It might be that they're limited by something else in their existing racks; say power or networking ports, so this is an easy hack to get into their existing rack scheme.
Unlike the old rack mount options for the trashcan Mac Pro units, it doesn't seem like much thought has been given here to a front-to-back airflow.
I'm also surprised they're touting the density of this solution— seems like the obvious thing would be to put the Minis on their sides. A 4U chassis has 17.5cm vertical space in it, and a Mac Mini is 17mm wide. With the Mini being 2in in height, that suggests 9 Minis in a 4U rack, vs 2 Minis in a 2U rack.
You'd think that from an environmental point of view, Apple would be able to sell packs of Mac Mini boards without the case and packaging for people doing this; with no physical board or electronic change, it would be easy.
> The compact size of the Mac mini, which packs a powerful System on a Chip (SoC) into a tiny footprint.The energy efficiency of Apple silicon (M-series) chips, which allows high density without overheating or excessive power draw.
This really adds nothing to the article, and looks like AI fluff to me.
Combine that with there being a bold section in like every single paragraph, I'm going to assume yes
The thing that got me was always referring to Scaleway in the third person. e.g. this read like the response I get when I ask AI to review code:
> Scaleway’s solution to that problem was ingenious: embedding a Raspberry Pi module with each Mac mini.
(I realize this may be an artifact of a corporate style guide, but I'd much prefer "Our solution to that problem was embedding . . ." Both because the "was ingenious" doesn't add a ton and reads like puffery and because this is Scaleway's own blog and referring to yourself in the third person is grating.)
It doesn't? If you didn't know those two things, they seem highly relevant to the subject being discussed. They define SoC, which might be an acronym you've known since high school (I did, but I'm a total nerd), and it justifies why use Mac minis instead of what usually gets used.
As to whether it was AI generated or not, who cares? It's useful information if you didn't know it already, and if those words came out of matrix math or someone non-technical with a BS in communications, does it really matter to you? Are you going hungry tonight because the money that went to creating those words went to Nvidia and not Sarah in Marketing? Sarah in Marketing might be out of a job soon, but her boyfriend has a good job that's not threatened by AI, so I hope she'll be fine, but I don't know. Is that the underlying worry here?
There is an emdash in the article though, you didn't think to call that out too?
I was interested in provisioning one of these a few months back through Scaleway, but couldn't navigate their sign-up process without it dumping me back to the start everytime. Nor did I receive a reply when I e-mailed their support e-mail.
I don't know if that's changed (they had odd pricing too, like Startup vs. Business, of which the difference wasn't clear), but aware. I hope someone has more success than I did.
The annoying thing is that Apple still makes proper rackmount servers, they just won't sell them to anyone, so mere mortals have to resort to these stupid Mac Mini hackjobs for no good reason.
not sure why the attach rpi for every mac mini, wouldn't it be cheaper to have one rpi and 9 mac minis connectd to 10 port switch? I also wished one day to make cluster out of Apple TVs - they are very cheap (~150usd for version with ethernet) and most likely the new upcoming version will have more powerful A-series apple sillicon. I guess tvOS is just very restricted.
They’re connected to a single USB-C cable. For many technical reasons you can’t have a simple kvm which switches inputs. You’ll need to continuously power all 9 of them some way.
All nine USB-C cables will need a continuous, active connection.
To do this, you will need a smart controller that switches which port it’s talking to.
Or you can stick a relatively cheap device on every mini and and connect it to the network.
Having a “controller” for every mini means you can swap single units in both hardware and software very easily. There’s a one-to-one relationship and you don’t have to deal with pairing.
> not sure why the attach rpi for every mac mini, wouldn't it be cheaper to have one rpi and 9 mac minis connectd to 10 port switch?
Simple... they're (likely) running something on the Raspberry Pi's that sets them up as USB gadgets, aka the Mac Mini "sees" a virtual keyboard and mouse. That's enough to manage remote provisioning.
