I recently came into a Macbook Pro, 18 GB of Ram, 1TB of storage. Its the only Mac thing I own. Its a real shame I have no idea what to do with this and it is just sitting there. I want to use it for something, but I dont know what. My homelab already has a huge host with a threadripper in it (which also fell into my hands), a pi-hole on a low end pi, and an old PC that runs a Minecraft server just fine. Any suggestions for what to do with this bad boy? I’m not afraid of any OS, all are welcome here. I tend to mostly host media and game servers, I do not have any home automation yet.
Edit: thank you everyone for the suggestions. I love this community <3
Use it as a laptop?
What’s you home lab ecosystem? My years in the Unix/Linux CLI world make it my preferred laptop (especially with homebrew).
Its a mix, only about five devices. Mostly Linux but the threadripper is windows and runs game servers. I did think about using it for that instead of my gaming desktop. Dedicated devices are the shit and my gaming rig is showing its age.
The thing I use Mac for primarily is music production. Garage Band is very approachable and free if you’re just getting started. Both Linux and Windows struggle to perform as well as MacOS does in this regard.
I have Pro Tools 12 lol, I prefer Ableton and Reaper now. I could take a look st Logic again I didnt get to use Logic X when it came out and it was cool. It might be worth keeping around for audio design now that I make shitty games I never finish or release.
Ableton is a dream on Mac compared to Windows. Basically zero latency.
As someone who really needs a laptop but is broke because of cancer, I am very jealous.
You can always use it as something like a Pi-Hole if youre fine with leaving it on at all times. Probably overkill for a Pi-Hole, though. Anyway nearly any PC can be turned into some kind of network appliance.
Hope you find a good use for it!
DM me, while it won’t be this laptop, I have a few others I got from work before they had a proper recycle program that still work fine. Nothing fancy but I couldn’t let my former boss toss them.
