There’s no advantage to being Mac like.

You can’t pick the most expensive brands and claim they’re “well rounded”. It’s like buying a luxury car and saying it’s your reliable little daily commuter.

The point is there is no valid reason besides the three reasons I stated for someone to want to buy a Mac. Either you like the looks, the brand or you just don’t know any better and you refuse to learn. Each of those options is valid, but you do have to pick one of them.

What is it about the MacBook Air that makes you feel it is well rounded? Why do you need the compute? Is it for video editing or 3D modeling? Because those run fantastic on midrange hardware now. Are you a developer? Because Mac hasn’t been the developer choice in over two decades. You know what’s better than being Linux like? Being Linux. WSL and the TPM chip removed anything else that might draw a rational consumer to Apple. Do a little gaming? I’ve got bad news about Macs. Lol. There’s no real reason anymore.

My DBA has had the same two monitors for a decade and most of the devs just use whatever monitor was on sale.

Technical people are not the people buying Macs. Mac has its place and it hasn’t been technical folks since TPM chips and WSL.

If like to see what you think the “features” are that can’t be replaced. Literally every single feature of a Mac is implemented better with Windows or Windows with WSL. “It’s closer to Linux” No, Linux is closer to Linux and I can’t dual boot or WSL on Apple silicone. “Muh security” TPM is 10x more practical and slightly beats out Enclave in performance. “Muh hardware” if you spend that much money on any laptop it’ll perform well. If you spend that much on a Windows laptop you’d get even better hardware. You could build multiple Linux machines that each outperform the Mac for the same price. “It just works” I have had multiple hours long troubleshooting call with a Jr Engineer that proves otherwise. “Muh package manager” if you struggle with this, you’re not technical. “Muh iOS dev” iOS/Android apps can be tested in a pipeline or through the myriad of tools like Device Farm. Ship it with Fastlane and call it a day. You can handle both app stores this way.

Why do you want a Mac? The only valid choices are aesthetics, brand loyalty or ignorance.

Sr Architect. Lol.

It’s not uncommon to just disable hardware you don’t intent to use. You don’t have to do it mechanically. There’s a lot of kiosks around that have a lot more capabilities than they’re used for.

If you’re looking to do it with a Pi, banana, orange or raspberry, let me know. I’ve spent way too much time finding the perfect screen to use and case to print. I build a rechargeable handheld device that can pull up all my surveillance cameras and functions as a master remote.

I’m not asking you to. Those are rhetorical. You either pay for them and are wrong about your costs or you don’t pay for them and you’re a hack, your software is a joke, and you don’t belong in tech.

You’re either lying or not knowledgeable on the topic enough to have an informed opinion.

You’re thinking about it too hard.

Just use a launcher, sometimes called Kiosk mode/launchers, to launch one app. You can disable the other hardware if you want, but it doesn’t seem like it really helps you reach your goal.

You could probably pull it off with a Pi Zero, battery pack, and screen if you want to get into it a bit. It’s not that hard at all.

Does your average non technical user who wants a device like this care if it’s not the highest quality screen?

The demographic that is just Apple fanboys and they weren’t giving up their overpriced garbage no matter what.

You don’t pay for electricity or pay a fee for using the data center? You don’t pay an engineer to do maintenance? You don’t pay for your own alerting system? You don’t pay for the network security tools? You don’t pay for your subscription to Docker Hub? You don’t pay for a second physical location you can swap to in an incident?

I do these migrations for a living. I know you’re a liar. Cloud beats on prem everytime. You simply cannot compete with their economy of scale.

Why couldn’t you just use a custom launcher? This isn’t a hard task.

If you’re doing actual big compute its cheaper in the cloud. Considerably. It’s also very easy and cheap to store lots of data. You will never be able to compete with their price for storage so I have no idea why you think that would be true.

He’s just making stuff up anyway. It’s not difficult to pull apart those data sets. The information is readily available. It just doesn’t show the first thing that came out of his mouth is correct.

I’ve done the on prem design. I’ve migrated people entirely to the cloud. I specialize a little in between.

Without any shred of doubt the cloud is going to be more cost effective than self hosting for 99% of all use cases. They’re priced that way intentionally. You cannot compete with Cloudflare/AWS/GCP/Vultr/Akami/Digital Ocean/etc.

My homelab isn’t about scaling, production workloads and definitely isn’t accessible to anyone but me. I’d argue using it in any other way defeats the purpose and shows a lack of understanding.

That’s not the point. Its unprofessional. Someone is going to smash and grab OPs idea and actually have the skills to host it properly. Probably at a fraction of the cost because OP doesn’t understand that hosting SaaS products out of his house isn’t professional or effective.

Also; cloud is cheaper than self hosting at any small amount of scale. This wouldn’t cost much to run in AWS if built properly. The people who struggle with AWS costs are not professionals and have no business hosting anything.

SLAs?

You’re going to need a redundant ISP and a generator. You’ve left the territory where it’s economical to self host something if that’s what you’re looking at. You still have several other single points of failure.

And I’ll be honest, your setup isn’t ready for an SLA either. Just having a second machine is such a small part of what you need to do before doing any guarantees. Are you using a Dynamic DNS service? What’s the networking setup look like? Router to Compute?

From the sounds of it, you’re not a professional. It might be time to engage an expert if you want to grow this.

You’ll need a place for the dialogue. Do you know anywhere that would work? I don’t know how we can organize at that level, but I’m willing to learn.

They’re openly fascists. I don’t know why you’re trying to split hairs. They’re not hiding it.

No you don’t. Fascists shouldn’t be given time of day. People who don’t act with integrity or good faith don’t get to sit with civilized society. The ideas aren’t valid and don’t have any merit. They come from uneducated people who have had their head filled with hate and prejudice. They’re not good citizens or decent people. They’re hate filled time bombs. They’re so mentally weak they gave into hating other people based on prejudices talking heads have them.

They don’t get a seat. They’re opinion is not valid. They should be ostracized by all civilized society until they stop being antisocial and destructive.

And that’s the nice, merciful and patient option.

Yep. It stimulates milk production and their paws contain scent glads that let them “mark” people or things. It’s a high honor to be kneaded on by the fuzzy guys.