Namespace Packs Hundreds of MacBooks Into Datacenter Racks to Run macOS at Scale
Mac at Any Scale
Namespace needed Macs for iOS builds, but Mac Minis were backordered for months and Apple caps macOS to two VMs per machine. So the company racks hundreds of MacBook Pros, wiring each with IP KVM, 10G Ethernet, and power, and boots fresh macOS instances in seconds on Apple's Virtualization framework. The piece covers the surprises — flaky HDMI cables, FileVault unlock timeouts, USB NIC bugs — and the engineering behind 4 Gbps guest networking.
But have you actually tried to order a couple hundred Minis? We have. Ordered in January, delivered in July.
- kccqzy
Amazing article. It just goes to show how many problems they are solving just to work around bugs and limitations within Apple itself. I’d wager a guess that if Apple made a new Xserve with the same performance as a Mac mini but twice the price people would still buy them, because figuring out data center operations is expensive.
- borschtplease
Apple still lives in the world where software developed in IDE on a personal computer and shipped as a boxed software on a disquette with a licence key. Xcode cloud is a joke. All their automation is a joke. It’s not surprising even their own software development stuck because of their ecosystem because they use same tools, same cryptic software signing with their plists, p8, chains, certificates, lack of ui testing, horrible cpp, objc legacy. You just drowning in this environment. How I wish we have proper web app apis at last
- vadepaysa
I run a mac mini server at home and it was quite a culture shock getting that thing to do anything like linux. The password retirement at boot is a hard gate and your server will just not do anything until you unlock it. GREAT feature for desktop and laptops, not so much for a server.
- cadamsdotcom
Chock full of technical details, thank you to the authors! Got a few takeaways for using my own mbp remotely.
But if you read between the lines it is fascinating what isn't said - about Apple's customer focus.
These folks have no advocate at Apple; they worked all this out on their own. At this scale with hardware from Framework or Lenovo or Dell, there'd be a 24/7 hotline with a human to reach.
With its market power Apple can ignore these people - let them suffer, as it were.
I wonder if Ternus' Apple will.. think different.
- titzer
What interests me is the miniaturization and thinness of the mainboard. Imagine if the mainboards were produced en masse and mated with a perfectly-fitting (liquid-cooled) heatspreader. That could be a very space-efficient blade server for very high density compute.
- giancarlostoro
> Under certain conditions, an external USB NIC stops working and acts as if it is not powered and shows no link. Trying another cable, another NIC, another switch port, no luck. But a quick visit to Network Preferences, deleting and recreating the “network service” in MacOS Settings brings it back to life
I too have this really annoying issue where my Mac decides a USB-C or Micro-SD peripheral is no longer readable if I am working through multiple SD cards and backing them up, not sure why. Would love to work at Apple for 2 weeks with Claude to fix it and then quit and come back home, tbh would love to just work at all sorts of companies to fix really obnoxious "never to be fixed" bugs, Discord's abysmal roles stack would be on my list as well.
- 00deadbeef
This article is dated November 3rd yet I've read it months ago, it was already in my history.
- willmeyers
Yeah Apple needs to fix this by either making Xcode Cloud better, make more Mac minis (or just dedicated server hardware), or even loosening the two-VM limit. This kind of thing is bad for the average consumer and just plain wasteful.