Hetzner Apple Mac Mini Offering
hetzner.comI had actually bought a bunch of M1 Minis that I set up as a video encoding farm. The organization I set it up for moved on, so now I'm sitting with 8 M1 minis. 1 of them is my daily driver, but the other 7 are just sitting there.
I contemplated setting up a rental service for them (something like $40-50/mo?) since I have symmetric 2 gbps fiber to my office, but I just haven't prioritized.
Are people actually interested enough for this to really be worth it?
One can get a Mac Mini directly from Apple at $58.25/mo for 12 months. Granted, that does not include power and bandwidth but it is also yours after just 12 months. I think a more reasonable price point for lease would be around $25/month. Or $50/mo but user owns it after two years, continuing to pay for power/bandwidth.
Having said that, how would the user access this? Would you have some kind of VMs or how did you imagine it?
I think the benefit of paying $50/mo is that you only need it for a month or 2, or only sporadically, you can just buy in occasionally.
If re-imaging them wasn't such a pain in the ass, I'd offer daily at something silly like $3/day. That way they only need to rent it when they need it, and the 8 minis would stretch farther, but I'd have to automate the re-image somehow, so more work.
User would access it via VNC to a subdomain that is pointed to a VLAN inside my office. They would be full metal to the M1, not VMs.
I rent mac minis because I need them to compile iOS apps. By renting them from a datacenter I get better uptime & internet speed & reliability than if I just set it up at home. That's why I pay a premium for it.
What kind of access do you get? Is it more about utilizing GUI (with some KVM), ssh or some sort of agent process (eg Jenkins or similar)
It requires a bunch of software development to get such a service running. In a Cloud way. Also you need to enroll them in an organization, so the user can not become rough and bind them to their private Apple ID and bricking it.
You could donate them to open source projects for improving their software (either physical or as a service).
> bind them to their private Apple ID and bricking it.
Would this actually brick them? Wouldn't a factory reset (how I've always re-imaged Macs) not wipe that out?
If the users manage to get the hardware banned from Apple dev tools, then it's as good as bricked in my opinion as it can't function in its' intended fashion and a factory reset doesn't help.
developer tools are linked to your iCloud. Why would apple ban them at the hardware level?
I just want a cheap way to live debug sites in Safari / Safari Mobile without being forced to purchase Apple hardware.
Only reasonable option I've come across so far is buying used hardware. VM under Win10/AMD seems like a PITA.
Remember that running OS X (including in a VM) on anything other than Apple hardware is technically a violation of Apple's terms of service.
If you're just doing it for personal use, this probably isn't a big deal. If you're doing it for your business, make sure you consider the risks.
You can rent from Amazon for $1/hour
It supports remote desktop and everything you would need
You can rent from Amazon for $25.99 a day and then for $1.083 an hour after your one day minumum.
> Billing for EC2 Mac instances is per second with a 24-hour minimum allocation period to comply with the Apple macOS Software License Agreement.
Maybe say you have to pay for at least 1 whole day every time.
Sort of as there is a minimum of 24-hours.
> Billing for EC2 Mac instances is per second with a 24-hour minimum allocation period to comply with the Apple macOS Software License Agreement.
Do those 24 hours need to be continuous?
Yes. It’s in the MacOS ToS.
But... why?
So you get the full Apple MacOSX experience.
Does browserstack not work for you?
I have a macOS VM under VMWare running on Windows. It wasn't that difficult, found some guides online by googling obvious search words. The only thing I haven't gotten to work yet is the App Store, but I saw a guide for that, just haven't done it yet. You won't get graphics acceleration btw, but CPU performance is fine.
I believe the trickiest bit was running a macOS serial generation app and copying that value into the VM settings.
(I've purchased plenty of Macs over the years so pls Apple, this is just for dev purposes!)
Enjoy it while it last, in 3 or 4 years Apple will drop Intel macOS support.
