Trust me, at our scale ... Apple didn't care at all about us, even if Scaleway is one of the biggest cloud provider in France.

And actually the project was made to be faster on the market than AWS on their M1 offer, not to be industrialized at first.

I get it, you did what you had to do, but you're not the only example.

They have the knowledge and it's existed in the past (Xserve) but they will never do it again because they design and sell furniture now.

Tell me they couldn't design a Mac Mini with holes for rack ears, built in BMC or serial console.... even if it was a specialty product people would pay a premium

I totally agree on your comment by the way, it's not ideal at all, I'm not even working on the project anymore, every update, every feature is always a pain as we had to do reverse engineering.

Everything on this project is "hackie", it is not a solution for the future, the day Apple will change their license or break retro compatibility, the project will have no chance to survive.

So yes, the mac mini is absolutely not designed to be placed in a DC, a special product for that purpose would be better. So it's a risky bet from a technical point of view.

We were a little team, doing the API dev, the infra, the hardware and countless things. The product is improving and it was impossible to even imagine remoing the case as we spent so many time wiring everything, going to DC and setting up everything. Yes the team is actually doing all of this, even going to DC installing the macs in the racks.

But I agree that for a big scale, this is a good solution. (cf: github)

Agree, removing the case is a lot of effort. Github does a lot of fancy things but you might want to consider how much they're charging by the minute as well

Our way is quite efficient & we're able to quickly adapt to new HW gens

Actually the power button is pretty useless, they set it up like this for the airflow as the mac mini fans are on the back.

Also, it's useless during the lifecycle but it simplifies operations a lot during the initial install & any kind of servicing.

We're actually thinking about features which will that power button to good use in a near feature, stay tuned !

Yes, and the actual license is pretty limiting as we have to sell the mac for at least 24h, not less, and no virtualization.

It’s madness that Apple can dictate that you have to sell it for at least 24h, not less. Ideally the manufacturer shouldn’t dictate how the property is being rented.

It's kind of amazing to offer this service at all when the vendor is so blatantly hostile to the idea.

This project was actually kickstart to compete against AWS launching the first apple as service, there were no consider about this.

That's exactly the purpose of the raspberry they setup in this image

>/etc/boot exe. files in /efi shows an empty sector

>/sys/power/s_stats is peripheral in terms of antico grego and a shallow-clientx .async language in thread_entry, arg

Generally the main purpose was CI, blockchain mining and AI training

No, the USB-C is just there to act as a KVM for administrating purpose, as the MDM hasn't enough administration capability

I was part of the team that built this project at Scaleway, ask me anything

My experience with a mac mini in a small R&D team has been a nightmare : the OS sucks so much for anything that is not a single user (at a time) on the machine, coming from the Systemd/Linux world

What was your experience ?

Yes, the experience is pretty bad, we were doing baremetal, so I assume there were only a single user on it. The tooling and its documentation was really bad too, actually we based ourselves on the asahi project and its documentation and some open-source project that did a lot of work on reverse engineering all of the system we used.

From a user based perspective, using the remote desktop feature was a pain and I don't think any of our users were actually using it, the main use was : CI, AI training and bitcoin mining.

I'm part of the current team ! Ask me anything itrash doesn't know ;)

Good to see you :), there a lot of good questions ! I'm not working on the project anymore so you'll be able to reply with better answer. But still had a really good experience with you guys.

Come back anytime ! We're still having loads of fun :)

plop