# I couldn't afford a new Mac, so I rented a 64 GB server and turned my MacBook into a thin client > Source: > Published: 2026-11-06 23:09:37+00:00 My MacBook Pro has an M2 Pro and 16 GB of RAM. For a while that was plenty. Then my normal day became: a few Next/Vite dev servers, Docker with Postgres and Redis, a couple of editors, a browser with too many tabs, and AI coding agents running in terminals next to all of it. Memory pressure stayed yellow, the fans came on for no reason, and the disk kept filling up with `node_modules`, Docker images and build caches. The obvious fix was a new Mac with more memory. The honest problem: I can't afford one right now. A higher-spec MacBook costs a lot of money up front. A dedicated server costs a monthly fee I can actually fit into a budget. So I tried something else: keep the Mac, but stop asking it to do the heavy work. **The server:** a Hetzner AX41 from their server auction / dedicated line. **The Mac:** the same 16 GB M2 Pro, now mostly running a terminal, a browser and an editor. Everything that eats memory or disk lives on the server now: repos, dependencies, Docker, dev servers, databases and the agents. The server is on my tailnet as `hause-dev`. The firewall (ufw) denies everything incoming by default. The only public ports are 80 and 443 for Caddy. SSH, mosh, Samba and my other dev services only accept connections over the `tailscale0` interface. That means: `ssh hause` works from my Mac, and nothing on the public internet can even try it.`--host` (or `-H 0.0.0.0` for Next), I open `http://hause-dev:3002` on my Mac and it just works. The rest of the internet can't see it.`ssh -N -L 3002:localhost:3002 hause`. I don't run Docker on the Mac anymore. The Docker CLI on my Mac uses a context that points at the server over SSH: ``` docker context create hause --docker "host=ssh://hause" docker context use hause ``` `docker ps`, `docker compose up` and so on all run on the server. For a GUI I use Gantry, a native macOS Docker app, pointed at the same SSH host. My Mac no longer carries a Linux VM eating several GB of RAM. Sometimes I just want to drag a file in or open an image without thinking about `scp`. So the server shares my code folder over Samba (SMB), the same protocol macOS uses for network drives. Samba only listens on the Tailscale interface, so the share isn't reachable from anywhere else. On the Mac it's built in: in Finder, press ⌘K, enter `smb://hause-dev`, and save the password to Keychain. The server then shows up under Locations in the sidebar like any other drive. I added it to Login Items so it reconnects when I log in. It's not for heavy work. Running `npm install` or `git` over a network share at 135 ms would be miserable, so those still happen over SSH on the server itself. The share is for browsing, previewing and dragging files around. This was the scariest part. I had a lot of projects in `~/code`, some with uncommitted work, gitignored `.env` files, and branches that only existed locally. Instead of trusting `rsync` and hoping, I: `~/archive` on the server instead of deleting them. Only after everything matched did I start cleaning up the Mac. Credentials. Cloud logins, API keys, SSH private keys, AWS and Kubernetes configs, CLI auth tokens: none of it got copied. Every tool on the server got logged into fresh. It's slower, but it means the server only has the access I deliberately gave it, and I know exactly what that is. The server got the same zsh setup, CLI tools and dotfiles as my Mac, so SSHing in feels like home. My server's SSH key got added to the other machines I manage, so I can hop from the server to them just like I used to from the Mac. Once all my dev servers lived somewhere I couldn't see, I wanted a quick way to check on them from any device. So I built **su.hause.dev**: a small Go binary that shows the server's live process list, memory and CPU, and lets me quit runaway processes. Repo: [https://github.com/dilutedev/hause.dev](https://github.com/dilutedev/hause.dev) Some decisions I'm happy with: `/usr/bin/kill`. The same repo also holds the hause.dev landing page and the deploy scripts (systemd unit, sudoers rule, Caddy site, install script). If you can afford a MacBook with 32 or 64 GB of RAM and you want everything local and offline, that's probably the better choice. This is the right choice for me *right now*, because it turned a big expense I couldn't make into a small one I can. Yes, and it was genuinely fun! :) I ended up with a faster Mac, a server I understand top to bottom, and a little panel on my phone that tells me what's eating my RAM. If you're stuck on an underpowered laptop and can't upgrade yet, a rented box plus Tailscale might be enough to make it feel new.