Companies maybe. I bought the last of the previous generation to have a small desktop with redundant internal drives. A Mac Pro would have been budget overkill.
At the time is was useful, as the Mac desktop was my daily driver. Unfortunately current macOS versions are really sluggish, so its currently a home "server" running Fedora 31.
The 16GB RAM limit is becoming a bit of a problem, so I will likely replace it with an Intel NUC.
Think so? I didn’t know Apple even made a server package since 2010 or so. I bought a Mini so I could have a low cost, decently specced desktop Mac hooked up to my two large monitors at home. An iMac was too expensive and I’d rather use standalone displays anyway. We also have lots of them in my wife’s office for the same reasons.
I mean, companies literally made rack mounts for Mac Minis, to install 6-8x of them at once in proper server racks. They didn't build this because no one was using it.
The post I was replying to said that was a large part of the reason to buy Mac Minis.
First, even though there were quite a few decent-sized Mac Mini deployments like you're describing, I'd be genuinely surprised if that accounted for a decent chunk of Mini sales overall. Some, sure! But most? I wouldn't expect it.
Second, does any of that require running Server? We have a database and application server in the office here, but it's not running Server: it's just plain macOS running daemon processes.
At least a decade ago, it wasn't that uncommon for me to see Mac minis kicking around as "office worker" desktops in places that gave developers Mac laptops. Get one of those, bring your own cheaper display, plug in a wired keyboard, and go. My suspicion is that "cheap desktop" has always accounted for more Mac mini sales than it's usually given credit for.
Note that "server" is a role you might use a Mini for, but "Server" in the article's title is a specific software package. You can have a server not running Server.
Also, I bought a Mini for my desktop because it's tiny, cheap, and powerful, and I can use my own screens.
Mobile developers build huge mac mini rack farms because they need to virtualize osx on top of Apple hardware for CI/CD/testing/store releases (or they used to back when I last worked in mobile dev). That's the bulk of where I've seen MacOS used to control and provision minis (usually with plenty of ansible/chef/etc as well).
10+ devs running integration tests/etc that require different xcode targets, branches, etc. I haven't done this in years but it was a pretty basic mac mini farm 8+ years ago when I did do it with macos + ansible. I really doubt it's changed much (albeit 3rd parties like testflight/etc might be better integrated nowadays). It's a huge reason Macstadium, etc exists where you can just rent mini farms.
I have a Mini running stuff like that but it's not running the Server package. I don't think Server was ever very popular, even on Macs that were being used as servers.
"Technology right wing" (my phrasing) numero uno apple fanboy John Gruber used to post so much about Mac mini colocs. Haven't seen much from him lately about that stuff.