By then, Windows 11+ will have moved onto ARM and whatever cross binary solution Microsoft is working on should be complete. Also, with emulation/virtualization, it's still perfectly feasible
I don't want to destroy your hope but take a look at ARM support in linux. (TL;DR the ARM space is very fragmented so taking a running system from one machine with ARM to another is not possible).
Fortunately, Linux lets you install things by compiling them locally instead of just auto-downloading a binary.
Are you saying that "aarch64" binaries don't run on all ARM chips?
3 or 4 years. sure not, they still sell intel macs on the website.
Quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Win-10,11/macOS/Linux on Linux
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28797129
404 points by nixcraft 11 days ago | 117 comments
Used totally makes sense. I picked up a Mac Mini with a 27" monitor for $500.
It's a shame that web developers have to spend $500 to buy a bespoke web-browsing machine just to make their sites work better with Apple hardware. If Apple wanted people to treat their browser seriously, they should have simulators and developer tooling to spare.
or just release safari cross-platform.
Safari (not WebKit specifically; the rest of the browser) relies on OS libraries. Those libraries would have to be reimplemented for other OSes.
I don't mean that that would be an impediment to porting; Apple have done this before—Safari 5 was available for Windows. (And interestingly, vice-versa, IE5 was available for macOS!)
What I mean is that the differences in implementation of these OS libraries would mean that this version of Safari wouldn't be bug-for-bug compatible with macOS Safari; and therefore, testing on this version of Safari wouldn't necessarily get you what you want, if your goal is finding and squashing 100% of the bugs that testing on macOS Safari would allow you to find and squash.
To use a pretty close analogy, it would be like a development workflow for Windows executable that involved running them under Wine in Linux, and never actually under Windows. You've QAed for the API surface, sure; but you haven't actually QAed the software for how Microsoft's own library implementations work (and the bugs that those implementations introduce.)
You're not wrong, but in practice I'd imagine >99% of bugs are in the rendering / webkit layer, not in the OS integration layer.
Sure, if you're making a plugin that plays with bookmarks or 'Read Later', you'd likely run afoul of the issues you mention. But most web devs are concerned just about browser compatibility of rendering their web-app. In this context, as long as web page rendering and JS engine is identical between OS' it's fine.
This very much depends on the bugs. In the past I've found many bugs in text rendering (especially related to non-English text[1][2]), layering (inconstent opacity), audio and video playback, etc. which were dependent on the combination of browser, operating system, and, in some cases, hardware. The general trend has been for browsers like Chrome and Firefox to take over more responsibility but that's not what Apple has done in Safari so it looks like a lot more work to say they should duplicate OS functionality to make it easier for Windows-only web developers to test with Safari.
1. https://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/combining-h...
2. https://chris.improbable.org/experiments/browser/javanese-te...
Rendering issues are OS issues too. For example, Safari's font rendering depends on the particulars of macOS/iOS's font-rendering framework. Safari on Windows would presumably use Windows' font-rendering framework, with drastically different results, due to the different frameworks supporting different subsets of e.g. ligature-pair width hinting or hyphenation, thereby causing text to wrap in different places, such that the layout at a given font size + viewport size on Windows wouldn't be predictive of the layout at the same font size + viewport size on macOS. (Which is not even to mention the fonts you'd have by default on Windows and not by default on macOS, that would interfere with the font family cascade, and yet couldn't be suppressed from the cascade because some macOS systems do have them.)
Or, for that matter, there could be certain exposed -webkit CSS selectors that are really just features of some or another macOS rendering-layer framework, with no Windows equivalent — the same way that IE's ancient CSS "filters" were really just exposed DirectX features (e.g. filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.blur). For these cases, testing on "Safari on Windows" would essentially just get you what testing in Chrome on Windows already gets you (unless Apple created an entire software renderer that brings in all of macOS's Quartz and all its subsidiary libraries as a big ol' polyfill.)
