I had actually bought a bunch of M1 Minis that I set up as a video encoding farm. The organization I set it up for moved on, so now I'm sitting with 8 M1 minis. 1 of them is my daily driver, but the other 7 are just sitting there.
I contemplated setting up a rental service for them (something like $40-50/mo?) since I have symmetric 2 gbps fiber to my office, but I just haven't prioritized.
Are people actually interested enough for this to really be worth it?
One can get a Mac Mini directly from Apple at $58.25/mo for 12 months. Granted, that does not include power and bandwidth but it is also yours after just 12 months. I think a more reasonable price point for lease would be around $25/month. Or $50/mo but user owns it after two years, continuing to pay for power/bandwidth.
Having said that, how would the user access this? Would you have some kind of VMs or how did you imagine it?
I think the benefit of paying $50/mo is that you only need it for a month or 2, or only sporadically, you can just buy in occasionally.
If re-imaging them wasn't such a pain in the ass, I'd offer daily at something silly like $3/day. That way they only need to rent it when they need it, and the 8 minis would stretch farther, but I'd have to automate the re-image somehow, so more work.
User would access it via VNC to a subdomain that is pointed to a VLAN inside my office. They would be full metal to the M1, not VMs.
I rent mac minis because I need them to compile iOS apps.
By renting them from a datacenter I get better uptime & internet speed & reliability than if I just set it up at home.
That's why I pay a premium for it.
It requires a bunch of software development to get such a service running. In a Cloud way. Also you need to enroll them in an organization, so the user can not become rough and bind them to their private Apple ID and bricking it.
You could donate them to open source projects for improving their software (either physical or as a service).
If the users manage to get the hardware banned from Apple dev tools, then it's as good as bricked in my opinion as it can't function in its' intended fashion and a factory reset doesn't help.
I have a macOS VM under VMWare running on Windows. It wasn't that difficult, found some guides online by googling obvious search words. The only thing I haven't gotten to work yet is the App Store, but I saw a guide for that, just haven't done it yet. You won't get graphics acceleration btw, but CPU performance is fine.
I believe the trickiest bit was running a macOS serial generation app and copying that value into the VM settings.
(I've purchased plenty of Macs over the years so pls Apple, this is just for dev purposes!)
By then, Windows 11+ will have moved onto ARM and whatever cross binary solution Microsoft is working on should be complete.
Also, with emulation/virtualization, it's still perfectly feasible
I don't want to destroy your hope but take a look at ARM support in linux. (TL;DR the ARM space is very fragmented so taking a running system from one machine with ARM to another is not possible).
It's a shame that web developers have to spend $500 to buy a bespoke web-browsing machine just to make their sites work better with Apple hardware. If Apple wanted people to treat their browser seriously, they should have simulators and developer tooling to spare.
Safari (not WebKit specifically; the rest of the browser) relies on OS libraries. Those libraries would have to be reimplemented for other OSes.
I don't mean that that would be an impediment to porting; Apple have done this before—Safari 5 was available for Windows. (And interestingly, vice-versa, IE5 was available for macOS!)
What I mean is that the differences in implementation of these OS libraries would mean that this version of Safari wouldn't be bug-for-bug compatible with macOS Safari; and therefore, testing on this version of Safari wouldn't necessarily get you what you want, if your goal is finding and squashing 100% of the bugs that testing on macOS Safari would allow you to find and squash.
To use a pretty close analogy, it would be like a development workflow for Windows executable that involved running them under Wine in Linux, and never actually under Windows. You've QAed for the API surface, sure; but you haven't actually QAed the software for how Microsoft's own library implementations work (and the bugs that those implementations introduce.)
You're not wrong, but in practice I'd imagine >99% of bugs are in the rendering / webkit layer, not in the OS integration layer.
Sure, if you're making a plugin that plays with bookmarks or 'Read Later', you'd likely run afoul of the issues you mention. But most web devs are concerned just about browser compatibility of rendering their web-app. In this context, as long as web page rendering and JS engine is identical between OS' it's fine.
I don't know about the early versions, but I believe the final version of IE for Mac, though also numbered 5, used an entirely different browser engine from that on Windows. Tasman
Debugging iOS-Safari issues on a web page requires:
1) Access to a Desktop Mac and a Desktop Safari.
2) An iOS device.
The Safari debugger recognizes a plugged-in iOS device and then allows to debug the iOS safari remotely. That's the only reliable way to find iOS specific JS or CSS issues. Browserstack alone does not help, unfortunately AFAIR.
This could be an interesting way to run mautrix-imesssage.
I wonder if they've got it hooked up to some sort of remote console solution; I've never been able to figure out how to get less-than-wretched performance out of the VNC server baked into the OS.
