
RemoteMac.io – Dedicated Mac mini - rootdevelop
https://www.remotemac.io/
======
comex
FYI, there are a few issues with the copy on the homepage:

\- "Mac Mini's" should be "Mac Minis", or "Mac minis" if you want to follow
the official capitalization.

\- "We only offer genuine, dedicated Apple machines running MacOS" is missing
a period.

\- "MacOS" should be "macOS".

\- "pre installed" should be "pre-installed" or "preinstalled".

\- "all your developer needs" should probably be "all a developer's needs" or
"all your development needs".

~~~
rootdevelop
Thanks for the feedback, we corrected the grammar.

~~~
antaviana
"Our i5 Mac Minis come with 240 GB and our i5 Mac Minis come with 500GB
storage as standard."

The second i5 should be i7.

~~~
rootdevelop
Thanks, it now says i7 :)

------
thinkingkong
What I really need is a setup like this with some automated “restore to
snapshot” functionality. We use a remote mac mini to do CI on our development
environment for new team members. That would be the best.

~~~
rootdevelop
That’s a good idea, we’ll see if and how we can add such a feature on
dedicated machines.

~~~
lloeki
If I rent a dedicated machine I can certainly do what I described there[0] by
hand but would you envision having some kind of turn-key support for GitLab CI
runners, supporting both gitlab.com through some partnership and self-hosted
instances? That would be brilliant, especially considering Xcode integration
with GitLab.

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18404893](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18404893)

[1]: [https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/06/one-click-clone-to-
xcode...](https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/06/one-click-clone-to-xcode/)

~~~
jl-gitlab
CI/CD product manager from GitLab here. We're actually already looking at
adding this - we're starting with some experimentation in our internal item at
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-
infra/infrastructure/issues...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-
infra/infrastructure/issues/5294). Some folks here at GitLab already have this
set up and working at a small scale, so it's certainly possible (with a couple
caveats.)

Check out that issue for more info.

~~~
lloeki
Haha seems like you ran into the exact same issues as I did! It works
brilliantly with a concurrency of 2 on an early 2015 2-core i5 13" MBP with
16GB of RAM, and I'm even using the machine interactively while builds are
processed. I'm using Sierra as a base but I've been building Mavericks, El
Capitan and High Sierra ones too. VMs are 1 CPU / 4GB. I saw no gain in
bumping up VMs to 2 CPUs.

[https://gitlab.com/archmac/packages/pipelines](https://gitlab.com/archmac/packages/pipelines)

~~~
jl-gitlab
If you have any advice or learnings for us, feel free to jump into that issue.
:)

~~~
lloeki
Not sure I can be more than a data point but hey, whatever. Done ;)

~~~
medicis123
Wanted to share that we developed a GitLab CI Runner/executor for Anka Build
and have made it public (It was done for one of our user). It basically
enables you to run your iOS/macOS GitLab CI pipelines/jobs on Anka build macOS
cloud. You can configure Anka Build macOS cloud on-prem(on macs) or on hosted
macs. Happy to share more details.[https://github.com/veertuinc/gitlab-
runner](https://github.com/veertuinc/gitlab-runner)

------
timcederman
One of the longest running services I'm aware of -
[https://macminicolo.net/](https://macminicolo.net/)

edit: just noticed they merged with MacStadium

~~~
tluyben2
More expensive than any of the competition I am aware off including OP.

~~~
angersock
Apple users should feel right at home then!

------
phinnaeus
What does Apple use for their servers? Do they just have a bunch of Mac Minis
in racks? Or do they have Mac servers they're not willing to sell? Or do they
not use Macs as servers?

~~~
saagarjha
For their cloud and services? Linux machines, mostly.

~~~
ardfie
Apple has also used AWS, Azure, and GCP in addition to their own servers.

~~~
wulfmann
OS-wise though still likely linux.

~~~
therein
It is RHEL for a fact.

------
teekert
When all devs need is your software (xcode), but you are so popular they they
buy your hardware anyway instead of looking at alternative platforms.

Although I see the why, the how and the need, it is entirely synthetic. In a
way Apple forces this incredible waste of hardware that is never seen and
could easily be virtualized and time-shared (there are no technical
limitations). It's really an opposite-of-green initiative. Although, perhaps
the only real alternative would be everyone buying a mac mini and use it even
less (in total), which would be even less green...

~~~
yardie
At its heart Apple is a hardware company and everything they do is to drive
sales of hardware. An iOS developer is forced to have Apple hardware. They
could charge for MacOS and they could charge for XCode. But they don’t because
the cost of continued development of those applications is subsidized by
hardware sales.

~~~
egil
Not to mention that the "it just works" experience is much easier to provide
when you control both software and hardware. No driver mess for the end user.

------
wpdev_63
You can run macos in a vmware vm if you really need it for ios development[0].
It's less than legal though.

[0]:[https://github.com/DrDonk/unlocker](https://github.com/DrDonk/unlocker)

------
willio58
Pretty simple and good idea. For people not wanting to drop the money to get a
Mac themselves to use Xcode for app development I could see them using this.

