X.org with Keith Packard’s code actually wrings a lot of good out of Intel graphics chipsets. I haven’t bothered with additional graphics capability in linux machines, unless I had a salvaged nVidia card laying around, for quite some time.
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At this point I am going to wait and see what the new Mac Pro is like, if it ever actually appears. The past few years I’ve been shifting as much of my stuff as I can over to my laptop that runs Linux.
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It seems like planned obsolescence. The SSD will fail after some number of writes, making the whole thing useless.
I have older laptop with Intel graphics chipset (Asus EEEpc). If I remember well, on Windows it supports only OpenGL 1.2, while open source drivers on Linux have OpenGL 2.0 support 
Probably other things will wear out first:
One of the Samsung SSD 850 PRO drives achieved a figure of 9.1 petabytes of data written! That’s 60 times the TBW figure Samsung promises on their data sheets. The other Samsung product – the Samsung SSD 750 Evo – was able to write 1.2 petabytes of data, which equals (in theory) to more than 80 years of constant writing. However, the pro models showed why their price is higher: None of them did write less than 2.2 Petabyte of data.
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Myth. You have to write a staggering amount of data to an SSD in order to wear it out before the rest of the computer wears out. For the kind of use that an ordinary user would put on the drive, it will outlive its owner. Even the most extreme power user is going to be hard pressed to work the drive to the point that it fails before the computer belongs in a museum.
Assuming 3,000 write cycles and a write multiplication factor of 2.5, if you write 10 gb per day, every single day to the entry level mac mini’s 128gb ssd, it will wear out in 42 years, or 84 years for the 256 gb option.
3000 write cycles x 128gb / 2.5 x 3650gb writes per year = 42 years.
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The mac died in 1984? Please tell me more of this strange alternative world you come from.
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I thought the same thing.
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Given Apple’s…less than robust enthusiasm…for their server product I’m not sure that having your product line associated with it is necessarily a good sign.
It seems to lose features at about the same rate that iTunes gains them.
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To be honest, this is horrible hardware to run linux on and you are probably just better off getting an intel nuc for much less money. There is little upside to getting a mac mini for things like this.
The storage is is permanently on the motherboard and you have to go though some weird hoops to get linux to run on essentially “Ok” hardware with crappy video for a slight premium cost.
Thanks for the article! I had Intel 530 SSD in my workstation PC, and it failed after less than 3 years, with less than 15 GB written daily. It’s good to know that it was probably an outlier.
What could be a better illustration of “black sheep” than an Xserve replacement with soldered-in storage?
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That’s why they have can be configured with 10 Gb Ethernet.
Three reasons to run Linux on Mac hardware:
- You split your time between OS’s and need to run Linux for some things and Mac OS for others.
- So that when the machine ceases to be able to run the latest Mac OS version, you can still load an up to date, fully patched OS on it and continue to use it until it dies or becomes an antique.
- Because you like Apple hardware (you think it’s well built, you think it’s pretty, or both) but dislike Mac OS for whatever reasons.
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Oh. Uh.
So I have even less reason now to avoid putting a replacement SSD inside this mid-2010 iMac, I guess.
I am a long-term Mac user and to the contrary, I remember when even RAM was no upgradeable.
Did you prefer it that way?
But apart from RAM, it doesn’t need features. I’ve seen racks full of these things in 2U enclosures attached to high-density disk arrays over Thunderbolt. It may not have a mainstream home-user following, and therefore may not get as much attention, but all the same, they sell a bunch of them.
That’s why they get stuffed in enclosures full of disks and other things attached via Thunderbolt. If you’re using it as a component, you don’t really care about the internal storage because even if you could upgrade it, it’s not like you could stuff a hardware RAID in there.
Don’t get me wrong, the fact that you can’t upgrade/replace the storage in them makes them extremely consumer-unfriendly devices, but that’s Apple. Their trillion dollar valuation didn’t come from hardware, it came from charging rent and planned obsolescence. I think that’s terrible, but from the perspective of my job? Those things don’t matter, the internal storage probably won’t wear out because it’ll be written to so infrequently.
Their marketing strategy doesn’t even allow for “black sheep” anyway. Everything is cohesive, and if it doesn’t fit the whole, it gets cut. Be it hardware, software, or hardware features. It’s why the bag with my recent-model MBP is full of so many freakin’ adapters.
I was referring to OSX Server, rather than the mini, and OSX server has bled features. It has dwindled down to little more than profile manager(for anyone who isn’t farming out MDM) Open Directory(for those places sufficiently mac-centric that they don’t just get bound to AD; or retro enough that they have resisted the push to do configuration via device profiles rather than Open Directory membership); and Xsan(which I suppose someone must use, if they still ship it). I’m not sure if netboot has been taken out and shot yet; but since all the new T2-equipped machines no longer support booting from it it’s effectively doomed in the not too distant future.
Pretty much everything else is either gone or replaced with a ‘just install it from 3rd party repos as though this were just expensive BSD with very limited hardware support!’ sign. Apple presents this as a feature;
"Apple no longer bundles open source services such as Calendar Server, Contacts Server, the Mail Server, DNS, DHCP, VPN Server, and Websites with macOS Server. Customers can get these same services directly from open-source providers. This way, macOS Server customers can install the most secure and up-to-date services as soon as they’re available. "
but implicit in that is the admission that Apple no longer cares enough to offer an integrated collection of those services that is kept reasonably up to date; nor do they have an interest in some of the default configurations and GUI tools that they used to provide.
Apple does not go with ‘but don’t worry, you can just roll your own from parts!’ about products they care about; and if you are going to have to roll your own from spare parts it’s a lot harder to see why you should start with OSX.
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Apple does not go with ‘but don’t worry, you can just roll your own from parts!’ about products they care about; and if you are going to have to roll your own from spare parts it’s a lot harder to see why you should start with OSX.
Apple doesn’t do that with their consumer-focused products, but Minis fell into this weird Xserve alternative that is amazingly, almost frighteningly common now. I’m going to a place later today that’s got six of them, and tomorrow I’m going to a place that has 10 of them. In both cases they were used to replace aging Xserve hardware.
That being said, if you don’t need to run Mac specific software on your server, for the love of all that’s holy, don’t. You can do everything cheaper and better with real, dedicated, redundant server hardware and Linux or BSD. Unfortunately, there are a lot of businesses that even if they don’t need to host any Apple-specific applications, they want all Apple hardware anyway because of some logic-overriding fanatical devotion.
