[hvgk]

They are perfectly stable machines for running batch jobs. I have had one running a bunch of build automation as a jenkins slave for about 9 months now. Never skipped a beat. It just works and the thing is damn fast.

If it’s doing it offline it’s probably cheaper to buy one and chuck it in your office than borrow one from a cloud provider. The ass end ones are really really really cheap. Much cheaper than just the CPU in an equivalent server machine. If they blow up, just mill down to the apple store and buy another one.

Disclaimers of course: (1) it doesn’t have ECC RAM (2) it doesn’t have redundant power. We ignore (1) and solve (2) by running a prometheus node exporter on it and seeing if it disappears.