That’s if the latency isn’t too bad, else it would be hell

~~~
xienze
Are they using the built in VNC server for remote access? Even on my LAN the
performance is absolutely terrible. Using a different server doesn’t help
either. I’ve seen lots of folks make reference to getting GPU-accelerated VNC
that dramatically improves performance if the Mini is hooked up to a monitor,
but in my experience it doesn’t work. The only acceptable remote desktop
solution I’ve ever found for the Mac is NoMachine.

~~~
Fnoord
VNC is terribly laggy and inefficient. It's OK for LAN (not WLAN) and
localhost.

RDP and NX however work great (I used both SFO <-> AMS in 2005, latency is
negligible), but NX is proprietary and X-only. It doesn't work on the macOS
GUI server (whatever its name is, Quartz?). There's technologies based on NX
when it was still FOSS. For RDP, there's xrdp which acts as glue between an X
server yet utilises the RDP protocol (which should be tunnelled over a secure
connection such as WireGuard or SSH).

Since we're swapping out X for Wayland I'm curious what the path of remote
desktop is going to be.

As for this project, it isn't difficult to run macOS in a VM (or buy a 2nd
hand Mac Mini) but if that's too difficult compared to the cost of setting it
up this could very well be a viable alternative.

~~~
simplyred
I think you're a little behind, we're in 2018 now ;-) and NoMachine now offers
a server version for Mac and for Windows. (for access to the physical display
for those who were wondering)

~~~
Fnoord
Which protocol(s) does that use?

~~~
simplyred
Still NX. There's some information how it has changed over the years here:

[https://www.nomachine.com/AR11K00745](https://www.nomachine.com/AR11K00745)

------
joshe
[https://www.macstadium.com/](https://www.macstadium.com/) is another option.
US based with data centers in Europe too.

~~~
xienze
At least the other one has somewhat sane prices. $70 per month for the OLD i5
Mini? It really doesn’t take long at all before buying outright makes more
sense.

~~~
chrisper
Do you have the same redundant infrastructure and network connection? Buying
isn't always an alternative to data center

~~~
Nullabillity
Does your client have redundant infrastructure and network connections? I hope
nobody is trying to run public services on these things...

------
oeuviz
Is this supposed to be profitable longterm assuming a ROI of >40months _?

_ €1249.-[0] divided by €29.95/mo plus other infrastructure

[0] [https://www.apple.com/nl/shop/buy-mac/mac-
mini](https://www.apple.com/nl/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini)

~~~
Zealotux
The €29.95/mo offer is for an older i5, the pricing for the 2018 version isn't
announced yet:
[https://www.remotemac.io/pricing](https://www.remotemac.io/pricing)

------
zubspace
Does anyone have experience with MacInCloud [1]? The pricings looks alot more
flexible with hourly or weekly rates.

[1]
[https://portal.macincloud.com/select/#/plans](https://portal.macincloud.com/select/#/plans)

~~~
blensor
Macincloud user here. I tried both their plans managed and dedicated and am
more satisfied with the managed plan as it seems more performant at a lower
cost (but maybe I was just lucky)

I am using it to compile a crossolatform inhouse Qt app for our employees with
ios devices.

BTW: Whats the best way to create "private" IOS Apps for a very limited number
of users. Recompiling the software every time just because we have to add an
UDID for every new user to our development profile is an incredibly tedious
amount of work.

~~~
jon-wood
There's support for enterprise distribution based on devices having a
corporate provisioning profile installed: [https://medium.com/wso2-iot/how-to-
export-in-house-developed...](https://medium.com/wso2-iot/how-to-export-in-
house-developed-ios-app-as-an-enterprise-application-dc087bdd64c3)

~~~
blensor
That was what I was afraid of. It's another $299/year down the drain just to
support a few devices.

I was hoping for a way (or a hack) to at least retroactively add a UDID
without going through the Archive process again (that is really slow). But I
guess I have to force everyone that brings his own IOS device to take a
company Android tablet instead :(

------
Jemm
How do you test on actual devices (iPhone, iPad) when developing on a remote
system? Obviously you cannot plug your device into the remote mac Mini's usb
port.

~~~
rootdevelop
There are several USB over IP solutions, we use Eltima’s USB Network Gate.
Otter options include NoMachine.

------
defied
Placing an order does not work, due to a Javascript error I think: `TypeError:
handler.open is not a function`

~~~
rootdevelop
Can you send us an email at support@remotemac.io, we’re not able to reproduce
it here.

------
xhruso00
How bad is running macOS + XCode in virtual machine? Is it that bad?

~~~
ubersoldat2k7
I tried with a React Native project, so I only used the VM for the builds; yes
it's shit. I mean, the whole iOS build process is painful enough. And I never
got the VM to work on more than 1024x768.

~~~
brad0
What hypervisor did you use?

~~~
stevewodil
Not OP but in VirtualBox you are limited to 7mb of VRAM in newer versions of
macOS, and I haven't found any workarounds for this.

VMware Workstation apparently has better support for macOS so it may be the
way to go, but you have to buy it

~~~
brad0
I’ve heard of VMware fusion, is that different from workstation?

~~~
stevewodil
Fusion is for Mac specifically (to run Windows, or Linux VM's), whereas
virtualization of macOS on a Windows machine requires Workstation

