Anyone else using Mac minis as VM hosts for self hosting? My Friendica server is a Linux VM on a Mac Mini in my living room. The VM is bound to a VLAN tagged network interface so it’s completely firewalled off from the rest of my network. Also got a second Linux VM on the same box for hosting local stuff on my main VLAN (HomeBridge/etc).
I feel like they’re really nice platforms for this, if not the cheapest. Cheaper than one might think though; I specced up an equivalent NUC and there wasn’t a lot of difference in price, and the M2 is really fast.
AM4 can do 128 GB with 4 32 GB sticks.
Other than that I agree with your post. No way you get more for your money as soon as you start going beyond the base configuration which is still 8 GB RAM /256 GB SSD in 2023/24 by the way.
Sure, it’s a compact and very power efficient device and having 10 GbE built-in for a reasonable price uplift (decent PCIe 10 GbE cards aren’t much cheaper) is great. But to be honest an Intel NUC or even desktop parts with low-end motherboards aren’t exactly power suckers when mostly idle.
And then SSD storage and RAM pricing is like a quarter compared to what Apple charges for it, if even that. And you have the choice of going for ECC RAM on supported platforms, which is great for a file server for example.
OS compatibility is a big one as well, you can basically choose between macOS and Asahi Linux and while the latter is probably okay for self-hosting purposes, I prefer more stable and long-supported distros like Debian.
Sure but I meant small form factor stuff, which I haven’t seen any board with more than two slots and thus 64 GB cap.
Fair enough!