The point at which Safari is guaranteed to work like it does on macOS, is the point at which you're bringing in a polyfill consisting of 99% of macOS's frameworks. May as well bring in the last 1% as well, and call it a VM. (Ideally a thin-as-possible paravirtualized VM where the display driver is written to directly make DirectX calls, etc. — but VM client software is already pretty good at providing these sorts of drivers.)
I don't know about the early versions, but I believe the final version of IE for Mac, though also numbered 5, used an entirely different browser engine from that on Windows. Tasman
Last I checked, there is a Windows WebKit/Safari build. I don't think it worked very well though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20700914#20701334
Edit: Looks like the new URL is https://build.webkit.org/#/builders/67?numbuilds=400 but the build has been broken for almost 2 weeks. The last successful build is the 300MB https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/archives.webkit.org/win-x... (as explained in the link above, the Apple Application Support libraries are required).
The M1 Mac Mini recently was only $600 on sale.
You can also find a refurbished M1 Mac Mini for under $600 on Apple's refurbished store.
Why not Browserstack?
Debugging iOS-Safari issues on a web page requires:
1) Access to a Desktop Mac and a Desktop Safari.
2) An iOS device.
The Safari debugger recognizes a plugged-in iOS device and then allows to debug the iOS safari remotely. That's the only reliable way to find iOS specific JS or CSS issues. Browserstack alone does not help, unfortunately AFAIR.
You actually don't need the iOS device - Safari will also link up to the iOS simulator, so you can do this with just XCode.
But XCode is MacOS only, isn’t it?
You can try Lambdatest.
This could be an interesting way to run mautrix-imesssage. I wonder if they've got it hooked up to some sort of remote console solution; I've never been able to figure out how to get less-than-wretched performance out of the VNC server baked into the OS.
> This could be an interesting way to run mautrix-imesssage
Wouldn't you be able to have only a single identity? Because unless you can have multiple identities with a single instance, it would be a very expensive way of having iMessage capabilities.
VMs have been a thing in the Mac world for a long time now, and these would be powerful enough to run a bunch of them.
I'm aware, but I thought iMessage had some hardware identifier that was necessary to use it. I guess my understanding was incorrect then!
The identifier is part of it, as I remember from my mackintosh days, but it cannot be all: MacOS works well as a multi-user system, including separate iMessage accounts for each user.
Aah, that's a good point.
Apparently mautrix-imessage supports jailbroken iphones. Isn't that much more cost effective (eg. $50 for a used iphone 4s) than paying $50/month?
Is it reliable? iMessage is not reliable on Hackintosh (over multiple years) due to security checks etc.
I never had any issues with it when I was hackintoshing. I stopped around Catalina though, so ymmv I guess.
Have you run mautrix-imessage? I'm trying to work through the docs to understand if I could use it as a way to proxy my received imessages (and iOS text messages?) onto my windows device as they arrive.
Yes, right now I run it on an old MacBook Pro, that is otherwise sitting idle. It is very reliable. The only issue I have is HEIC attachments not being displayed on the Element desktop client (due to a lack of support in either Electron or Chromium, I forget what piece was ultimately to blame there.)
We've been using Hetzner boxes to run our self-hosted GitHub Actions runners for a couple years now, except for Mac which we have run in MacStadium. This offering is much cheaper than MacStadium though; EUR 49 compare to USD 129.
I ordered one of these M1 Minis from Hetzner last night as soon as I saw the announcement. It was provisioned and ready this afternoon. Initial impression is good, it's a Big Sur M1 Mini. I paid extra (EUR 69/mo) to get two 1TB SSDs as well, since we often run up against the 256GB storage limitation.
Hetzner provide a dedicated IPv4 address and IPv6 /64, SSH access is via a password. Unlike MacStadium, VNC access didn't seem to be enabled initially, but some Googling around yielded the ASD command to turn that on. Our Hetzner firewall config blocks everything but port 22 anyway, so I tunneled VNC port 5900 through SSH and it worked fine.
