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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but there's a legit gap in the datacenter— not having a sanely, legally rackable OS X machine is a pretty big problem for a lot of organizations. Not everyone wants to do their Jenkins builds or generate homebrew bottles on a Mac Mini under someone's desk.

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Is this really an issue? They sell shelves that let you rack 2 Mac Minis in 1U space. You can also buy a rack mount Mac Pro if you want to spend really big bucks.

Isn’t the newest Mac Pro available in rack form?

Ah, so it is, and the thermal story there is definitely much better than with the Mini, there being a clear intake/exhaust flow. OTOH, there's still likely a gap in terms of management features, and the starting price of $6.5k for a 4U system is definitely going to be a barrier for some. Good to know there's at least something, anyway.

None of those use cases seem relevant for iOS or macOS development.

Surely you'd want CI builds for your app? I suppose you can always go the sassy option and just offload this problem onto Travis or CircleCI, but then they're the ones stuck figuring out how to rack thousands of Mac Minis, dealing with thermals in a machine that isn't set up for hot/cold aisles, a computer that doesn't have a serial port or dedicated management interface, etc.

If you're a big enough org or the app is for internal use, this might not be an option anyway. At that point I imagine most people just give up on it and figure out how to run macOS on a generic VM. But at that point you have to convince your IT department that it's worth it doing a thing that is definitely unsupported and in violation of the TOS.

Or maybe some of these are big enough that they are able to approach Apple and get a special license for N concurrent instances of macOS running on virtualized hardware? Who knows.

No company on the planet is big enough for Apple to make exceptions like that. All of them either use a cloud provider or a custom rack design just for Mac Minis.

Companies like Google or Microsoft aren't big enough? Google's Chrome and Microsoft Office alone I would wager are more than big or popular enough to get special treatment

Adobe is smaller by contrast but I'd speculate has a much deeper relationship with Apple as well

All of them use Mac Minis as far as I know.

Nope, just build straight from XCode.

Well sure, for a single person team. But as soon as you're working with other people, surely you want an independent machine making builds and running tests— this is literally item 3 on the Joel Test.

You would be surprised how some teams actually develop code, even timesharing iMacs among teams.

I wonder what the overlap is between those teams who do not invest in their infrastructure, and those who ship broken products.

If you ever get a chance to meet employees at CircleCI or some other CI provider at a conference after Covid is over, consider asking them about how they rack Mac Minis.

Good for them, I just use XCode.

Ah yes, how could they have been so blind. They should have just put XCode in the server racks.

What servers?

The entire thread is about running OSX in data centers. In data centers you run servers if you didn't notice.

pjmlp's view appears to be that because their customers, who are not experts, don't know enough to ask for continuously tested software, they don't believe it is their professional responsibility to provide that either. This allows them to dismiss any complaints about macOS in datacenters as irrelevant.

On the contrary, testing doesn't come for free, and everyone gets what they care to pay for.

I'm not a consultant, but I believe it would be an ethical failing on my part to hand someone else a piece of code without extensive, automated testing and CI.

You have 80 hours budget to deliver X features, no compromise or no pay, feel free to decide how to deal with testing.

Well, thank you for providing the first compelling argument as to why software practices need to be more formally regulated. Providing CI/CD should be the industry norm and expected default.

macOS is not a server OS and X serve has long stop being an option.

I can't tell if you're being facetious or you just don't care about automated testing and continuous integration for your code.

CI/CD is largely ignored in plenty of consulting gigs.

I care to the extent customers care.

I pity your customers.

Their choice, no need to pity them.

So true. I've done a lot of freelance work over the past 20 years. CI/CD has never come up. You're sometimes lucky if you can even set up a test system / site.

Apple tried selling Xserves for years.

And to this day they're still the most gorgeous servers ever made, especially the xserve raid.

I don't think the answer is for Apple to force people into buying custom server hardware any more than it is to force them into making janky rack setups for Mac Minis.

The answer that most people would like to see would be a stripped down, non-GUI macOS that's installable at no cost in virtualization environments, or maybe with some evaluation scheme like Windows Server has, which effectively makes it free for throwaway environments like build agents.

> The answer that most people would like to see would be a stripped down, non-GUI macOS that's installable at no cost in virtualization environments

That's called "Darwin" and it's theoretically open source, but there doesn't seem to be a useful distribution of it. Whether that's due to lack of community interest or lack of Apple support is the question.

A useful distribution (for building anyway) would require all the headers and binaries from macOS, which wouldn’t be distributable, right? So you’d have to have enough of a free system to be able to get to the point where that stuff could be slurped out of a legit macOS installation. Sounds like an interesting challenge.

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