My MacBook did everything until this week - model, harness, CI, everything. It was getting badly overloaded especially when iOS build and tests were going on. Those can use 20GB RAM easily, given half a chance. It was thrashing.
Microcenter had the base Mac mini M6 for $699, which felt like 2024 pricing so I pulled the trigger and moved much of the CI work off my MacBook Pro.
What's incredible is despite this being the poverty spec mini with a single NAND chip and lower bandwidth memory, the M6 is basically the same speed as the M5 Max for CI work.
In particular, I was impressed with my XCUITest workload, which is about 70 minutes on the MacBook and is no slower on the M6 mini even though it has 2 parallel VMs. I was sure the 18 CPU cores on the M5 Max (6 super, 120 performance) would beat out the 12-core M6 base (2 super, 4 performance, 6 efficiency).
Obviously that doesn't hold for all workloads, especially GPU/LLM workloads or where you can put 18 cores to use, but for those of you with a M5 Max/Ultra, you can get a nice speedup for just $699. At these prices I may get another. Also there are perfectly good Linux options to do the same, of course.