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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Apple sells a rackmount server.[1] It's a repackaged Mac Pro. Unclear who, if anyone, buys these.

If MacOS Server is being discontinued, are those being orphaned? Or can you run the regular OS headless?

[1] https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro

macOS server was a GUI app that you install from the App Store on regular macOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/macos-server/id883878097?mt=12

10.6 (Snow Leopard) was the last version where they sold a separate more expensive server edition of the OS.

As for server hardware, I have to imagine the 3rd party 1U Mac Mini rack enclosures are already more popular than Apple's official rack mount Pro. https://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmacmini.html

Use case for datacenter Macs is basically just as build servers for Mac and iOS projects, anything else there's not much justification for the hardware cost.

I hadn't looked for these before, but for people who need the extra oomph there are also Mac Studio rack mounts now: https://www.mk1manufacturing.com/Mac-Studio-c28/

I think it's generally used as a rack-mounted workstation not as a server, guys I've worked for in live video productions definitely seem prefer their gear to be rack-mountable for ease of setup and tear-down, I imagine it's not an uncommon request in other related fields.

Although I can feel my toy vs. necessary alarm going off (you can do live stuff on some truly awful hardware, you don't need the latest Mac even if your personality dictates as much), having stuff rack-mounted is a real help when it comes to keeping track of stuff and keeping your "builds" (literally) reproducible

In a less segmented environment (i.e. non-professional), having gear in a rack can also stop people playing with it.

That's not a server. That's just a Mac pro that can be rack mounted.

Well, that comes down to what you think a server is. macOS is definitely unix, and can run server software. You can do that on that rackmount mac. So what makes it not a server?

servers generally will have out of band management, redundant power and networking, some kind of light you can flash to help find it in a rack. stuff like that. oob management is probably the most vital feature of a proper server.

New Mac Pros/Mac minis actually have OOB management features. However depends on having an MDM and another Mac on the same LAN I believe.

Yes, https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep580cf25b... explains how to MDM them for OOB management. (Lights out management).

The fact that Server.app has been gutted and gutted for years now.

Talking about the hardware here. Yep, Server.app is a shell of what it could be. But I mean the rackmount macs — I was asking GP why they didn't consider those servers ;-)

Not GP, but because they aren’t marketed as servers and don’t have features you’d commonly expect in a server. Video and audio production heavily uses rack mount gear and so having a rack mounted version of a Mac Pro makes perfect sense.

Looking at the back, it is missing things like redundant hot-swapable power supplies. The processor is one oriented toward workstations rather than servers. Not certain if the OS can be configured for huge pages in RAM.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/pro...

The rackmount server is really for folks that have their audio / video equipment in a rackmount, not to be a rackmounted server. It would be horrible to use that machine in a server room.

> Unclear who, if anyone, buys these.

Native development shops running in-house build pipelines I imagine. But even that has completely gone to the cloud in the last 5 years.

What do the clouds use?

Mac Minis

That's wild.

Pixar, maybe?

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