The open question, which only time will answer, is network connectivity. MacStadium (or at least the Atlanta data center we use) seems to have pretty reliable connectivity, but our Hetzner runners sometimes fail with some transient network glitch while trying to download a random dependency now and then. Fortunately most of the tools we use will auto-retry, so even if we do have sporadic network connectivity glitches for the price it's well worth it.
Curious about how they are "delivered" - ssh login with root access? Anyone know?
SSH by default according to Hetzner's customer forum [1].
[1] https://forum.hetzner.com/index.php?thread/28493/&postID=280...
The customer forum requires a login to access, and unfortunately is often in German.
The linked post says this:
"Danke für das Interesse an dem neuen Produkt!
Die Fragen zum Betriebssystem sollten sich durch die Veröffentlichung der Produktmatrix beantwortet haben. Es wird das aktuelle macOS Big Sur installiert.
Bei der Einrichtung und Zugangsmöglichkeiten haben wir uns nur für SSH entschieden. Nicht jeder Kunde möchte mit einem aktiven VNC-Zugang starten. Wie auch der eine oder andere beschrieben hat, ist die Einrichtung/Aktivierung nicht schwer. Gerne könnt ihr dazu auch einen Community-Artikel schreiben und weiteren Kunden helfen.
Welche Alternativen zu VNC würdet ihr Vorschlagen oder hättet ihr gerne, die wir uns mal anschauen sollten?"
I don't understand German, but I ordered one and received SSH login instructions, and was able to get VNC enabled and connected by tunneling port 5900 through the SSH connection.
> The customer forum requires a login to access
It's not just a login. You need to actually be a customer. I consider that a good thing, because it allows me (and Hetzner) to speak more freely compared to a fully public forum. That's also why I just linked to the forum instead of quoting.
> and unfortunately is often in German.
That's true. The majority of the active user|customer base is German (I am myself) and thus communicating in German is the obvious choice. I've seen a few English-speaking folks participating by using a translator of choice to read the threads and then simply responding in English. I think it works well enough, as virtually every German understands English. Especially a German running servers.
The rest of us not using Apple product watch with perplexity all things related to Apple hardware/licences, etc.
I mean if you're developing/testing for AIX you're gonna have to buy/find a vendor that licenses POWER8. I feel like we've forgotten that running software on commodity hardware is the exception rather than the rule for the bulk of CS history.
It’s been the rule for all my life. I think I should be allowed to feel that it’s the rule rather than the exception.
Definitely, I'm referring to the issues related to end consumer.
A Linux based M1 Max with ECC memory (and no GPU) would be a phenomenal server that could run the vast majority of hosting workloads.
Hosting providers would also love it because it's super small form factor and extremely low on power usage.
I imagine cooling and ventilation costs (apparently ~40% of data center energy costs) would plummet as well.
My experience is only with AWS, GCP, Azure and Red Hat. This pricing for m1 mini seems quite great to me at ~80$ compared to an aws t3a.xlarge Can this kind of instance be used as a server for deploying web apps? I have never tried hetzner. I couldn't find any information about data transfer costs. As someone with predictable traffic and no need for infinite scalability would you recommend such a setup?
scaleway has also an M1 offer
FWIW, I've tried the Scaleway (Paris), MacStadium (Atlanta), and as of today also the Hetzner (Falkenstein, Germany) M1 offerings.
The Scaleway service had such awful latency on the VNC connection that I found it almost completely unusable. MacStadium and Hetzner are both better. That's particularly odd because I'm based in Kyiv, Ukraine, so I would have expected better latency to Paris than to Atlanta. It might have been a problem on my ISP's end, I didn't spend any time looking into it.
Besides that, the Hetzner offer is by far the cheapest, as is usually the case with Hetzner. If you don't mind having to do all configuration yourself, and you don't require a flashy whiz-bang UI for managing your provisioned resources, Hetzner is a great value.
I have seen mixed reviews about Hetzner online. Does anyone have any enlightening anecdotal evidence in favor or against the company?
