Selfhosted

"I specced up an equivalent NUC and there wasn’t a lot of difference in price, and the M2 is really fast."

You must be putting a lot of stock in the CPU and 10G Ethernet. Because the pricing on storage and RAM, which are much more important resources in most self-hosting scenarios, differ an extreme amount since you can't upgrade the RAM in the M-chip Minis. They also cap out at 32 GB which isn't bad but half of what say AM4 can do. Power Efficiency is of course also great on the M-series chips which is worth something.

If we're purely talking Intel NUCs then the i7s and i9s do get expensive but so does the M2 pro. M2 is absolutely faster than i5 and i3 but I can't really imagine a use case where that would matter for self-hosting?

I want to do something like this to replace my huge ass dual xenon and have less noise and electricity consumption.

I’m looking for a refurbished M1 Mac mini with 10Gbe but still out of luck.

Why the M1 and not M2 or 3 ? Price of course but also because Asahi Linux will work perfectly on M1 before the new chips.

Seems slightly unnecessary unless you have loads lying around, I'm still using a 10 year old dual core i3 and it doesn't sweat running 60 services, and I can expand the storage much more than a Mac mini.

I specced up an equivalent NUC and there wasn’t a lot of difference in price, and the M2 is really fast.

How come? Second hand HP Mini should be cheaper...

I did think about this, but finally abandoned the idea for 3 reasons:

1. Not much choice of hardware
2. Unlikely to come across old hardware of that type to repurpose
3. Much harder to move workloads from/to the cloud if necessary.

That being said, if I had a spare Mac mini I would probably have tried 🤓

I happened to have one. It's a decent little machine. They don't seem to die.

However for hosting, I wouldn't use them. Spec wise they kinda suck.

Just to add to the Asahi Linux chorus - I'm self hosting a bunch of things, not on VMs but installed on the actual OS, and it's been incredibly fast and reliable. I do have thorough offsite backups happening because one should, but loving it so far.

I've been thinking more and more about getting a Mac Mini specifically for this as well. They're silent, not too power hungry and more than powerful enough, and I would just love scripting in Swift on there 😆 (but maybe that's just me).

How long have you had it setup like this? And what's your experience been so far?

I have a couple older Minis in my Proxmox cluster. One’s a 2012 model and the other is a 2018. They both run great (and the 2018’s got 64GB of RAM and 10Gb Ethernet). I’m not sure I’d go looking for them for a homeland, but they’re great to repurpose.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.

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Years ago I worked at a call center that had windows XP running on some type of mac mini PC .