> This could be an interesting way to run mautrix-imesssage
Wouldn't you be able to have only a single identity? Because unless you can have multiple identities with a single instance, it would be a very expensive way of having iMessage capabilities.
The identifier is part of it, as I remember from my mackintosh days, but it cannot be all: MacOS works well as a multi-user system, including separate iMessage accounts for each user.
Have you run mautrix-imessage? I'm trying to work through the docs to understand if I could use it as a way to proxy my received imessages (and iOS text messages?) onto my windows device as they arrive.
Yes, right now I run it on an old MacBook Pro, that is otherwise sitting idle. It is very reliable. The only issue I have is HEIC attachments not being displayed on the Element desktop client (due to a lack of support in either Electron or Chromium, I forget what piece was ultimately to blame there.)
We've been using Hetzner boxes to run our self-hosted GitHub Actions runners for a couple years now, except for Mac which we have run in MacStadium. This offering is much cheaper than MacStadium though; EUR 49 compare to USD 129.
I ordered one of these M1 Minis from Hetzner last night as soon as I saw the announcement. It was provisioned and ready this afternoon. Initial impression is good, it's a Big Sur M1 Mini. I paid extra (EUR 69/mo) to get two 1TB SSDs as well, since we often run up against the 256GB storage limitation.
Hetzner provide a dedicated IPv4 address and IPv6 /64, SSH access is via a password. Unlike MacStadium, VNC access didn't seem to be enabled initially, but some Googling around yielded the ASD command to turn that on. Our Hetzner firewall config blocks everything but port 22 anyway, so I tunneled VNC port 5900 through SSH and it worked fine.
The open question, which only time will answer, is network connectivity. MacStadium (or at least the Atlanta data center we use) seems to have pretty reliable connectivity, but our Hetzner runners sometimes fail with some transient network glitch while trying to download a random dependency now and then. Fortunately most of the tools we use will auto-retry, so even if we do have sporadic network connectivity glitches for the price it's well worth it.
The customer forum requires a login to access, and unfortunately is often in German.
The linked post says this:
"Danke für das Interesse an dem neuen Produkt!
Die Fragen zum Betriebssystem sollten sich durch die Veröffentlichung der Produktmatrix beantwortet haben. Es wird das aktuelle macOS Big Sur installiert.
Bei der Einrichtung und Zugangsmöglichkeiten haben wir uns nur für SSH entschieden. Nicht jeder Kunde möchte mit einem aktiven VNC-Zugang starten. Wie auch der eine oder andere beschrieben hat, ist die Einrichtung/Aktivierung nicht schwer. Gerne könnt ihr dazu auch einen Community-Artikel schreiben und weiteren Kunden helfen.
Welche Alternativen zu VNC würdet ihr Vorschlagen oder hättet ihr gerne, die wir uns mal anschauen sollten?"
I don't understand German, but I ordered one and received SSH login instructions, and was able to get VNC enabled and connected by tunneling port 5900 through the SSH connection.
It's not just a login. You need to actually be a customer. I consider that a good thing, because it allows me (and Hetzner) to speak more freely compared to a fully public forum. That's also why I just linked to the forum instead of quoting.
> and unfortunately is often in German.
That's true. The majority of the active user|customer base is German (I am myself) and thus communicating in German is the obvious choice. I've seen a few English-speaking folks participating by using a translator of choice to read the threads and then simply responding in English. I think it works well enough, as virtually every German understands English. Especially a German running servers.
I mean if you're developing/testing for AIX you're gonna have to buy/find a vendor that licenses POWER8. I feel like we've forgotten that running software on commodity hardware is the exception rather than the rule for the bulk of CS history.
My experience is only with AWS, GCP, Azure and Red Hat. This pricing for m1 mini seems quite great to me at ~80$ compared to an aws t3a.xlarge
Can this kind of instance be used as a server for deploying web apps? I have never tried hetzner. I couldn't find any information about data transfer costs. As someone with predictable traffic and no need for infinite scalability would you recommend such a setup?
FWIW, I've tried the Scaleway (Paris), MacStadium (Atlanta), and as of today also the Hetzner (Falkenstein, Germany) M1 offerings.
The Scaleway service had such awful latency on the VNC connection that I found it almost completely unusable. MacStadium and Hetzner are both better. That's particularly odd because I'm based in Kyiv, Ukraine, so I would have expected better latency to Paris than to Atlanta. It might have been a problem on my ISP's end, I didn't spend any time looking into it.
Besides that, the Hetzner offer is by far the cheapest, as is usually the case with Hetzner. If you don't mind having to do all configuration yourself, and you don't require a flashy whiz-bang UI for managing your provisioned resources, Hetzner is a great value.
They are truly great for thrifty do-it-yourself hosting. Don't expect customer support or discounts or anything, but their prices are impossible to beat, and everything works as advertised. The big gotcha is that their only points of presence are in Germany and Finland.
