Yes, and it's wise not to apply general advice to niche situations: like using a Mac mini for a web host.
With this attitude, we'd all still be running 2U Dell PowerEdge and poor Raspberry Pi would have gone out of business.
It's 2025, almost 2026. A web server from a few years ago has less power than consumer mac Mini today while using much more energy.
Throw out the advice that is from the era of physical install media and let's focus on specific (instead of general, unhelpful) advice as we move into the modern era where cheap computers are just fine.
Unless you're sending the Mac mini to space as part of this project, the internal hardware ECC built in to Apple silicon SoC combined with the extremely short unified memory paths removes this as a valid concern
Any software RAID on macOS is a risk I wouldn't be willing to take, but that is another matter entirely and has nothing to do with ECC.
One reason Google was a big hit was because (while all the competition was doubling down on big iron), they ran their search on commodity hardware, and compensated in software/networking.
I don't think Macs would be a great platform for running a k8s cluster, but the power efficiency alone makes them a curious alternative to explore.
It was *not* common in mid-90s. x86 was commodity hardware - home PCs, early NT workstations. PHP was still written in Perl. Linux was a few years old - industry veterans (e.g. Greenspun) were throwing rocks at it.
Yes, the x86 platform was documented - through reverse-engineering efforts. Compaq was the first to produce PC clones, to IBM's great disdain.
Don't get me wrong - you're probably better off running Ampere. Just don't dismiss commodity hardware.
The setup was common in universities, back then. That's probably also how they got to use it.
This wouldn't work with Apple products because Apple ultimately has control over the hardware. You don't want a server that suddenly shows "Please enter your AppleID" in the middle of something, for example.
> The setup was common in universities, back then. That's probably also how they got to use it.
Sun Microsystems were also big in universities. As were IBM. Lots of people believed the "servers have special hardware" voodoo back then, and parroted that it's bad news to run servers on consumer hardware.
Somehow, decades later, the meme refuses to die. Unlike Sun Microsystems. Or IBM's Unix server business.
And yet, running clusters of Mac Minis is one of the most common datacenter solutions for when you need MacOS (usually for CI systems that run iOS builds or something similar).
