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Comment by vegabook | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Apple doesn't offer a headless MacOS or at least a path to a minimal install. Those mac minis make a great little server box but losing 8GB to hundreds of processes, before you've done anything, just feels wasteful and inelegant.

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There are no sales in it.

Apple leadership makes decisions based on money.

That is also why there is no iPhone mini even though there is a small number of people that really prefer a small phone.

Worse, there's sales in NOT doing it. When I buy a Mac, I get extra memory "just in case." I would've been fine with 24 gigs on my MacBook Pro, but I got 48.

mr money bags over here

Oh yeah. I should've gone for a M4 Max w/128 gigs.

They did provide OS X Server at one time, but the market just wasn't there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server

Not very useful context considering that was before iOS development took off

> that was before iOS development took off

It was offered through the 2010s, iOS development had taken off by then, and the last release was in 2021.

In fact the number of unique apps available on IOS has declined since the 2010s

I am not sure iOS popularity would justify macOS as a server. What would be the use case? It's not app development; that is done just fine on the standard desktop macOS. It's not backend; that is done just fine on Linux servers, even in Swift if that's your thing.

Builds

You don't need any feature from the old server OS for this, though. You just need your workstation to be on a network.

A network connected to what

My workstation is ill-suited to be a CI runner, even if it is networked

Right. A way to rephrase this would be: what feature from the old Mac Os X Server is missing from the current macOS desktop to make it possible?

Which Apple gladly sells their own Xcode Cloud infrastructure instead.

Yes. Somehow it’s actually even worse

Mac OS X Server was..

.. macOS but with a utility to install apache/ldap/smtp/carddav and caldav.

very useful for a home server.

absolutely no benefit over Linux for the majority of the workloads it was designed to simplify.

It wouldn't really give you much unfortunately, certainly didn't run noticeably leaner.

(I think at some point "server" just became an .app that was available via the app store).

Right, but I could see an alternate timeline where OS X Server took off, and within a decade took a path similar to Windows Server (pared down services, headless flavor, etc)

> very useful for a home server.

That sounds like a giant customer base, if paired with the right software for personal / small organization web publishing, blogging, and e-mail.

It's a shame that things turned out differently.

It wasn't an absence of a market. Those of us that had to manage OSX Server soon found out the software was marked by several high-profile bugs, technical debt, and a perceived decline in reliability. I migrated a large number of Macs to Ubuntu Server software. The hardware was great.

I fear the quality of macOS is deteriorating today in the same manner than befell OSX Server.

https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/apple-blasts-mac-os-x...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

https://www.letemsvetemapplem.eu/en/2024/10/19/chyby-v-macos...

Those Mac minis are a pain in the ass of a server box that auto-enable FileVault after annual releases, and getting LaunchDaemons just right compared to a Linux OS feels like perpetual iterations. trying to figure out why my apache didn't start after the last reboot. Oh, must have been the Mac log rotator messing with the file permissions again

It's a shame, because I love how efficiently MacOS runs and the form factor/design language of a Mac mini is not something I feel the need to hide in a dark corner

You'll have to leave virtual desktop enabled, and will definitely be using it semi-regularly aside SSH

I use LingonX to setup which apps and scripts run when. Never had a problem.

> Those mac minis make a great little server box but losing 8GB to hundreds of processes

It doesn't matter because all the extra stuff just goes to swap. And you can't disable virtual memory anyways. So in the end you're not really losing anything. Those hundreds of processes are ultimately basically mostly just using up a little bit of your SSD, not your RAM, so it's not a concern.

They’re not in swap if those processes wake up to do things

Yeah but they mostly barely do, and only the memory they actually access gets used, as opposed to everything they've allocated. You can observe the actual aggregate usage in Activity Monitor. This is why it's no problem at all to run something actively using 10-12 GB of memory on a 16 GB Mac.

They make that, but they don't offer it to anyone to my knowledge. https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/apples-houston...

I thought a minimal darwin distro exists, giving you headless macos?

What sort of applications would benefit from MacOS instead of Linux as a headless server OS?

What would you use it for? To run Docker containers that rely on a Linux VM anyway?

Can speak for someone who managed a racked [1] Mac Mini racked as a server in 2015~2018:

* Profile Manager / MDM * Caching server for OS updates * Thunderbolt connection to a PCIe RAID HBA for a JBOD for NAS file sharing

All these things/use cases now are depreciated, MDM via JAMF in the cloud, internet is fast enough that caching OS updates isn't necessary, and NAS's are much better suited.

[1] https://www.sonnettech.com/product/legacyproducts/xmacminise...

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