platform you choose. You can even do code signing.
Omarchy is even less production ready than racking up laptops.
solyin 8 hours ago [-]
Plus there's the issue that DHH is a racist twat.
shye 8 hours ago [-]
That's one of the reasons to keep it as far as possible from anywhere you need trust (like prod): software, like soylent green, is made of people. And you can't trust people like him.
linhns 2 hours ago [-]
Omarchy, for what it is, is just a toy project from DHH. As much as I acknowledge the guy's talent, it is not viable for any production grade build
lrvick 4 hours ago [-]
iOS simulator is just software. Reverse engineering it to run on Linux seems pretty viable these days and likely cheaper?
amelius 8 hours ago [-]
> You can't build iOS apps without a Mac.
I'm hoping AI will change that soon.
some-guy 8 hours ago [-]
You can already do this, but the Apple’s EULA forbids Mac OS running (virtually or otherwise) on non-Apple hardware.
amelius 7 hours ago [-]
It's MY operating system after I bought it.
drnick1 8 hours ago [-]
So what? The EULA can say whatever it wants.
some-guy 4 hours ago [-]
As an individual developer I would totally violate that part of the EULA, but if I'm selling OSX computer like OP, you're exposing yourself to much greater legal risk.
sneak 8 hours ago [-]
Today you can run macOS and current Xcode in kvm/qemu on any modern amd64 server. Next macOS will be arm only and likely DRM’d up the wazoo.
I could see Mac minis being used for data center type setups. But MacBooks are distinctly consumer devices. I know your company is trying to solve a niche. But if it stops becoming a niche, consumers will be impacted because of operations like yours.
SOLAR_FIELDS 8 hours ago [-]
The incentives of the current system are not set up as such for this company to care about potential negative externalities of their actions.
sneak 8 hours ago [-]
The article addresses that. In the very beginning.
> But still, why laptops? Isn’t it a major waste of screen pixels and keyboard buttons and battery ions? Well yes, Mac Mini would be a better choice for a datacenter. Sure, it has very rudimentary remote management, no redundant power, and a beautiful case that ensures that cooling will be difficult regardless of which side you lay it on. But these are all known challenges that we have learned to manage.
> But have you actually tried to order a couple hundred Minis? We have. Ordered in January, delivered in July. Welcome to the world of 2026 when the supply chains are in disarray. Never mind that Apple doesn’t release updated CPU models to all devices at once. So Mac Mini didn’t get M5 cores for 10 months (and then suddenly got M6 before any other device model!). We promise the best and the newest to our customers so we had to be inventive. That’s how the MacBook-in-Datacenter project was born.
kravmaga999 6 hours ago [-]
Above all else, looking at a "Mac rack" is, at least for me, a truly F**ing awesome aesthetic and technological experience.
nwellinghoff 9 hours ago [-]
I really wonder if Apple's logic to require a sale of a unit for 2 VMs is fiscally correct. Seems like it would be better to open it up to virtualization such that more devs can make iOS and macOS apps. Is the community of devs being forced to buy mac hw just do dev a iOS/macOs app so large that its worth putting us through all this HASSLE? Maybe they are worried about clone machine/farms that will eat into their sales. Idk. Because they are so VM unfriendly, I refuse to deal with Apple's bs.
intrasight 9 hours ago [-]
> Is the community of devs being forced to buy mac hw just do dev a iOS/macOs app so large
Yes.
Why else would you buy such an expensive machine with such a crappy operating system?
N7lo4nl34akaoSN 8 hours ago [-]
It's Unix and it can run any pro creative app you like.
Because the target market (mobile) is very profitable, if you have the skill, I also don’t understand that stance because Mac powerbooks, Mac minis, Mac studios last a long time and have high resale value if you decide to move on, particularly if you are a smaller development company.
someguyiguess 8 hours ago [-]
Not crappy. Skill issue.
5 hours ago [-]
waterTanuki 36 minutes ago [-]
> But have you actually tried to order a couple hundred Minis? We have. Ordered in January, delivered in July. Welcome to the world of 2026 when the supply chains are in disarray.
I hope you guys are the only ones employing this strategy otherwise you're just contributing to the same problem mac minis have.
wslh 9 hours ago [-]
I am lost, doing it in a Hackintosh is feasible but against EULA terms? I remember having a Hackintosh around the office two years ago (yes, it was x64 based). BTW I just found "ARM is not a universal architecture, there will be no more Hackintosh" [1].
The registry distribution subject "for another blog post" is the most interesting part of this to me. I'm very interested in the efficiency/locality metrics that went into designing that. I look forward to that future post.
