Mac minis make great servers. Wonderfully power-efficient, while running much faster than what I'd normally get.
I’ve been using my five-year old M1 Mac mini lately for hosting my homelab stuff and I have to say, it’s fantastic.
Using a Mac mini as a server isn’t a new concept, and if anything, the old Mini design was actually quite iconic to be seen in stacks. What I want to point out is how great they are at doing server duties, thanks to Apple Silicon.
podman stats on my M1 Mac mini.
After the couple of months I spent overworking myself, things have gone to normal for over a month now (thankfully) and after work hours, I was finally able to get back to my personal homelab setup. As always, things are always constrained to one’s own free time AFTER touching some grass and dealing with life stuff, but we’ve had several holidays lately that had given me enough homelab time.
One of my objectives for my homelab setup was to repurpose my unused Mac mini M1. It was left unused since I did get a powerful M4 Macbook Pro and I have one too many M1s in reserve. It was also something I kept in mind because I did notice some of my selfhosted apps in my NAS were clearly not performing to their best with its 5-year old Intel Celeron J3455 processor.
Oh, hold on. Did I say 5-year old? The NAS is 5 years old (as of May 11, 2025), but the processor was originally released in Q3 2016. It’s nearly 9 years old. Yeesh. It is showing its age, especially when I learned that the NAS is running a couple of major Docker versions behind.
I’m not replacing this DS1019+ anytime soon of course! It does a fantastic job at being the NAS that it is, happily serving several terabytes of my storage on-demand, and keeping it backed up to multiple storage providers and in good condition. I can see it running for 5 more years or so. I’ll give credit to Synology here for running great hardware and software, but if even Intel says the processor it’s running in is end-of-life, then yeah…
So what I decided is to let the NAS do NAS duties, and let the Mac mini become a compute node of sorts that runs on modern hardware. Almost all my containers will be running on the Mac mini.