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Hackintoshes would make a lot more sense.


No, they wouldn't.

Look at the current state of Mackintoshes. People are having kernel panics and struggling to keep their machines running with current software. OS X moves pretty fast, possibly faster than Linux, and Apple builds it to support Mac hardware.... the teams who are porting hackintosh code have to support a lot more hardware variety and they have less resources than, say, linux.

Running mackintoshes in production makes no sense.

And I challenge the claim that you would save money.

Looking just at off the shelf costs of low end hardware does not tell you the TCO of serious machines that need to be running all the time.

To get comparable hardware quality to Apple products you have to spend more, generally, when going with "commodity" hardware.

The idea that Apple is expensive is a myth, born of two things-- people perpetuating it since 1980 (yes, 35 years this myth has been spread), with the vested interest of rationalizing their dislike of Apple... and the fact that Apple doesn't compete at the very low end.

In production, TCO is much more about reliability and other things than initial hardware cost.


You mean the professional market that that Apple is abandoning in favor of consumer devices.

I look after a mostly MAC environment and OX server is hopeless no migration from stand alone MAC's to Networked was the first shocker I found

And our Mac's are less stable than our windows 8 Box used for running hyperv VM's


> People are having kernel panics and struggling to keep their machines running with current software.

Not here. My Mac is at about 11 days of uptime and it's under constant use. At this moment, I can't say it's less reliable then my Linux machines.

In this specific case, however, I'd consider ditching the enclosure and ducting cold air through the internal chassis/heatsink. A Macpro is, essentially a heatsink with boards mounted on it and I'd just let the chassis do that part.


Is 11 days of uptime supposed to be impressive?


It's hardly the uptime of someone who's struggling with kernel panics and random crashes. Last power down was when I embarked on a trip. The previous one was a system update. In fact, I never saw a kernel panic with this machine.


Here's my 10.6.8 Snow Leopard MacBook Pro laptop:

sh-3.2# uptime 11:28 up 117 days, 19:13, 4 users, load averages: 0.91 0.98 0.95


I think the part you quoted was referring to hackintosh machines only.

Still, there's no doubt in my mind that Apple are doing some "move fast and break things" OS development.


One really shouldn't blame Apple for OSX not working on a Hackintosh.


> People are having kernel panics and struggling to keep their machines running with current software.

A guy I work with has been running several heavily used hackintosh servers without issue. They have been very reliable and he's happily converted existing Linux servers to hackintosh. He's been doing this for a while and knows exactly what hardware to use.


Of course they would.

Legally? Yeah, good luck.

Edit: I think the more obvious answer to this is that they would rehouse these babies in a more convenient, albeit likely custom form-factor.


It is appealing in a way, but I also think it would put the business at legal risk in a way that is totally unconscionable. We cannot run a Hackintosh in production for a single moment, the long term ramifications could be immense.

The chassis we designed represents my attempt to re-house the Mac Pros in something more suitable for the datacenter.


Yeah, the legal risk just isn't worth it.

It'd be interesting to see someone rip apart a Mac Pro and build an entire form-factor around its setup.

Don't get me wrong, what you guys have done is extremely beautiful in all ways, but I can't help to think that if someone wanted to do this with say a Mini... say you take a 1u rack, drill some new holes into it... hmm.


The Minis are incredibly simple machines inside, and their airflow is not great. You could pop their logic boards out and run them without the chassis. With some thought it wouldn't be too tough to significantly improve their airflow for this environment.

I do have an existing rack design that holds 64 of them (and other people have gone denser, with operational compromises I prefer not to make), so there's no great impetus on my side to rip them out of their enclosures.

My Mac Mini rack design is shown in a little more detail in our previous article: http://photos.imgix.com/building-a-graphics-card-for-the-int...


Thanks for the detailed response. Really cool stuff you guys have going on.

What other companies utilize Apple hardware in this way at this kind of scale? While not "out of this world" in comparison to some of the big players who have tackled scaling, it's definitely significant considering Apple hardware.


I'm not aware of anyone who specifically uses Mac Pros (although I've heard some private rumblings). I suspect part of the issue is that the old form factor was not very rack-friendly, and people haven't gotten comfortable with the new form factor. Maybe this chassis design will help move this forward.

Mac Minis are a little more common than it might seem at first glance, particularly for use cases that some other people have outlined in their comments throughout this thread. Mozilla uses them to test Firefox builds on OS X for instance. I would imagine that places like Sauce Labs must have a Mac Mini farm to facilitate browser tests on OS X.

I'm not aware of any other service that operates in the same space as imgix that runs outside of EC2, so they definitely aren't using OS X there. I think in general there's a sort of disregard for the particular graphics processing benefits that OS X provides (as evidenced by some of the comments in the thread).

I would also be remiss to not mention Mac Mini Colo (http://macminicolo.net/) who do co-located hosting. imgix started out with them, and they did a great job.

There's another interesting use case where you need to have OS X (or iOS): when you want to display photos taken on iOS devices with their applied filters (the images are stored pristine, and the filters are applied on top when you view them). To recreate these photos exactly as they were on the device, you ideally need to render it within an Apple environment. You can probably imagine the use case for a service that stores a lot of user generated photography, in a world where iPhones are the most popular cameras (https://www.flickr.com/cameras).

I also heard through the grapevine today that a certain film studio is interested in getting one of these chassis to test out, because they saw this article. That's pretty exciting to hear, even though we don't profit in any way from the sale of these chassis.




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