I have no experience with this, but for what it's worth, looks like there's a rack mounting enclosure available which mechanically extends the power switch: https://www.sonnetstore.com/products/rackmac-studio

I have something similar from MyElectronics, and it works, but it's a bit expensive, and still imprecise. At least the power button isn't in the back corner underneath!

For #2, OWC puts a screw hole above their dock's thunderbolt ports so that you can attach a stabilizer around the cord

https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderbolt-dock

It's a poor imitation of old ports that had screws on the cables, but should help reduce inadvertent port stress.

The screw only works with limited devices (ie not the Mac Studio end of the cord) but it can also be adhesive mounted.

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/CLINGON1PK/

That screw hole is just the regular locking USB-C variant, is it not?

See for example:

https://www.startech.com/en-jp/cables/usb31cctlkv50cm

Looks like it! Thanks for pointing this out, I had no idea it was a standard.

Apparently since 2016 https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/documents/usb_type-c...

So for any permanent Thunderbolt GPU setups, they should really be using this type of cable

Note that the locking connector OWC uses is a standard, not the standard. This is USB we're dealing with, so they made it messy: the spec defines two different mutually-incompatible locking mechanisms.

Of course they do.

Now that’s one way to enforce not inserting a USB upside-down.

It’s been terrible for years/forever. Even Xserves didn’t really meet the needs of a professional data centre. And it’s got worse as a server OS because it’s not a core focus. Don’t understand why anyone tries to bother - apart from this MLX use case or as a ProRes render farm.

iOS build runner. Good luck developing cross-platform apps without a Mac!

Practically, just run the macos-inside-kvm-inside-docker command. Not very fast, but you can compile the entire thing outside of the VM, all you need is the final incantations to get Apple's signatures on there.

Legally, you probably need a Mac. Or rent access to one, that's probably cheaper.

There are open source MDM projects, I'm not familiar but https://github.com/micromdm/nanohub might do the job for OS upgrades.

"... Thunderbolt is great for peripherals, but as a semi-permanent interconnect, I have worries over the port's physical stability ..."

Thunderbolt as a server interconnect displeases me aesthetically but my conclusion is the opposite of yours:

If the systems are locked into place as servers in a rack the movements and stresses on the cable are much lower than when it is used as a peripheral interconnect for a desktop or laptop, yes ?

This is a semi-solved problem e.g. https://www.sonnetstore.com/products/thunderlok-a

Apple’s chassis do not support it. But conceptually that’s not a Thunderbolt problem, it’s an Apple problem. You could probably drill into the Mac Studio chassis to create mount points.

You could also epoxy it.

> To that last point, I've been trying to figure out a way to, for example, upgrade to macOS 26.2 from 26.1 remotely,

I think you can do this if you install a MDM profile on the Macs and use some kind of management software like Jamf.

They do still sell the Mac Pro in a rack mount configuration. But, it was never updated for M3 Ultra, and feels not long for this world.

With MDM solutions you can not only get software update management, but even full LOM for models that support this. There are free and open source MDM out there.

VNC over SSH tunneling always worked well for me before I had Apple Remote Desktop available, though I don't recall if I ever initiated a connection attempt from anything other than macOS...

erase-install can be run non-interactively when the correct arguments are used. I've only ever used it with an MDM in play so YMMV:

https://github.com/grahampugh/erase-install