It’s not great as a headless server.

With full disk encryption enabled you need a keyboard and display attached at boot to unlock it. You then need to sign in to your account to start services. You can use an IP based KVM but that’s another thing to manage.

If you use Docker, it runs in a vm instead of native.

With a Linux based ARM box you can use full disk encryption, use drop bear to ssh in on boot to unlock disks, native docker, ability to run proxmox etc.

Mac minis/studio have potential to be great low powered home servers but Apple is not going down that route for consumers. I’d be curious if they are using their own silicon and own server oriented distro internally for some things.

They fixed unlock in the last release:

"On a Mac with Apple silicon with macOS 26 or later, FileVault can be unlocked over SSH after a restart if Remote Login is turned on and a network connection is available."

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/managing-filevault-...

Thanks for the reply. I'm looking to replace my aging mini pc with a mac mini, so I'm quite interested in any limitations here.

The full disk encryption I can live without. I'm assuming these limitations don't apply if it's disabled. [Ah, I just saw the other reply that this has now been fixed]

I was aware of the Docker in a VM issue. I haven't tested this out yet, but my expectation is this can be mitigated via https://github.com/apple/container ?

I appreciate any insights here.

    The root of trust for Private Cloud Compute is our compute node: custom-built server hardware that brings the power and security of Apple silicon to the data center, with the same hardware security technologies used in iPhone, including the Secure Enclave and Secure Boot.

Granted, I don't know if it's really server oriented or if they're a bunch of iPhones on cards plugged into existing servers.