Considering how much Apple has been helping MacStadium and the volume of Mac minis going to rack based installs, I'm surprised Apple hasn't made them a little more rack mount friendly.
Seems like they could just make a special case-less sled with only minor tweaks to the existing mini design. Obviously they would need to build a sled/ server chassis too with networking and power delivery.
All the big players who rack Mac Minis already have custom rack equipment that fits Mac Minis of this form factor. I suspect the design hasn’t changed at all primarily for this reason.
Yes, but putting the minis in a case in a rack is wasteful. Both in terms of raw materials used, and energy efficiency. Considering how much of a deal Apple makes out of saving a few power bricks from the landfill, manufacturing thousands of enclosures which end up in server racks wasting power seems out of place.
It sounds like upper management said no to the server market years ago and doesn’t want to sell a “server”. But they’ll happily sell you a Mac mini to build a server farm.
Arguably, mac minis are servers that can be repurposed as desktops. Even in their marketing blurbs Apple advertises mac minis as build and render farms.
The Mac mini isn't intended for that type of use... they do make a rack mount Mac Pro ( https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack ). Give it a generation to get to the M series chips.
> The Mac mini isn't intended for that type of use
The mini absolutely is intended for use as a server. It's what Apple provided to Mac Stadium for OSS projects to build on. Very few Mac Pros are used for CI servers, they are mostly used for video and audio processing.
Seems like they could just make a special case-less sled with only minor tweaks to the existing mini design. Obviously they would need to build a sled/ server chassis too with networking and power delivery.