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Re:New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra by frollogaston on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @11:07AM (#49435459)
I thought the question was low-end MacBook + mini vs high-end MacBook. The low-end one has all those nice things. I wouldn't sacrifice that. If it has to be MacBook + super old used mini as home server, so be it.
Re:New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra by jmalicki on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @11:39AM (#49435966)
Except for LLM inference speed, macs suck as a server and are pretty expensive, why wouldn't you get a Linux box?
Re:New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra by frollogaston on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @12:16PM (#49436492)
Because it's not exactly a server, more like a home PC that I also remote into. And not doing anything super processing heavy on it, so any cheap one is fine. Usually SSHing but sometimes VNC which is annoying in Linux. The Mac Studio use case is that except yes heavy processing, but I've never needed that. Tiny power draw is nice too.

I also have a new RPi. It's still too slow as a PC or server, and the random issues with Linux software on ARM aren't worth. Like oh, there's no arm64 bin for this thing so you gotta build it, and the libs are harder to find, and oh turns out the code has a race condition that only gets triggered on arm64...

Re:New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra by JohnBooty on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @01:32PM (#49437601)
Buying a Mac specifically for serving is misguided in nearly all use cases, but as an all-in-one solution they make sense. Personally I feel like the number of boxes I need to manage has an inverse correlation to my happiness.

Macs are totally “fine” for light server duty… as is just about any computer of the last decade+. The CPUs are beasts, the disks are screaming fast.

The operating system itself may not be ideal at serving but you can just run Docker/Orbstack if you need to do something especially Linux-y.

I’d put the question back on you — what are scenarios where an Apple Silicon Mac wouldn’t cut it as a light server for one person or a handful of people? About the only scenario that comes to mind is scenarios where you expect to utilize it so heavily that the fans are running for many hours a day. At some point those are either gonna wear out or just ingest so much dust that the machine runs hotter and needs a deep clean. But even that is largely mitigated by just pointing an external fan at it.

Re:New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra by 8xeh on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @03:22PM (#49439243)
My Mac mini m1 is a fantastic home server.

Years ago I realized running a 100W PC all the time was REALLY expensive, so I switched to an old linux laptop at 30W (about $4/month). That helped, but I moved to the m1 mac specifically for the power efficiency. It does all the things my linux server did, and it does them at 6W (75¢/month).

I've found no competitor with similar performance that can run in such a low power footprint. M4 mini's are way better at power/performance, and I imagine their price is about to come way down since the M6 mini just got announced.

Software-wise, it's different, but mostly equivalent. Homebrew or macports has a similar software inventory to debian. And Apple's container framework is a welcome improvement over colima for running most container workloads.

Re:New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra by frollogaston on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @03:59PM (#49439775)
That too, it's either Mac mini or Rpi if you care about power, and the Rpi is very limited.
Re:New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra by praseodym on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @04:22PM (#49440075)
My home server is an ASUS NUC 14 Essential which idles at 5W with a bunch of services running. Its peak performance is probably less than the Mac Mini, but the hardware is cheap (at least it was before RAM/storage got expensive) and it’s a great platform to run Linux on.
Re:New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra by frollogaston on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @04:33PM (#49440219)
NUC is good too. Having x86 is surprisingly important in Linux.
Re:New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra by entrope on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @05:39PM (#49441050)
It takes almost 8 years for $3.25/mo of electricity savings to break even with a $300 difference in up front cost. Assuming the time value of money is zero, that is.
Re:New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra by frollogaston on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @07:07PM (#49441919)
Yeah, the reality is you never break even. It's only a thing if the two options are similar pricing.