How reliable is your CI machine? I don't have the log entries anymore but in the past I've seen Mac Minis that were set up as Jenkins nodes throttle hard, leading to variable job results. The Minis were running VirtualBox VMs which would arbitrarily report long running test failures. I remember thinking perhaps it was VirtualBox specific behaviour until I search for "mac mini cpu throttle" and found similar results.

For my purposes? Very reliably. But my use cases are very sporadic; I'm just exposing a webhook for my VCS and running when one of a small set of my personal projects are updated.

(It also runs a couple other small things for the house.)

> My CI machine is a Mac mini I bought used for $350 and dropped an SSD and an extra stick of RAM into

All but the vintage 2012 desktop Mac minis have been nuetered in the sense they are not upgradable.

"Neutered" is a weird term. The line is due for a refresh, I think it's got an i7-4578U Haswell in its top-end machine, but that's not "neutered". Yeah, they want you to pay for upgrades themselves and that sucks, but, whatever--my 2012 one has an Ivy Bridge i7 in it and it is still plenty fast for build tasks in my (fairly price-conscious) environment.

If I needed a beefier machine, I would be making much more money and justifying its purchase.

OK, so buy one used. It's just not a big deal for a home developer.

I'm guessing they mean the lack of memory slots in the current model.