💻Namespace Racks Hundreds of MacBook Pros in a Datacenter for iOS CI

Your iOS CI might soon run on rack-mounted MacBooks

Namespace just showed off a datacenter full of hundreds of MacBook Pros, and yes, it looks as weird as it sounds. The company builds and tests iOS apps, and it needs real Macs for that. The iOS Simulator only runs on macOS, and Apple wants a recent Xcode version before you can ship to the App Store. So if you want Apple builds at scale, you're stuck buying Apple hardware and figuring out how to keep it alive. The obvious answer would be Mac Minis, which are cheaper and better suited to a rack. The catch? Supply has been a mess, and Mac Mini got M6 cores after going 10 months without an M5 refresh. So Namespace is running MacBook Pros, each with an IP KVM, a 10G Ethernet NIC, and custom heat-guiding holders. Mac Minis and Studios are coming into the fleet soon, which will make management easier. The operational details are where it gets painful. FileVault locks the disk, and the password prompt disappears from the external screen after 5 minutes of inactivity. Namespace worked around it with SSH and fdesetup authrestart, which keeps the disk unlocked across reboots. Their Mac solution sits on Apple's Virtualization framework, and Apple caps you at two macOS VMs per physical Mac, so every machine gets split in half.