Uptime.lab (see Insta) deshells M2sand runs them bare a bit like GitHub does
gib444 6 hours ago [-]
> The most unreliable cable? HDMI! Often thick and inflexible. Tends to fall out every time you touch the shelf.
For real. Also disconnects if you wave a palm hair in its general direction. So much worse than screw-in DVI, mechanical design wise.
cactusplant7374 7 hours ago [-]
Why HDMI cables instead of a HDMI dummy plug with screen sharing enabled?
mcculley 7 hours ago [-]
They mentioned have to deal with FileVault at boot.
MisterMunchkin 6 hours ago [-]
Apple bros, why don’t you just make servers? People would go nuts for a 1TB RAM Mac server. You’re a hardware company! Why are you throwing away one of the biggest hardware markets!?!?!
k0dyn 4 hours ago [-]
'cuz they can't source enough fab time for their existing products - so further expanding their market doesn't do anything to expand their revenue.
Though to be fair, they more-or-less ignored enterprise even when we weren't in a fab-constrained environment.
pjmlp 6 hours ago [-]
Apple decided they don't care about neither servers, nor workstations markets.
tonetheman 8 hours ago [-]
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davemultifactor 6 hours ago [-]
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scosman 9 hours ago [-]
Wild to see them using MacBook Pros and not Mac Mini/Studio. Curious how that possible makes sense for economics and cooling.
fckgw 9 hours ago [-]
They answer that in literally the first paragraph in the article.
TL:DR; They couldn't buy enough minis or studios.
Danox 6 hours ago [-]
The Mac Mini’s and Mac Studio’s are very popular fast, quick, and easy to move around. With very good resale value private party or back to Apple.
scosman 8 hours ago [-]
it's "literally" the 5th paragraph, but yeah, it's there.
7 hours ago [-]
supersimpleguy 8 hours ago [-]
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scosman 8 hours ago [-]
tbh, I skipped to the part about Virtualization.framework and skipped the part that started "Chances are you’ve seen me on X: "
supersimpleguy 5 hours ago [-]
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varispeed 8 hours ago [-]
So they buy up the machines, likely create supply issues (add waiting time etc.), then rent them out at premium?
People are outraged landlords doing that with housing.
Yet someone such rent seeking behaviour is acceptable?
Get fucked.
Danox 6 hours ago [-]
Many people/companies are willing renters today even when the resale value is very good with Mac’s in comparison to PCs. Never have trouble selling on decently equipped Mac computers. The PCs, aside from the graphics card, end up in a scrap heap. (computer graveyard).
varispeed 3 hours ago [-]
"willing" renters, because corporations are buying up the supply.
Rendered at 01:33:17 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
They are one of the last companies we should be trusting with hosting infrastructure.
All sorts of intel you can get about all sorts of companies that way.
Add to that aging and wildly insecure ssh-based centralized ruby based infra management solution and I can only conclude everyone invovled has been asleep at the wheel on industry best practices for a over a decade.
Production servers should be immutable once deployed, remotely attestable at all times, with quorum signed secret management that trusts no single admin, with every workload in a dedicated vm with only a kernel, reaper, and target daemon, under an inaccessible offline base OS with TPM gated full disk encryption that fails closed if the system is ever modified after first boot.
And all of that is the bare -minimum-. Unfortunately negligence is industry standard since security engineers that actually know how to do system hardening are crazy rare in the bay.
The most grating thing is requiring every workload to be in a dedicated VM. You are throwing so much performance away. What kind of threat model would justify this? Usually there’s no threat model analysis at all.
Banning opensshd is again mostly a fool’s errand. It’s much more productive to design a system that writes the authorized_keys file read by opensshd. For example you can design a system that requires peer approval before your own key gets written to authorized_keys.
That's not a useful watermark, most of Apple's own offerings are nowhere near the iPhone revenue level.
It’s not all about what you think consumers think they want. There are other more pressing factors, like ability to deliver and supply chain management which have strategic impacts in the longer term.
https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
A 21U rack at a datacenter (currently 2 in EU). It holds three MyElectronics 1.25U steel mounts at 2U pitch (3 Mac Minis each, rear ports, open floor for the bottom intake, 18 slots in all). 12 M5 Pro 15-core/24 GB/1 TB/10GbE NoMac Sendbox hosts at two 6-vCPU/8 GB VMs each, four M5 Pro 48 GB NoMac Simulator hosts at about 20 phones each.
Power comes from two Netio PowerPDU 8KS units (8 × C13, per-outlet switching and metering over an API) on the A and B feeds. Hosts are split evenly across the two feed and connected with C14-to-C7 cords, and an APC AP4421 transfer switch feeds only the network gear. The rack peaks around 1.3 kW and averages about 0.3 kW.
