Mac Minis are horrible server hardware. We've had a couple running as servers. They fail randomly. Their hard drives fail. They don't rack mount easily. The only reason to have them is if you inherit some old ones, don't want to throw them away, and then don't mind replacing and throwing failed units away pretty often.
I think I have about about 20 Mac Mini's for various roles around my office. Probably the most used computers / servers in our entire environment. They're starting to show their age though. One by one they are being retired.
So much naysaying here. The Mac Minis are excellent for certain use cases (like a home server) and they last forever. Great that Apple is updating them regularly.
yep. another use case, specifically for mac minis, is (was?) build servers. buy 20-30 mac minis, lock them in a dedicated room in the office, use them to execute build & test CI jobs for company's ios app. no one is carrying them around, they're used as servers.
As someone who uses Mac Minis for servers the biggest reason is value.
I can fit 2 Mac Minis in a 1RU. And that is a Core i7, 16GB, 2xSSD which is about 20-30x faster than what Amazon, Rackspace offers for the same price. Now throw in the fact that you can (a) send it back to Apple if it breaks or (b) sell it on eBay for nearly the same price it all becomes very compelling.
Given that I use a Java/Hazelcast/Cassandra stack I can simply add more Mac Minis to linearly scale with no single point of failure.
They actually had a Mac Mini Server as well for a bit. It made sense because it had a second hard drive instead of an optical drive and came with a Mac OS X server, back when that was a standalone $499 product: https://support.apple.com/kb/SP586
(Not sure what differentiates the later model Mac Mini Servers from the regular Mac Minis, since Mac OS X Server just became a $19 App Store purchase, and optical drives were no longer a thing in Mac Minis)
You can get Mac minis at many cloud providers (expensive at AWS, cheap at Hetzner). They weren't designed as servers, but are good value for many server use cases.
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.
Apple knows that people use them as servers.
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