We used to have racks of these things for automated testing …. And eventually they stop responding, so someone needs to power cycle them. In the computer room. In a rack
I seriously don’t understand why Apple won’t make server macs, with proper server features like IPMI, rack mounting support, virtualization. As a software developer, macs are horrible to work with.
Beyond the nightmare that is code signing and certificates (required even for debug builds), the physical devices are special snowflakes. Getting them to play nicely in a CI/CD system is really difficult. They often freeze or misbehave requiring physical access to fix. Also, if you want to target older OS X or iOS versions, you need to use an older version of XCode (that Apple makes really difficult to find) and an older version of MacOS.
There are many other use cases beyond software development, such as render farms, network storage, backup etc.
I bought my iMac in March 2020… since then it’s been powered down maybe half a dozen times (a couple of those were power cuts) and rebooted (outside of macOS updates) maybe ten times.
It just sits there reliably doing its thing and sucks little juice in power saving so 🤷🏻♂️
