[nre]

Interestingly enough I was actually discussing this with a friend (who works in enterprise IT) the other day. Basically rack servers are purpose build for the task, with hot swappable components, redundant power/storage, multiple NICs, ECC, remote management, and so on. They come with enterprise support and can be easily maintained in the field.

Meanwhile a Mini cluster is literally a bunch of mini pcs in a rack, and idk if Apple even supports this kind of industrial use. While it's a quality product the Mini isn't really designed for the datacenter.

[xienze]

> and idk if Apple even supports this kind of industrial use. While it's a quality product the Mini isn't really designed for the datacenter.

I think they know of it and tacitly approve of this use case, as evidenced by the Mac Mini having the same form factor for ages. They’re well aware that a lot of people use Minis (and Studios now) in data centers, and that the Mini footprint is sort of “standardized” at this point.

[selectodude]

That 10GbE NIC option on the low end Mac Mini was a dead giveaway.

[nxobject]

IIRC, Apple did indeed have a server SKU for the Intel Mac mini at some point.