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Comment by ramgine | Hacker News Reader

I just retired my m1 air to being a server this month. They’re very capable laptops. If the neo is even comparable in spec it’s excellent for the price

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My m1 air with 1TB ssd and 16GB of ram is a little champion, I use it during travel to play indie games like Hades II or Slay the Spire, and it works really well, better than my Steam Deck which broke. The only issue it really has is when I try to plug it into my docking station it struggles mightily with 2 2K screens and a 4K screen, so I just use my desktop in that case.

I am jealous of my wife’s 13” M5 iPad Pro though, that oled screen is gorgeous, a wonder of modern engineering.

> [...] and it works really well, better than my Steam Deck which broke.

Well, the MacBook Air was also a lot more expensive than the Steam Deck?

The M1 also consumes more power.

I just bought a second hand M1 64GB as my main work laptop, haha. They definitely are capable laptops

Yeah! My M1 air is now my iOS build server since GH actions bill macOS mins at 10x the price.

How do you use M1 Air as iOS build server. Is 8G sufficient for only doing iOS builds? Do you connect to it remotely?

Couls you please describe your dev process.

It works out pretty okay for me, I do it since GH runners are very expensive and I have my own hardware so why not. https://docs.github.com/en/actions/concepts/runners/self-hos...

I setup a self hosted runner and then use that in my CI workflows. Then I disabled it from sleeping so it can clamshell forever and now it sits here in my living room silently workin' https://imgur.com/a/EaBICdo

why does GH actions bill macOS minis 10X?

Ah sorry minutes, they bill the most for macOS probably because of what a pain it is to scale it with apples EULA (I'm guessing) https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-...

ah ok, minutes makes more sense. thanks.

Mins here being short for minutes, not minis.

And, presumably for a combination of the Mac build (and hardware) being of niche interest and sitting outside the standard Linux workflows so it's annoying to administer. And serving a money-making audience (iOS app devs) who have a revenue stream and see the extra CI cost as worth it.

What is a macOS mini…

Not “mini”, “mins” -> minutes.

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