To replicate that they'd need a KVM switch which doesn't have some weird edge case in how exactly it does USB-C switching, and it needs to be remotely controlled. A Pi is cheaper plus the failure modes of a Pi are more understood than the failure mode of some weird ass KVM switch someone cobbled together in China.
running macOS, which runs Xcode, which is required for making and signing iOS and macOS apps, Witcher, then sold on the App Store for money dust justifying spending money on their, or a similar service.
Yeah, I was hoping for more detail as well. I'm guessing they did something similar to what I did to make my Pi control computers.[0]
The Raspberry Pi 4 can emulate a USB keyboard and mouse, and there are inexpensive adapters that allow it to capture display output. You can also hook it up to a relay to cycle power for an external device.
Scaleway has some of the best prices for cloud Mac Minis and has better deals than the scam that is AWS's overpriced cloud Mac Minis.
Going with AWS for cloud Mac Minis is the quickest way to lose a lot of money if you don't know what to do with it and to flush as much cash down the drain as quickly as possible.
https://www-uploads.scaleway.com/Mac_mini_rack_1_e31ad1da6e....
This is not the image I expected to encounter under the title, “high density”.
Make those sleds taller and do three, maybe four per sled with a pair of large diameter fans. That’ll would be high density. This is medium at best.
It might be that they're limited by something else in their existing racks; say power or networking ports, so this is an easy hack to get into their existing rack scheme.
The fan would move the heat off that given sled but if the channel between the sleds can’t remove that extra heat you probably didn’t help yourself.
My point is the picture doesn’t show any details on the room or what’s outside the rack so it’s hard to know what’s optimal.
Seriosuly, like surely they could've at least used 1 rpi per rack ?
Or find cable with matching length?
Interesting that they run them upside down.
It’s because the power button is on the bottom.
also hot air rises, and the vent is on the bottom
Fans can move a lot more air than convection.
Unlike the old rack mount options for the trashcan Mac Pro units, it doesn't seem like much thought has been given here to a front-to-back airflow.
I'm also surprised they're touting the density of this solution— seems like the obvious thing would be to put the Minis on their sides. A 4U chassis has 17.5cm vertical space in it, and a Mac Mini is 17mm wide. With the Mini being 2in in height, that suggests 9 Minis in a 4U rack, vs 2 Minis in a 2U rack.
EDIT: Here's a commercially-available solution that's 6/4U: https://www.mk1manufacturing.com/Rack-Mount-for-6-M4-mac-min..., you'd think it could basically be this but with the management plane behind or off to the side or something.
You'd think that from an environmental point of view, Apple would be able to sell packs of Mac Mini boards without the case and packaging for people doing this; with no physical board or electronic change, it would be easy.
Todays game of was it AI generated?
> The compact size of the Mac mini, which packs a powerful System on a Chip (SoC) into a tiny footprint.The energy efficiency of Apple silicon (M-series) chips, which allows high density without overheating or excessive power draw.
This really adds nothing to the article, and looks like AI fluff to me.
Combine that with there being a bold section in like every single paragraph, I'm going to assume yes
The thing that got me was always referring to Scaleway in the third person. e.g. this read like the response I get when I ask AI to review code:
> Scaleway’s solution to that problem was ingenious: embedding a Raspberry Pi module with each Mac mini.
(I realize this may be an artifact of a corporate style guide, but I'd much prefer "Our solution to that problem was embedding . . ." Both because the "was ingenious" doesn't add a ton and reads like puffery and because this is Scaleway's own blog and referring to yourself in the third person is grating.)
It doesn't? If you didn't know those two things, they seem highly relevant to the subject being discussed. They define SoC, which might be an acronym you've known since high school (I did, but I'm a total nerd), and it justifies why use Mac minis instead of what usually gets used.
