Ask HN: Would you rent M3 Ultra from me? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you rent M3 Ultra from me?

Hey,

I recently got myself into an accident and 2 things came out of it. One is a broken MacBook Pro M4 Pro, that I am heartbroken about as it's my favourite machine and I cannot spend so much on replacing the display. 2nd, much better thing is that I got ahold of M3 Ultra 256GB Studio. As both of those events were pretty expensive,that got me thinking, would it actually be feasible to rent those out to the community for way lower than cloud providers do? Obviously I don't have the SLA of six zeroes, but my 1Gbit/s EU link is stable, electricity is not terribly priced, that would help me offload the cost of those a bit.

Would any of you be interested in that, and if so, what would you be willing to pay for bare metal M4 Pro or M3 Ultra for a week or a month?

I guess that I would rent it out based on trust here, not to random person, and would share all network access via Tailscale.

Thanks!!

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I would recommend against this. Check your local and EU laws -- Anything coming out of your IP address may end up being your responsibility if it turns out to be illegal.

Another thing to consider is that most people would likely rent it for the unified memory and AI usage. Speaking from experience, your M3 Ultra will run _hot_ while performing; you'll need to plan a good, cool environment that the machine lives in, and set the fans to always run via something like MacsFanControl or some other utility, since it won't engage the fan at a higher rate just because your GPU is pegged and generating all the heat.

The third thing is knowing how to balance out its memory usage. SSDs have a finite lifetime in terms of writes. Macs are _very_ good at not wearing out SSDs, but if your renter botches something in a config and you spend days or weeks swapping in and out of virtual memory, your machine will wear faster and harder.

Hey, thanks for the reply, I completely agree on all of the precautions, but again, I wouldn't really want to make a business out of it, just allow for some of the costs to be softened or as a proof of concept. If I would take not a random John Doe, but someone with an established name in the industry or even here, then I would have something to hold on to. I already have a modified piKvm so I would just add a custom fan or two and should be pretty sure about the temps as well.

Nevertheless I agree on everything you pointed out :)

I would take not a random John Doe, but someone with an established name in the industry or even here

The difficulty will be instilling confidence regarding reliability, security, etc. among such professionals.

About the legal aspect, are you sure? Amazon and basically ANY VPS in the world is lending you their machine (or part of it), and you're still 100% responsible with what you do with it.

You could rent it for $200-500 a day or $3000 a month and be on par with others in this space.

When you rent a machine like this, they probably will use it to the max. Lowing lifespan should be part of the equation.

I (think) that Vast [1] did something vaguely similar a few years back where regular people could rent out their nVidia GPUs. Might be worth looking into if that's an option.

[1] - https://vast.ai

They did! In my limited test it worked quite well, but I only needed it for a few hours. They have never supported Mac's tho, I think it would be interesting.

Nope.

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