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Comment by jermaustin1 | Hacker News Reader

I had actually bought a bunch of M1 Minis that I set up as a video encoding farm. The organization I set it up for moved on, so now I'm sitting with 8 M1 minis. 1 of them is my daily driver, but the other 7 are just sitting there.

I contemplated setting up a rental service for them (something like $40-50/mo?) since I have symmetric 2 gbps fiber to my office, but I just haven't prioritized.

Are people actually interested enough for this to really be worth it?

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One can get a Mac Mini directly from Apple at $58.25/mo for 12 months. Granted, that does not include power and bandwidth but it is also yours after just 12 months. I think a more reasonable price point for lease would be around $25/month. Or $50/mo but user owns it after two years, continuing to pay for power/bandwidth.

Having said that, how would the user access this? Would you have some kind of VMs or how did you imagine it?

I think the benefit of paying $50/mo is that you only need it for a month or 2, or only sporadically, you can just buy in occasionally.

If re-imaging them wasn't such a pain in the ass, I'd offer daily at something silly like $3/day. That way they only need to rent it when they need it, and the 8 minis would stretch farther, but I'd have to automate the re-image somehow, so more work.

User would access it via VNC to a subdomain that is pointed to a VLAN inside my office. They would be full metal to the M1, not VMs.

I rent mac minis because I need them to compile iOS apps. By renting them from a datacenter I get better uptime & internet speed & reliability than if I just set it up at home. That's why I pay a premium for it.

What kind of access do you get? Is it more about utilizing GUI (with some KVM), ssh or some sort of agent process (eg Jenkins or similar)

It requires a bunch of software development to get such a service running. In a Cloud way. Also you need to enroll them in an organization, so the user can not become rough and bind them to their private Apple ID and bricking it.

You could donate them to open source projects for improving their software (either physical or as a service).

> bind them to their private Apple ID and bricking it.

Would this actually brick them? Wouldn't a factory reset (how I've always re-imaged Macs) not wipe that out?

If the users manage to get the hardware banned from Apple dev tools, then it's as good as bricked in my opinion as it can't function in its' intended fashion and a factory reset doesn't help.

developer tools are linked to your iCloud. Why would apple ban them at the hardware level?

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