August 1, 2026

Adding a trashcan to the orchard

The newest tree in the orchard is a 2013 Mac Pro 6,1: 3.5 GHz 6-core Xeon E5-1650 v2, 16 GB of ECC RAM, dual FirePro D500s, bought in 2017 and still on Monterey. On paper it benchmarks below a 2017 laptop. As a headless always-on box, it beats both of ours.

Why a 12-year-old desktop

Our other Intel boxes are laptops, and laptop coolers give up minutes into a sustained build. The trashcan has one big slow fan and a 450W thermal core, so its six cores hold full turbo indefinitely at around 14 dBA. It idles at about 43 watts, which rounds to $5 a month to leave on forever.

The GPUs are dying. It doesn't matter.

The D500 is the 6,1's famous weak point; Apple ran a repair program for these cards. Ours already flashed a black screen at login once. Headless, none of that matters: a CI box over SSH never touches the GPU. That's the trick with this machine: take the one component that fails and remove it from the job description.

Onboarding: same as any tree

The usual steps: Tailscale, Remote Login, SSH key, passwordless sudo, never sleep. Being a desktop it gets one bonus the laptops can't offer: auto-restart after a power failure.

sudo systemsetup -setremotelogin on
sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1
sudo pmset -a autorestart 1   # desktops only

First job: self-hosted CI runner

A GitHub Actions macOS runner only needs macOS 11+, so the box is useful today, still on stock Monterey. Go builds don't need AVX2 or a GPU, and six non-throttling cores with ECC RAM make a better always-on runner than either laptop.

# on the trashcan: install and register the runner
./config.sh --url https://github.com/<org>/<repo> --token <token>
./svc.sh install && ./svc.sh start

# in the workflow:
runs-on: self-hosted

How it stacks up on a real build

Same clean xcodebuild plus a simulator boot, run on every box in the fleet. The trashcan is the fastest Intel machine we have, and it holds that pace all day without a fan tantrum.

The M3 is in another league, as expected. Among the Intels, the trashcan beats both laptops on a single run, and the gap widens on back-to-back builds once the laptop coolers heat-soak.

Next: Sequoia and simulators

Stock Monterey caps it at Xcode 14, which is too old for iOS 26 testing. OpenCore Legacy Patcher supports the 6,1 through Sequoia, the same OS our other Intel boxes run, which unlocks Xcode 26.3 and current iOS simulator runtimes. That upgrade plus a cheap RAM bump turns it into simulator overflow capacity behind the same manzanasd leases as everything else.

Intel ends after this generation: no Tahoe on OCLP, and macOS 27 drops Intel entirely. Sequoia is the end of the line, and that's fine. The orchard doesn't need its trees to be young, just to hold a lease and do the work.