It seems to me that the licensing situation—you have to lease a whole machine for a minimum period of 24 hours—will make the Mac Pro a poor choice in most contexts. The Mac Mini at or near its base configuration may remain the most sensible option.

It would be kind of crazy to imagine, if the M-series processor for the Mac Pro is among the best performing CPUs in the world - which it may turn out to be - that these processors would be virtually inaccessible in the server space in any relevant way. It seems like something which should not result from a free market.

I wonder how "usage" is defined here: for instance, if I run a managed service on a fleet of Macs in the cloud, which serves many end customers from each machine, is this allowed under the terms?

>if I run a managed service on a fleet of Macs in the cloud, which serves many end customers from each machine, is this allowed under the terms?

IANAL (and haven't read the full EULA) but probably. The 24 hour restriction seems to apply to leasing. I would assume that running a multi-tenant managed service (or, for that matter, serving web pages) from a Mac would not be seen as leasing.

> It seems to me that the licensing situation—you have to lease a whole machine for a minimum period of 24 hours—will make the Mac Pro a poor choice in most contexts

Not necessarily. A Mac Pro would work well for single-tenant usage where you want to run a series of applications that can each burst to the whole machine but not take long to finish.