I recently got myself into an accident and 2 things came out of it. One is a broken MacBook Pro M4 Pro, that I am heartbroken about as it's my favourite machine and I cannot spend so much on replacing the display. 2nd, much better thing is that I got ahold of M3 Ultra 256GB Studio. As both of those events were pretty expensive,that got me thinking, would it actually be feasible to rent those out to the community for way lower than cloud providers do? Obviously I don't have the SLA of six zeroes, but my 1Gbit/s EU link is stable, electricity is not terribly priced, that would help me offload the cost of those a bit.
Would any of you be interested in that, and if so, what would you be willing to pay for bare metal M4 Pro or M3 Ultra for a week or a month?
I guess that I would rent it out based on trust here, not to random person, and would share all network access via Tailscale.
Thanks!!
josefcub•16h ago
Another thing to consider is that most people would likely rent it for the unified memory and AI usage. Speaking from experience, your M3 Ultra will run _hot_ while performing; you'll need to plan a good, cool environment that the machine lives in, and set the fans to always run via something like MacsFanControl or some other utility, since it won't engage the fan at a higher rate just because your GPU is pegged and generating all the heat.
The third thing is knowing how to balance out its memory usage. SSDs have a finite lifetime in terms of writes. Macs are _very_ good at not wearing out SSDs, but if your renter botches something in a config and you spend days or weeks swapping in and out of virtual memory, your machine will wear faster and harder.
realaccfromPL•16h ago
Nevertheless I agree on everything you pointed out :)
brudgers•6h ago
The difficulty will be instilling confidence regarding reliability, security, etc. among such professionals.