As to whether it was AI generated or not, who cares? It's useful information if you didn't know it already, and if those words came out of matrix math or someone non-technical with a BS in communications, does it really matter to you? Are you going hungry tonight because the money that went to creating those words went to Nvidia and not Sarah in Marketing? Sarah in Marketing might be out of a job soon, but her boyfriend has a good job that's not threatened by AI, so I hope she'll be fine, but I don't know. Is that the underlying worry here?
There is an emdash in the article though, you didn't think to call that out too?
If it smells like ai…
I was interested in provisioning one of these a few months back through Scaleway, but couldn't navigate their sign-up process without it dumping me back to the start everytime. Nor did I receive a reply when I e-mailed their support e-mail.
I don't know if that's changed (they had odd pricing too, like Startup vs. Business, of which the difference wasn't clear), but aware. I hope someone has more success than I did.
The annoying thing is that Apple still makes proper rackmount servers, they just won't sell them to anyone, so mere mortals have to resort to these stupid Mac Mini hackjobs for no good reason.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/in-the-loop/2025/10/shipping-...
not sure why the attach rpi for every mac mini, wouldn't it be cheaper to have one rpi and 9 mac minis connectd to 10 port switch? I also wished one day to make cluster out of Apple TVs - they are very cheap (~150usd for version with ethernet) and most likely the new upcoming version will have more powerful A-series apple sillicon. I guess tvOS is just very restricted.
They’re connected to a single USB-C cable. For many technical reasons you can’t have a simple kvm which switches inputs. You’ll need to continuously power all 9 of them some way. All nine USB-C cables will need a continuous, active connection.
To do this, you will need a smart controller that switches which port it’s talking to.
Or you can stick a relatively cheap device on every mini and and connect it to the network.
Having a “controller” for every mini means you can swap single units in both hardware and software very easily. There’s a one-to-one relationship and you don’t have to deal with pairing.
> not sure why the attach rpi for every mac mini, wouldn't it be cheaper to have one rpi and 9 mac minis connectd to 10 port switch?
Simple... they're (likely) running something on the Raspberry Pi's that sets them up as USB gadgets, aka the Mac Mini "sees" a virtual keyboard and mouse. That's enough to manage remote provisioning.
To replicate that they'd need a KVM switch which doesn't have some weird edge case in how exactly it does USB-C switching, and it needs to be remotely controlled. A Pi is cheaper plus the failure modes of a Pi are more understood than the failure mode of some weird ass KVM switch someone cobbled together in China.
You mean a kvm switch?
What would you do with a cluster of Apple TVs?
run computer programs probably
We also have a video of how we built the (then-M1) infra at GitHub: https://youtu.be/I2J2MzKjcqY?si=piMVam3qUpJGeW9Q
With 60 minis per rack, and custom sled cases.
What do people use mac servers for?
MacOS dev and CI.
running macOS, which runs Xcode, which is required for making and signing iOS and macOS apps, Witcher, then sold on the App Store for money dust justifying spending money on their, or a similar service.
How does the Pi communicate with the Mini? Software stack? Zero details and useful information in this post.
Yeah, I was hoping for more detail as well. I'm guessing they did something similar to what I did to make my Pi control computers.[0]
The Raspberry Pi 4 can emulate a USB keyboard and mouse, and there are inexpensive adapters that allow it to capture display output. You can also hook it up to a relay to cycle power for an external device.
[0] https://mtlynch.io/tinypilot/
AI slop
Scaleway has some of the best prices for cloud Mac Minis and has better deals than the scam that is AWS's overpriced cloud Mac Minis.
Going with AWS for cloud Mac Minis is the quickest way to lose a lot of money if you don't know what to do with it and to flush as much cash down the drain as quickly as possible.
I’d like to know what’s on the baseboard that the Pi is attached to
Looks like a relay so probably to powercycle it.
Don't think everything needed is included in the picture. Definitely additional cables for power and networking would need to be added
And yet they have the pi backward so the networking ports are buried. I have no idea what’s going on here.
Looks like some sort of power supply converter? Maybe a USB-C power splitter.