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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

Gonna be a lot of cheap Mac minis for sale on eBay in a few weeks hopefully

As someone who is currently looking to setup local CI for macOS hardware, that'd be neat :)

Unrelated; For CI, what hardware would people recommend? I'm choosing between mac Mini (M4 Pro) and Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) but haven't digged into the CPU difference yet to understand what would be best. Opinions?

How heavy is your CI workload? Even the base Mac Mini is equipped with a pretty beefy CPU, but obviously it has limited RAM/storage (although the latter can be solved with a cheap external SSD enclosure).

It's basically for private/personal usage, almost no concurrent jobs ever, but I don't have the entire day to wait for builds. Doing maybe 10-12 builds per day on average. Storage won't be an issue, it'll be networked from outside of the box, but I'm curious if there is massive difference in performance between M4 Pro and M3 Ultra. FWIW, I'm mostly doing Rust builds at the moment.

I’m doing that (similar scale and same language) with a base model M4 mini. Works great. Anything more is overkill imo.

Thanks! Yeah, guess it's mostly nitpicky choice between M4 Pro and M3 Ultra, and both would work fine ultimately.

I mean, I think the non-Pro base model M4 would be just fine for a CI box. Unless you are compiling something the whole of Chromium all day every day.

Meh, if I'm buying new hardware, (and I'm not that price sensitive,) I'd rather go with the best CPU the model has available when I get it. And no, just a whole bunch of Rust projects, so no compiling of Chromiums, just compilation of other Rust browsers.

Why?

People are buying mac minis to run clawbot. They will quickly realize it was a fun toy and it will be turned off, then sold on a marketplace.

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