The network is a MikroTik RB5009 holdin the only public IP, doing outbound NAT and inbound WireGuard only, plus a MikroTik CRS312 giving 10GbE to every Mac on a 1 Gbit/s uplink. It has three VLANs: management (PDUs, KVMs), hosts with port isolation so they can only reach the gateway, R2 and the public internet.
Every host is commissioned with FileVault off and pmset autorestartatconnect 1, autorestart 1 and sleep 0, with auto-login on the phone hosts, hostd as a LaunchDaemon, zero-touch MDM enrollmen through Mosyle, and updates deferred 90 days.
Basically that's it. Fortunatelly, we did not have supply problems, but we are also smaller.
https://x.com/zerohedge/status/2100211198805381524
For years, "code review" in iOS meant "email your patch set to a particular email address, which would format your patch and send it to a mailing list". That list would be populated with people who could approve or disapprove it.
The server that ran that conversion was a MacBook sitting in a pretty random "server" room that included MacBooks, iMacs facing a wall, and other Mac devices used as headless servers.
Useful more than a decade ago, still useful now!
"Apple has come a long way and has made a very inconvenient and complex process only slightly less inconvenient, and people somehow are happy and pretend Android sucks."
We moved off GL/GH CI for iOS apps and switched to XCode Cloud only because of the pain that Apple is w.r.t. to signing. This is the other way, and luckily we have LLMs now: https://docs.fastlane.tools/actions/match/
Whatever we pay in runner-minutes/month is the price of our sanity so we don't have to deal with the nightmare that is their signing/release process, and their stupid CLI/XCode tools. Not to mention that even XCode Cloud seems to have been coded and shipped without any kind of second pair of eyes (QA nowhere to be found), and the XCode UI and Web UI behave in totally different ways for the same input. Of course without any kind of proper explanation for any errors, as in Apple's fashion.
And when they started trying to "automate" the process, it was a roll of the dice if it would work.
I have been out of that game for last 5 years, but I occasionally still open Xcode and it _seems_ it works most of the time.
In which universe ? You generate a signing key, its password, configure the alias, the alias password and then just modify your gradle build script to say signingConfig.set(file("file/path.jks"))
Hell, if you want to go even further, give up on signing, use the debug signing certificate and let google sign for you with their own keys.
I've stopped counting how many issues you get on trying to build iOS apps because "whoops, sorry, xcodebuild just farted and can't sign"
I'm not building anything complicated, just a iPhone / watch app, but when I do get stuck with env its codex to the rescue. IMO relative to my experience many years ago its amazing.
But now normal users can have some AI thing write single-use code for them, and for relatively simple code like "show me all my pictures between these two dates that are in landscape rather than portrait" they'll usually get it right.
And now who wants a phone where you can't do anything like that?
You mean APIs that inconsiderate developers use to release a simple calculator in the form of a 300+MB binary that eats a quarter of my RAM?
So I get why they don't care.
What would be more pertinent is changing the charging logic so the packs are held at 50% state of charge vs being always charged up to 100%, that will significantly decrease the chance of pack issues while greatly increasing the longevity of the battery itself. If you hold a lithium ion cell at 50% SOC for years without varying it and keep the temperatures flat, it can last for a very long time without capacity degredation. If you leave it at 100% it will be degrade in a few short years and can swell, at which point it has twice the chemical potential to flame out. Also if it's charged to 100% when the datacenter is at 20'C ambient and datacenter cooling fails and temps go up, having the pack warm up to 40'C can overvolt it and that is usually where they swell/fail.
Also fair to note here that Apple is probably at the frontier in terms of using the highest safety cells and battery management logic so I'd feel better about this than I would putting a lesser brand's lipo pouches in datacenter environment.
A lot of words, many of which might well be true. But it ignores the fundamental point.
I think we can safely assume its not their building, not their datacentre.
As a result, they need to play by the rules of the datacentre operator.
The datacentre operator has fire suppression systems build to a certain spec.
The datacentre has risk assessments and insurance covers to think about.
The datacentre has other customers to think about.
The datacentre has its own staff to think about.
Yes, datacentres have some of the most advanced multi-layer fire detection and suppression systems in the world.
But a fire caused by multiple racks stuffed full of LiPo batteries will likely result in very hard to control results, especially if it becomes a cascading event.
Yes, it is arguably highly unlikely to ever happen, especially with Apple hardware as you say.
