Companies maybe. I bought the last of the previous generation to have a small desktop with redundant internal drives. A Mac Pro would have been budget overkill.
At the time is was useful, as the Mac desktop was my daily driver. Unfortunately current macOS versions are really sluggish, so its currently a home "server" running Fedora 31.
The 16GB RAM limit is becoming a bit of a problem, so I will likely replace it with an Intel NUC.
Think so? I didn’t know Apple even made a server package since 2010 or so. I bought a Mini so I could have a low cost, decently specced desktop Mac hooked up to my two large monitors at home. An iMac was too expensive and I’d rather use standalone displays anyway. We also have lots of them in my wife’s office for the same reasons.
I mean, companies literally made rack mounts for Mac Minis, to install 6-8x of them at once in proper server racks. They didn't build this because no one was using it.
Mobile developers build huge mac mini rack farms because they need to virtualize osx on top of Apple hardware for CI/CD/testing/store releases (or they used to back when I last worked in mobile dev). That's the bulk of where I've seen MacOS used to control and provision minis (usually with plenty of ansible/chef/etc as well).
"Technology right wing" (my phrasing) numero uno apple fanboy John Gruber used to post so much about Mac mini colocs. Haven't seen much from him lately about that stuff.
bsg75|5 years ago
At the time is was useful, as the Mac desktop was my daily driver. Unfortunately current macOS versions are really sluggish, so its currently a home "server" running Fedora 31.
The 16GB RAM limit is becoming a bit of a problem, so I will likely replace it with an Intel NUC.
kstrauser|5 years ago
kstrauser|5 years ago
gambiting|5 years ago
swozey|5 years ago
bluedino|5 years ago
ramraj07|5 years ago