Honestly, they can charge quite a bit more than the amortized cost. You can't hire 10% more admins if you only have one. And there's substantial training and cognitive cost to manage a more heterogeneous network if your staff only work with Linux or Windows but you have one or two Macs for a particular pipeline, which is a common use case given the price of Apple servers.

Seconding this. The value is especially obvious if you’re not running a single server: these are targeted for things like build & test infrastructure, where these would be one more node in a larger system. Not duplicating that or having to maintain a VPN, etc. is worth a lot more than the pricing differential.

No it's not. Do the math, it is a serious rip off, waaaaay over priced.

Statements like that need a TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) calculation to back them up.

Both sides need to be doing this. So many un-cited "AWS is cheaper overall" estimations, with hand-wavey "but you have to hire more IT staff" as their justification.

Plus, articles which do the TCO calcuations (there was one recently that pointed out a 200% premium for AWS) are still derided because people really prefer to argue with their feelings on this topic.

We get it, you don't want to run your own infrastructure. How much is that distaste worth to your company?

You realize you can install Parallels on a Mac and create multiple Mac VMs, right? So just run the base OS on the hardware and never screw with it and run test/build VMs on it.

Keenly. Now think about what happens as you go from being a one person show doing everything on your laptop to a larger operation. You have servers in the cloud, build in the cloud, and tests in the cloud. You can do everything for every other platform that way, nicely locked down on a secure network protected with firewalls, access controlled with ephemeral IAM credentials, nice CloudFormation/Terraform to manage everything — and someone says we need to have a build runner on one dude’s Mac because we can’t treat Apple platforms like Windows or Linux. Now you need a VPN or other network holes, you’re delayed & paying network egress pulling stuff down over the internet, the owner of that Mac has to be careful about installing system updates to avoid breaking the build, etc.

Unless everyone is working pro bono, the amount of time you spend on ops will pay for a lot of Mac mini hours and takes away time which could be going towards actual product improvements.

Depends very much on how many of those you have. We have one AMD Threadripper box and one Mini for builds and some other various machines for testing, and we've had to screw with one of them maybe once a year.

Modern machines are less finicky than older hardware. Spinning disk is almost dead, and if you avoid it you've eliminated most of your moving parts that fail often. Fans are the only other thing. Solid state hardware can hum away for years and years.

This is for small scale of course. If you try to run a larger scale DC it gets to be a pain since even with rare failures they will now happen often if you have tens or hundreds of machines. I wouldn't try to run a DC these days unless there was a compelling reason or a huge cost saving.

Exactly. Put that Mac Mini in your data center with redundant power, redundant networking and complete failover to another data center. I've been there and done that - it ain't cheap. Your rack enclosure with redundant power sources and Fibre Channel Adapters is going to run you more than the Mac Mini itself. Add in the need for high availability and failover and yeah, you're looking at some real money. When you look at the total cost of putting a Mac Mini in your data center, and not just the cost of a Mac Mini itself, then you'll see this is a good deal.

The fuck are you doing that a Mac Mini needs failover? At that point, dear lord have mercy on that dev team and whatever horrible ideas management have pushed.

Paying a team of iOS developers $150/hr to create apps. The Mac Mini is their CI/CD server - if it goes down then they're toast. A team costing $1,500/hr sits idle because I'm too cheap to pay $25.99/day to keep them productive? That doesn't make any sense.