However at the very least the guy should fess up and have a chat to the datacentre operator to at least give them a chance to say (preferably in writing) "ok, no problem, we'll just add it to our risk register".
Its The Right Thing To Do (TM).
But if you read between the lines it is fascinating what isn't said - about Apple's customer focus.
These folks have no advocate at Apple; they worked all this out on their own. At this scale with hardware from Framework or Lenovo or Dell, there'd be a 24/7 hotline with a human to reach.
With its market power Apple can ignore these people - let them suffer, as it were.
I wonder if Ternus' Apple will.. think different.
I too have this really annoying issue where my Mac decides a USB-C or Micro-SD peripheral is no longer readable if I am working through multiple SD cards and backing them up, not sure why. Would love to work at Apple for 2 weeks with Claude to fix it and then quit and come back home, tbh would love to just work at all sorts of companies to fix really obnoxious "never to be fixed" bugs, Discord's abysmal roles stack would be on my list as well.
Plus, since the desperate are willing to do crazy-looking things like this, bulk-buying $6,000 premium laptops with batteries and screens, at enormous margins, Apple is even more incentivized to keep (not) doing exactly what it's (not) doing.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/
I.e. just because Apple requires you to do things in 24 hour increments does not mean your billing has to expose it in exactly the same way.
That doesn't mean the business has to charge the user for 24 hours. You could charge for 6 hours and then just let the Mac sit idle and unused the remaining 18.
You're eatting the cost of that unused time, but if its a differentiator that leads to more business than it might still be worth it.
EDIT: To be clear, imagine a case where the user has 24 hour sole access to the Mac. They could use up 24 hours if they wanted. But usage is tracked per hour, and they're only billed after the fact based on how much time they actually were running something during that 24 hour window.
For Amazon EC2 the case is different since it doesn't allow VMs but only possible to get dedicated bare-metal hosts. Obviously Amazon could offer VMs but they would not because the current way allows them to charge 24 hours even if user uses the host only 1 hour. And obviously no body big enough challenging the status quo and impacting AWS' revenue hard enough.
Nobody cared.
12 MacBooks per shelf, if we say roughly 5U per shelf (21.12/4.445 rounded up), so roughly 9 shelves per 47U rack, so 100-ish MacBooks per rack.
That's a scary density of LiPo battery.
The author complains about the lack of redundant power in Mac Minis, but there are other ways to get redundant power into one AC input.
I mean, its basically the same thing in the MacBook, no ? The SMC ?
After all, there needs to be a magical chip inside to make sure you don't, for example, fry the laptop because it accepts charge via both USB-C and the MagSafe port.
Sure SMC failure is incredibly rare, but it doesn't mean the theoretical SPoF is not there.
Also when was the last time you had an internal PSU on a Mac fail ? Its been a very long time since I've ever seen one, and that's even thinking back to the old days with the old-school canister capacitors. Say what you like about Apple, but on the whole they do a decent job on their BOM selection.
Also you can pull one out and work on it with the integrated keyboard, trackpad, and screen if it has problems.
Obviously it’s super inefficient to need to do this, but there are some upsides.
It's kinda hard to argue with their results, though. They handed the enterprise market to Microsoft 40 years ago, and have shown few-if-any signs of changing their mind.
Amazon solves this by disabling FileVault and warns against enabling it.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-mac-...
Amazon also has much tighter integration and offers the Macs bare-metal. This has the downside that you can only gets Macs as dedicated hosts, so it's another layer to manage, and that it takes around an hour to wipe the Mac whenever you shut it down, even if you're not going to release the underlying dedicated host. Also for the last year, even grabbing a Mac dedicated hosts often runs into "None available" for hours at a time. Amazon tells you "try this other zone" but even that is no guarantee. I wasn't even able to get our TAMs to tell me whether trying other regions was likely to help. Besides that, it takes 5-10 minutes to launch a Mac, and once you acquire one, there's a 24 hour minimum billing period due to Apple licensing restrictions. Which is all to say, as a single customer, you can't really build an elastically scaled Mac CI/CD farm on top of AWS. You really need to size for your peak load. Which is expensive compared to just buying your own Macs, but $former_employer didn't want to be in the datacenter business.
FWIW, I believe MacStadium was the first to offer Macs in datacenters as a service:
https://9to5mac.com/2020/12/27/macstadium-mac-mini/
I could see them flooding the used Macbook market and selling like hot cakes, but also giving them back "rack" space.
1. Beefy M6 Mini as the server. UTM managed MacOS VMs with screen sharing enabled. 1 VM per project. Set the Mini and VMs to never go to sleep. 2. Secondary Macbook Air -- I screenshare into the VM for the project I want to work on and do work from there. I can close the laptop at any time and not worry about agents stopping. 3. With Tailscale on all machines I can work from anywhere.