They are truly great for thrifty do-it-yourself hosting. Don't expect customer support or discounts or anything, but their prices are impossible to beat, and everything works as advertised. The big gotcha is that their only points of presence are in Germany and Finland.
My only gripe would be that running your business on Hetzner can be a little bit scary at times since they have so much unattended automation in place to block abuse. For example, if your server is erroneously sending traffic with private IP addresses out of its public interface, they will block the server without warning. I don't have any other providers to compare this against, so that might just be how it is.
> For example, if your server is erroneously sending traffic with private IP addresses out of its public interface, they will block the server without warning.
I had a CS class last semester where the students used some Hetzner cloud servers. I always got an email or two before having the servers IPs blocked. And it were mostly students' faults by choosing easy passwords..
I recommend Hetzner! No affiliation, just a happy user..
>>>Don't expect customer support
To be fair, you can also book a managed server with them.
For their hosted hardware offering, HDD/SSD swaps (or even "we replace everything about your server because it produces random faults except your HDDS") are within reasonable timeframes (i.e. usually within an hour).
They, however, will not diagnose this for you - that part is on you.
I've been a customer for years and have nothing negative to say. They are providing exactly the products they are advertising. Even those specs that don't necessarily have hard numbers attached with all products (disk speed, CPU performance) have always been good.
That said, there are some products certain customers expect that they will not sell you (and don't advertise). For example, you won't be able to click a button to deploy Software Y pre-configured by the provider as you might with Digital Ocean. What you'll get is mostly along the lines of "server with the OS of your choice and your SSH key installed on it". If that's what you're looking for, Hetzner is difficult to beat on price to performance.
I moved personal projects to Hetzner from Linode several years ago, due to significantly better pricing for the RAM I needed, and I haven't had any problems. I am using a few of their "cloud" shared servers (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud) and backups, can't speak to other services. I'm not doing anything CPU or IO intensive, though.
I've been their customer for over 2 years, no problems at all and I'm very happy with their prices and offering. Started with dedicated server and now I'm also using their cloud services for some of my EU-based clients. Can definitely recommend, I much prefer Hetzner vs no-name VPS providers when I need cheap VMs.
Happy customer for more than 15 years.
I used to run several root-servers and once they started their cloud-offering moved everything over there.
Support was always great (although rarely needed), performance is fantastic, prices hard to beat.
I love the simplicity of their cloud offering which fits my use-cases perfectly and doesn't put the burden of overly complex products, APIs and tools on me as a user.
Have been using them for years, never had an issue.
I have heard that they disconnect you for a couple of hours if youre being heavily DDOSSed tho.
I had a dedicated server in Germany from Hetzner that I was pretty pleased with. Bandwidth was unlimited (I peaked at 1 TB/24h).
I've been using a dedicated server (intel gen 3 from their second hand server marketplace) for about a year now and haven't had any problems.
It's only hosting personal stuff though, nothing popular or for business. Uptime has been good so far as well.
One disadvantage might be the Gigabit ports on most servers, if you really need a lot of bandwidth.
Anecdotally, I got 2 32gb intel servers for €20/month a piece before Hetzner became known everywhere and prices rose. Now I’m locked in.
The biggest issue is their limited regions. Otherwise I’ve only ever been extremely happy.
In you like a Mac mini for rent with a phantastic KVM and access the mini like it stands on your Desk, try http://oakhost.net
Anyone know if they install ARD for remote desktop access? It's pretty difficult to administer a Mac remotely without MDM and/or ARD.
According to a thread on their forum, you get SSH access and can install/activate VNC afterwards (or whatever else you may prefer).
Note that this is part of Hetzners dedicated offers, meaning the first bill is 2 times the monthly rate because setup fees.
Is Hetzner still sending paper contract over snail mail to use their services? Then requiring the signed paper contract be sent back by post? I haven't cared enough about their offer to check by myself again.
Never experienced anything like that, been a happy user for about half a decade.
Me neither, been using them for 15 years.
They do this for new accounts, obviously it will not affect you guys??
