I recently came into a Macbook Pro, 18 GB of Ram, 1TB of storage. Its the only Mac thing I own. Its a real shame I have no idea what to do with this and it is just sitting there. I want to use it for something, but I dont know what. My homelab already has a huge host with a threadripper in it (which also fell into my hands), a pi-hole on a low end pi, and an old PC that runs a Minecraft server just fine. Any suggestions for what to do with this bad boy? I’m not afraid of any OS, all are welcome here. I tend to mostly host media and game servers, I do not have any home automation yet.
Edit: thank you everyone for the suggestions. I love this community <3
Dev device for Asahi Linux, don’t think M3 support is quite there but if you had the time could help contribute
iMessage server?
Could I move away from Google Messages with that? Or is it not a way to make androids compatible with iMessage?
Yeah, an Android client can connect to a macOS server to send iMessages
Thank you for the suggestion. I’ll take a look at that. It doesnt sound too hard. I am in the process of recovering my icloud so I may have to wait for that.
donate it to meJokes aside… If you don’t use Mac stuff at all and don’t mind bricking the computer, would you be interested in trying out Asahi Linux for science?
I’m not familiar with the project at all so I’m not sure how it works, but it might be cool to try. The lead developer had some personal issues recently but is otherwise quite active on Mastodon
If I do nothing else at all with it I will consider this. Its better the body goes to science than do nothing.
it’s actually remarkably easy to install and remove if you dont want it. Last time I used asahi it was cool but not ready for daily use. The m3 is a powerful little chip. I’d use that machine as my daily driver laptop whenever I needed it. Can do coding, music stuff, video editing, etc. I can do all that on my m1 pro, even!
alternatively, sit at a coffee shop, put a mech keyboard on top, and type a pretentious manuscript hoping someone will notice how cool u r (:
I honestly feel like a raccoon that has somehow wandered into a five star hotel suite every time I am on this. Most of my machines are 8+ years old except for one other.
I’m surprised dabbling with the Mac creative suites hasn’t been suggested yet. It’s the main reason a lot of users go for the OS over Windows or Linux.
Its got them. I’m not a fan boy by any means but they make very nice toolsets. Thats one thing I like about Mac is a lot of the shipped programs are good. Microsoft has been dragging ass on that as years go by.
What’s you home lab ecosystem? My years in the Unix/Linux CLI world make it my preferred laptop (especially with homebrew).
Its a mix, only about five devices. Mostly Linux but the threadripper is windows and runs game servers. I did think about using it for that instead of my gaming desktop. Dedicated devices are the shit and my gaming rig is showing its age.
Use it as a laptop?
This is a terrible suggestion. Use it as a frisbee
As someone who really needs a laptop but is broke because of cancer, I am very jealous.
You can always use it as something like a Pi-Hole if youre fine with leaving it on at all times. Probably overkill for a Pi-Hole, though. Anyway nearly any PC can be turned into some kind of network appliance.
Hope you find a good use for it!
DM me, while it won’t be this laptop, I have a few others I got from work before they had a proper recycle program that still work fine. Nothing fancy but I couldn’t let my former boss toss them.
Dang, such a generous offer! Any laptop is better than no laptop! Thank you for your kindness!
No problem! Technology should be used, most of what is thrown away isnt even close to done. We can and should do better.
I have an M1 MacBook Pro that I mostly connect with via ssh and it is currently running as an Ollama server, but it has run various projects over the past few years.
I have wanted to try that, I always wondered how much world building I’d have to do to build an llm off of it to control NPCs talking. But recently with world events I have been turned off of those. Maybe I could try it though. Thats all I would want to do with an llm.
I mostly use Linux but I have a MacBook from a previous job. I mostly use it for media consumption. It’s not the problem it once was but back in the day, Linux and streaming services didn’t always get along because of DRM.
I do like how using macOS pushes me to get the design details right on my own software. I mean, say what you want about Apple but they do usually put care into the aesthetics and design details. When I feel like a project is done because it’s functional, I’m wrong. That extra 10% effort to use the right fonts or consistent margins or whatever is what makes good software great.
So, I would say use it as a learning tool. There’s plenty things that are worse on macOS but it’s different. And that’s healthy. Periodically using a different OS with a different goal is good for you. (Don’t bother with Windows 11. Nothing of honor is to be found there. Distro hop and keep Windows in a VM if you need it.)
I also found it helpful when working from home. Like, I’d spend all day on my Linux machine writing code or whatever and then I’d clock out and just use the MacBook. I could have probably used a PlayStation or done anything but sometimes, you’re busy. Switching operating systems and having zero work stuff on one computer can be good when you’ve had a long day.
The thing I use Mac for primarily is music production. Garage Band is very approachable and free if you’re just getting started. Both Linux and Windows struggle to perform as well as MacOS does in this regard.
I have Pro Tools 12 lol, I prefer Ableton and Reaper now. I could take a look st Logic again I didnt get to use Logic X when it came out and it was cool. It might be worth keeping around for audio design now that I make shitty games I never finish or release.
Oh man I’ve kept my 2015 Macbook Air around purely because it handles light Ableton sessions better than my old Windows desktop did, and more reliably than Ableton under WINE. Ableton is a dream on Macs, I’d love to switch to Reaper though; would you say it’s worth switching?
Honestly, I’d only recommend Reaper if you wanted to do audio work on Linux. Its a catch 22 for sure, but I did like Ableton better just all around.
I heard bitwig is where it’s at for Linux these days (for electronic music at least)
Ableton is a dream on Mac compared to Windows. Basically zero latency.
It would be a fast host (and client) for more heavily modded Minecraft.
You could self-host an LLM, but unfortunately 18GB total system RAM (so less than 14GB usable by the GPU?) is pretty skinny.
You can do some stuff to an iPhone with one. Like sideloading, I think?
You think this would run Project Ozone 3 better? I dont think anything will with that modpack as is but my current host has to be reset daily or it crashes.
Some mod packs are just unstable.
Could be a specific area/item crashing it, and TBH all modded servers need regular maintenance like mob culling and regular server restarts. But it could also be a problem with your host, yeah, and the M3 Pro is going to be way faster than any CPU your host has. Plenty of RAM too.
I’d recommend running it with GraalVM EE as your JVM.
I tend to gravitate towards Enigmatica and ATM myself (as their devs/dev process is pretty good), but not sure about Ozone or skyblock mod packs.
The music mixing capabilities are very solid if you’re looking to use your new laptop as a creative outlet. The default software is solid for journaling and writing as well. You can set up shortcuts to run some custom automations as well. Hope this helps!
The transcode performance on the apple silicon is pretty solidif you wanted to go the media server route. Or have a really expensive NAS host lol
I have a macbook for work and I like it generally, it integrates well with other *nix environments. But if you don’t use a laptop or don’t want to have the uncomfortable interruption to your hotkey muscle memory it’s a bit useless. I’d either sell it and/or find someone in my network that needs it
By “came into”, I’m going to assume that you either received it for free or got it very inexpensively because of circumstances.
In which case I’d take the opportunity to make a profit by selling it for far more than it’s value to some moron who see’s an Apple logo and automatically creams themselves. They’re not hard to find.
Then you can buy whatever you want.
Switch emulation.