Especially since they're not like a regular server, loud and power hungry. They're the definition of quiet and power sipping. I have one do all my background coding work when I want to keep my laptop clear (being headless helps with me moving around too).
Yesterday I saw AI in a pendrive, which got me wondering if small set-top boxes isolated from the web, connected to TVs or your local WiFi will be the norm of tomorrow
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50360432
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50360445
With up to three tiers of cores (Super/Performance/Efficiency), how do you handle getting them split evenly to customers?
Could you please share how you setup the host Mac? Which pmset settings, defaults, tips and tricks for it?
We have all the hosts enrolled into MDM, so we have all sorts of access ready: SSH, KVM, VNC, MDM. With Macs in the DC we found having all these ways to access the machines is really essential. Things break in unexpected ways.
In terms of settings, besides the obvous (do not sleep, do not auto-update, etc), disabling USB restricted mode helps a lot (Privacy&Security > Allow accessories to connect) - no need to approve connected devices via UI.
What are you building if it's not a secret?
I'm building a EU Mac mini hosting service. Very early stage, I have just bootstrapped the company.
Think 80% of Dockerfile syntax supported for running "docker build" against macOS guests. I do have some pieces already done here and there and basically it all comes down to actually creating a product out of a pile of various working scripts (OSS obviously). That's the hardest part.
And then comes the final boss of the game: marketing. Not sure anyone needs this at all.
But honestly before we had that, we started with a system where nodes pulled whole images from each other (a decentralized algorithm without central coordination, but no chunking). It worked surprisingly well considering how simple the implementation was.
Also it doesn't have iOS Simulator, so automated testing is out of question. I doubt that porting the Simulator would be feasible, since it requires macOS kernel.
Well, maybe with XNU in a VM and reimplementing parts of macOS userland. Would love to see someone try.
Fixing, thank you!
If I run just a UI test suite for an hour, that's $3.60/run, which is now higher than what I'm paying for AI inference that made the change that triggered the run. That's crazy! If I ran even just one run per night that would run me more than $100/month. A Mac Mini is $900 - I break even in nine months by buying the hardware outright. If I run multiple UI test suites per day, I break even much faster. These ARM chips are so power-light that the cost of electricity is practically irrelevant, and after all, these aren't rack-mounted monstrosities with 90 dB fans - they're meant to cool themselves sitting on your desk. Maybe it's different if you need like 60 of them?
Is anyone even running the numbers before they sign up? Or are companies really running that many Minis and are paying the premium to outsource the DCOps?
When you take resale value into account, purchase makes even more sense than renting.
Used M1 Mac Minis from 2020 are currently selling for about $500 when they originally retailed for $699.
The clue to their decision may be right there, potentially going for an increase in sales.
But nowadays it seems they suffer from a lack of vision and drive; perhaps (hopefully) they’ll come around.
I'm not sure this is true anymore.
[0] https://xtool.sh
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44011515
I'm hoping AI will change that soon.
https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM
> But still, why laptops? Isn’t it a major waste of screen pixels and keyboard buttons and battery ions? Well yes, Mac Mini would be a better choice for a datacenter. Sure, it has very rudimentary remote management, no redundant power, and a beautiful case that ensures that cooling will be difficult regardless of which side you lay it on. But these are all known challenges that we have learned to manage.
> But have you actually tried to order a couple hundred Minis? We have. Ordered in January, delivered in July. Welcome to the world of 2026 when the supply chains are in disarray. Never mind that Apple doesn’t release updated CPU models to all devices at once. So Mac Mini didn’t get M5 cores for 10 months (and then suddenly got M6 before any other device model!). We promise the best and the newest to our customers so we had to be inventive. That’s how the MacBook-in-Datacenter project was born.
Yes.
Why else would you buy such an expensive machine with such a crappy operating system?
Not so much these days.[0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50031653
I hope you guys are the only ones employing this strategy otherwise you're just contributing to the same problem mac minis have.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/1uboij0/arm_is_...
Uptime.lab (see Insta) deshells M2sand runs them bare a bit like GitHub does
For real. Also disconnects if you wave a palm hair in its general direction. So much worse than screw-in DVI, mechanical design wise.
Though to be fair, they more-or-less ignored enterprise even when we weren't in a fab-constrained environment.
TL:DR; They couldn't buy enough minis or studios.
People are outraged landlords doing that with housing.
Yet someone such rent seeking behaviour is acceptable?
Get fucked.