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Comment by ThouYS | Hacker News Reader

Having replaced my MacBook with a Mac Mini, I would reconsider. The MacBook is just such a _complete_ package. Great speakers, great keyboard, fantastic screen, the fingerprint sensor thingy.. Takes a lot of gear to match that

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If your computer never leaves your desk, the iMac is pretty competitive with those features. Even comes with a TouchID keyboard.

I’ve had iMacs for almost 20 years. My last one was indeed my last. Without target display mode (use the Mac as a monitor), I’m ditching a perfectly good monitor. I was going to buy a Mac Studio and a good monitor to replace the iMac until the spouse reminded me that we are now retired and will spend time in a camper. So a MBP for me (and BenQ’s Mac-specific monitor), but others might do well to consider a Mac Mini/Studio.

iMacs are great for a lot of use cases, but my image of the typical HN user would prefer to keep the monitor separate.

It's like, you pay laptop prices for laptop performance but without laptop portability or desktop modularity. This only sorta made sense back when Apple had no "prosumer" desktop offering unless you wanted a cheap used Mac Pro (which is what I ended up doing at some point).

I thought the question was low-end MacBook + mini vs high-end MacBook. The low-end one has all those nice things. I wouldn't sacrifice that. If it has to be MacBook + super old used mini as home server, so be it.

Except for LLM inference speed, macs suck as a server and are pretty expensive, why wouldn't you get a Linux box?

Because it's not exactly a server, more like a home PC / dev machine that I also remote into. Usually SSHing but sometimes VNC which is annoying in Linux. And the Mac mini is pretty fast. Yes a Linux box would win in terms of multicore CPU(?) or GPU if you need to run big batch processes, or a high-uptime service. My work is running those on cloud, not in my house.

Buying a Mac specifically for serving is misguided in nearly all use cases, but as an all-in-one solution they make sense. Personally I feel like the number of boxes I need to manage has an inverse correlation to my happiness.

Macs are totally “fine” for light server duty… as is just about any computer of the last decade+. The CPUs are beasts, the disks are screaming fast.

The operating system itself may not be ideal at serving but you can just run Docker/Orbstack if you need to do something especially Linux-y.

I’d put the question back on you — what are scenarios where an Apple Silicon Mac wouldn’t cut it as a light server for one person or a handful of people? About the only scenario that comes to mind is scenarios where you expect to utilize it so heavily that the fans are running for many hours a day. At some point those are either gonna wear out or just ingest so much dust that the machine runs hotter and needs a deep clean. But even that is largely mitigated by just pointing an external fan at it.

My Mac mini m1 is a fantastic home server.

Years ago I realized running a 100W PC all the time was REALLY expensive, so I switched to an old linux laptop at 30W (about $4/month). That helped, but I moved to the m1 mac specifically for the power efficiency. It does all the things my linux server did, and it does them at 6W (75¢/month).

I've found no competitor with similar performance that can run in such a low power footprint. M4 mini's are way better at power/performance, and I imagine their price is about to come way down since the M6 mini just got announced.

Software-wise, it's different, but mostly equivalent. Homebrew or macports has a similar software inventory to debian. And Apple's container framework is a welcome improvement over colima for running most container workloads.

That too, it's either Mac mini or Rpi if you care about power, and the Rpi is very limited.

My home server is an ASUS NUC 14 Essential which idles at 5W with a bunch of services running. Its peak performance is probably less than the Mac Mini, but the hardware is cheap (at least it was before RAM/storage got expensive) and it’s a great platform to run Linux on.

NUC is good too. Having x86 is surprisingly important in Linux.

It takes almost 8 years for $3.25/mo of electricity savings to break even with a $300 difference in up front cost. Assuming the time value of money is zero, that is.

Yeah, the reality is you never break even. It's only a thing if the two options are similar pricing.

Not an option if you're trying to drive 3 decent screens.

Macbook (base) yes, but my MBP (M3 Max) is driving 4 screens for me without issue.

My M1 Pro drives 4 screens no problem. The trick is that you can only attach two through one Thunderbolt port, so you have to attach the 3rd one via the other port instead of your dock. (The 4th screen is the laptop's built in screen)

Keyword is pro. Non-pro chips drive fewer screens unless you use DisplayLink. Which I did at some point, it's a hack but ok for lighter usage.

Yes but if your debate is desktop or laptop, you're probably not looking at anything but a pro.

Uh idk, I have a desktop and laptop that are both base. The laptop is an M4 Air which is overall faster than M1 Pro, especially single-core where it's even faster than M3 Max.

I've been away from Macs (2015 MBP and an M1 Pro) for a while now, but they used to have a limitation of one screen per port. Apparently driver related as according to my faulty memory a Linux install didn't have the same issue.

Are you using Apple displays or did they fix it?

They must have fixed it because I drive my two main monitors from a dock connected to one port and then my 3rd monitor from the other port. Been set up this way for at least two years now.

I've been away for about 3 years now. My thunderbolt dock couldn't drive two monitors from my Macs, and I couldn't daisy chain display ports either. A Linux ThinkPad had no problem though. Glad they've finally fixed (implemented) it.

Note that modern Macbook Pros can drive crazy screens.

A Macbook Pro M4 or M5 drives TWO of these at once, well, for equivalent of quad 4K configured as dual super ultrawides:

https://www.samsung.com/us/monitors/gaming/57-inch-odyssey-n...

Per Apple support page, MBP with M5 Max handles:

Two external displays

Two displays up to a native resolution of 8K (7680 x 4320) at 60Hz, 5K (5120 x 2880) at 120Hz, or 4K (3840 x 2160) at 240Hz over Thunderbolt or HDMI

Three external displays

Two displays up to a native resolution of 6K (6144 x 3456) at 60Hz or 4K (3840 x 2160) at 144Hz; plus one display up to a native resolution of 8K (7680 x 4320) at 60Hz, 5K (5120 x 2880) at 120Hz or 4K (3840 x 2160) at 240Hz over Thunderbolt or HDMI

Four external displays

Four displays up to a native resolution of 6K (6144 x 3456) at 60Hz or 4K (3840 x 2160) at 144Hz over Thunderbolt or HDMI

https://support.apple.com/en-us/101571

PS. Use TB4 or TB5 dock from Cal-Digit (match the TB version of your mac), or this or one of the rebranded versions of the same OEM: https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderbolt-dock, or an Ivanky Fusion dock if you want to go nuts with up to SIX displays, Quad 6K@60Hz and Dual 4K@60Hz:

https://www.amazon.com/Thunderbolt-Monitor-Docking-Station-A...

I do remember the M1 chips being uniquely capable in this aspect compared to later chips but when I say decent displays I meant 3x 120hz 4k screens with HDR on at least one.

Last year when I was browsing the only recentish Apple silicon capable of driving that was the M3 Ultra.

Honestly the screens become more of a liability than an asset to me past 2 (including the laptop screen). I've tried. Even if I'm knee deep in work and have like 4 servers I'm monitoring, my eyes are only going to look at one screen at a time, so it's just extra window management and eye/head/mouse movement to have more screens.

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