Maybe in the last 3 years? I didn’t have it when I registered either.
Never ran into that requirement.
I have a bare metal + several cloud instances on Hetzner.
When did they require this? I haven't used Hetzner in about 8 years, but back then, I did not need to do this, I just signed up online with a credit card.
Just a photo of ID sent digitally for me (I'm in the EU, might make a difference)
Can you opt out of that and ask for a paper contract via snail mail then?
in the US I was required to file ID by paper to start an account-- much later the project migrated, my manager apparently stopped paying the bill and it was in my personal name
I've been using them for the past 7 years, never had to provide anything on paper, but ID/company validation is required.
They asked for me to send a selfie holding my Hong Kong Identity Card but no other bureaucracy.
No, but I am sure they can accommodate fax for you.
Isn't it expensive? But for quick testing (like safari), it may be good
That 19% you can get back if you are outside of Yurop.
Or if you are a business within the EU.
Is 58.31 = 5831 here? It's doubly confusing: dot instead of comma and separator at the hundredths position.
Your nick is programmer_dude and a dot for a decimal point confuses you?
Yes, it managed to confuse me. Here's how...
1. I did not notice the M1 was being offered on rent. I assumed it was for sale at the listed price.
2. Since 58.31 € is an unrealistic price for an M1 machine (and since this is a European site) I concluded the site must be using a comma instead of a dot. 5831 € is a realistic price for a Mac afterall.
Unfortunately the site is using a dot for a dot despite being European and the M1 is being offered on rent.
It's not selling you a Mac mini for €58.31. It's letting you rent one for €58.31 a month. That's why it says "monthly". Hetzner is a hosting provider.
[edit: this comment written before the parent comment was edited to include point 1]
The parent comment was posted with point one, the last paragraph was introduced in the edit.
Love HN's eventual consistency!
> Unfortunately the site is using a dot for a dot despite being European and the M1 is being offered on rent.
You're on the international version of the site.
If you go to the German version, they quote the price as 58,31 €:
> 5831 € is a realistic price for a Mac afterall
I don’t know where you live, but €5000 is not a realistic price for a mac mini in any place I’ve heard of.
Dots are only used in groups of 3 (unless India, as far as I’m aware).
Anyway, not saying you weren’t confused. But I think it’s fairly easy to figure out that there’s no way the dot in this situation is meant as a thousands seperator.
> 5831 € is a realistic price for a Mac afterall.
Not really... the Mac Pro is famous for its high price, but this explicitly says mac mini which is almost exactly an order of magnitude less than 5831 € .
Hmm, sorry I wouldn't know about that either never purchased an Apple product in my life. Apple is basically a non-entity in India.
Let's not be a jerk to people who are trying to learn. We all started out unaware of things we now consider essential knowledge. For (my) example, timezones offsets can and do include partial hour offsets (+0415 is/was real), and dates should generally be YYYY-MM-DD (when not displayed to end users) for your sanity (and because iso8601).
OP, you can look up the numeric formats for Germany in your system preferences or Excel or similar — it can help to see them templated out sometimes.
The user has been "programmer_dude" for 6 years just on HN, there's no chance that they didn't learn about the dot.
I'm confused as to how they can be confused.
Even in my comma-as-separator country, our calculators have a dot. The only thing that could be confusing is encountering numbers with 3 decimals: 123,456 vs 123.456
See my reply to ginko.
In much of Europe commas are thousand separators, dots are decimal point separators. So what you're seeing is fifty eight euros and thirty one euro-cents.
You might be surprised to find that that is not the case in Europe. In fact, apart from China and English-influenced countries, very few countries around the world use dots for decimal points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Countries_us...
But English and Chinese influenced countries comprise a significant portion of the world. The top 3 most populous countries use dots for decimals (China, India, United States) according to your link.
You are right, and that is still not "in much of Europe".
58.31 € per month is between 58 and 59 euros per month.
in German comma = dot, so it is 58.31