My only gripe would be that running your business on Hetzner can be a little bit scary at times since they have so much unattended automation in place to block abuse. For example, if your server is erroneously sending traffic with private IP addresses out of its public interface, they will block the server without warning. I don't have any other providers to compare this against, so that might just be how it is.
> For example, if your server is erroneously sending traffic with private IP addresses out of its public interface, they will block the server without warning.
I had a CS class last semester where the students used some Hetzner cloud servers. I always got an email or two before having the servers IPs blocked. And it were mostly students' faults by choosing easy passwords..
I recommend Hetzner! No affiliation, just a happy user..
To be fair, you can also book a managed server with them.
For their hosted hardware offering, HDD/SSD swaps (or even "we replace everything about your server because it produces random faults except your HDDS") are within reasonable timeframes (i.e. usually within an hour).
They, however, will not diagnose this for you - that part is on you.
I've been a customer for years and have nothing negative to say. They are providing exactly the products they are advertising. Even those specs that don't necessarily have hard numbers attached with all products (disk speed, CPU performance) have always been good.
That said, there are some products certain customers expect that they will not sell you (and don't advertise). For example, you won't be able to click a button to deploy Software Y pre-configured by the provider as you might with Digital Ocean. What you'll get is mostly along the lines of "server with the OS of your choice and your SSH key installed on it". If that's what you're looking for, Hetzner is difficult to beat on price to performance.
I moved personal projects to Hetzner from Linode several years ago, due to significantly better pricing for the RAM I needed, and I haven't had any problems. I am using a few of their "cloud" shared servers (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud) and backups, can't speak to other services. I'm not doing anything CPU or IO intensive, though.
I've been their customer for over 2 years, no problems at all and I'm very happy with their prices and offering. Started with dedicated server and now I'm also using their cloud services for some of my EU-based clients. Can definitely recommend, I much prefer Hetzner vs no-name VPS providers when I need cheap VMs.
I used to run several root-servers and once they started their cloud-offering moved everything over there.
Support was always great (although rarely needed), performance is fantastic, prices hard to beat.
I love the simplicity of their cloud offering which fits my use-cases perfectly and doesn't put the burden of overly complex products, APIs and tools on me as a user.
Is Hetzner still sending paper contract over snail mail to use their services? Then requiring the signed paper contract be sent back by post? I haven't cared enough about their offer to check by myself again.
When did they require this? I haven't used Hetzner in about 8 years, but back then, I did not need to do this, I just signed up online with a credit card.
in the US I was required to file ID by paper to start an account-- much later the project migrated, my manager apparently stopped paying the bill and it was in my personal name
1. I did not notice the M1 was being offered on rent. I assumed it was for sale at the listed price.
2. Since 58.31 € is an unrealistic price for an M1 machine (and since this is a European site) I concluded the site must be using a comma instead of a dot. 5831 € is a realistic price for a Mac afterall.
Unfortunately the site is using a dot for a dot despite being European and the M1 is being offered on rent.
I don’t know where you live, but €5000 is not a realistic price for a mac mini in any place I’ve heard of.
Dots are only used in groups of 3 (unless India, as far as I’m aware).
Anyway, not saying you weren’t confused. But I think it’s fairly easy to figure out that there’s no way the dot in this situation is meant as a thousands seperator.
Not really... the Mac Pro is famous for its high price, but this explicitly says mac mini which is almost exactly an order of magnitude less than 5831 € .
Let's not be a jerk to people who are trying to learn. We all started out unaware of things we now consider essential knowledge. For (my) example, timezones offsets can and do include partial hour offsets (+0415 is/was real), and dates should generally be YYYY-MM-DD (when not displayed to end users) for your sanity (and because iso8601).
OP, you can look up the numeric formats for Germany in your system preferences or Excel or similar — it can help to see them templated out sometimes.
The user has been "programmer_dude" for 6 years just on HN, there's no chance that they didn't learn about the dot.
I'm confused as to how they can be confused.
Even in my comma-as-separator country, our calculators have a dot. The only thing that could be confusing is encountering numbers with 3 decimals: 123,456 vs 123.456
In much of Europe commas are thousand separators, dots are decimal point separators. So what you're seeing is fifty eight euros and thirty one euro-cents.
You might be surprised to find that that is not the case in Europe. In fact, apart from China and English-influenced countries, very few countries around the world use dots for decimal points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Countries_us...
But English and Chinese influenced countries comprise a significant portion of the world. The top 3 most populous countries use dots for decimals (China, India, United States) according to your link.
I contemplated setting up a rental service for them (something like $40-50/mo?) since I have symmetric 2 gbps fiber to my office, but I just haven't prioritized.
Are people actually interested enough for this to really be worth it?