It's disappointing that the author thinks a NAS is some off-the-shelf appliance of sorts. Your old desktop with a few big HDDs in it can be a NAS. It's more about the role.
I am seriously considering switching some workloads from amd/linux to mac mini and osx at least until there is a better platform for cost-efficient ml inference for whisper and other large ml models where common cpu/gpu ram is cheap and convenient.<p>Amd should've had this market sealed with their integrated graphics platforms, maybe they will still get there with the new crosscompilers to Vulcan.<p>Don't need massive perf just 2x faster than cpu and better energy efficiency.
Is there a specific reason why Mac is particularly good for this?<p>One possible reason. I remember talking to a tech who worked for a company that made information kiosks. The kiosks ran Windows, but on a Mac Mini. He told me the reason was they had less hardware failures when they used them.
How could OP fail to mention media server?<p>> Running a web server to serve that page and a few other random pages.<p>Dull. Not just any web server, with Apache 2.4 already installed by default, once httpd.conf is configured, in particular for directory listings and with softlinks to directories with proper permissions, and once the server is started, macOS serves media, i.e. pictures, music and video files that's just sitting in folders on the filesystem, no web development necessary. I never understood the need for dedicated media server software when Apache2 (Web Sharing) has done it so effortlessly since Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah; it has always <i>just been there.</i>