Using maccloud

How maccloud works

maccloud rents you a whole, dedicated Apple Silicon Mac — a Mac Studio with M5 Ultra or a Mac mini with M5 Pro — racked in our data center with redundant power and a fast network. You're the only tenant: the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine and every gigabyte of unified memory are yours.

• Every machine gets its own public IP address (IPv4 and IPv6) on the Internet, so you can reach it directly — no shared gateway, no port juggling.
• Full admin access. It's a real macOS machine you control: install anything, run services, use it as a CI runner or a model server.
• Ready for AI on day one. Each machine ships with working local models and an LLM chat window, so you can start prompting the minute it's handed over — and replace any of it.
• Prepaid by the day. Fund your account with credit and each active machine draws its daily rate. No contracts; activate for 30 or 365 days to save.

Getting started

1. Create your free account Live

There are two ways in, and both are free:

• Sign up at console.maccloud.me/signup with your name, email and a password (12+ characters). We'll email you a link to confirm your address.
• Reserve a machine from the Mac Studio or Mac mini page. Reserving creates your account automatically and drops you straight into the console. Choose a password from the card at the top of your Overview, and click the link in the email we send to confirm your address.

2. Confirm your email

Confirming proves the address is yours. Until you do, you can use the console in the browser you signed up on, but you won't be able to sign back in after signing out. Lost the email? Use the Send it again link in the console, or request a new one.

3. Sign in

Go to console.maccloud.me — or click Console at the top of any maccloud page. Forgot your password? Use Forgot password; the reset link is valid for one hour.

A tour of the console

Your current credit is always shown at the top right of the console — click it to add funds.

Free plan & demo units

Every account starts on the free plan. It costs nothing and doesn't require a card. With it you can sign in, track reservations, add credit, and — once demo units launch — send prompts to a shared maccloud Mac.

• Demo units are available to accounts with a confirmed email address.
• Each account gets a small daily allowance of demo usage, shown in the console. It resets every day at midnight (US Eastern).
• Demo units are shared and best-effort. Don't send confidential or personal data to them — that's what a dedicated machine is for. See Demo units & AI output in our terms.

Credit & billing

maccloud is prepaid. You add credit to your account, and each active machine draws its daily rate from it.

• Minimum is one day. Fund as little as a single day of service.
• Save by committing. Activating a machine for a full 30 days saves 10%; 365 days saves 20%. Other lengths are billed at the daily rate.
• Low-balance warnings. We email you when your credit has about 14 days left and again at 3 days.
• Nothing is wiped at $0. If credit runs out, your machine is suspended — powered down but kept intact — and resumes when you add credit.
• Payments are processed by Stripe. Your card number goes straight to Stripe and is never stored on maccloud's servers. Coming soon

Reservations & provisioning

Reserving holds a machine for you and costs nothing. Each reservation shows its status on your Overview:

We always confirm configuration and price with you by email before any billing starts. Mac Studio units are built to order (current lead times are on the configure page); Mac minis ship from stock when available.

Your machine

When your machine is handed over, the console shows its details and we email you a welcome note with everything you need:

• Public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses dedicated to that machine.
• An administrator account on macOS, with your SSH public key installed.
• The LLM chat window — a ready-to-use chat interface backed by models already loaded on the machine, plus an OpenAI-compatible API on the machine's loopback address for your own code.
• Hardware: the full chip, all unified memory, 4TB of internal SSD and a 10Gbps network link.

Connecting to your machine

SSH

Connect with the username from your welcome email and the machine's public IP:

ssh admin@203.0.113.10
# or over IPv6
ssh admin@2001:db8:90::10

Add your public key under SSH keys in the console (coming soon) or send it to support before provisioning. Password logins over SSH are disabled.

Screen Sharing (the macOS desktop)

For the full desktop, use the Screen Sharing app built into macOS. We recommend tunneling it through SSH so it's never exposed to the Internet:

ssh -L 5901:localhost:5900 admin@203.0.113.10
# then, on your Mac, open:
open vnc://localhost:5901

The LLM chat window and API

The chat window runs on the machine itself. Reach it in Screen Sharing, or forward it to your own browser over SSH. Your own code on the machine can call the local OpenAI-compatible endpoint directly — nothing leaves the box, and there's no per-token bill.

Networking & firewall

Each machine is connected directly to the Internet on its own public IP addresses. That makes it easy to run real services — but it also means you decide what's reachable.

Edge firewall Coming soon

From the Firewall section of the console you'll manage inbound rules for each machine. Rules are enforced on maccloud's edge routers, before traffic ever reaches your Mac — so they cost your machine nothing, and they keep working even if macOS is busy, rebooting or misconfigured.

• Simple rules: protocol (TCP, UDP, ICMP), port or range, and the source addresses allowed (anywhere, a single IP, or a network — IPv4 and IPv6).
• Safe defaults: new machines start with inbound SSH and ping allowed and everything else blocked. Open only what you need.
• Applied in seconds, with a history of every change so you can see who changed what.
• Can't lock yourself out: the rescue console works independently of these rules.

You can also use the macOS firewall on the machine itself for application-level control; the two work together.

Rescue console & power

Every machine has an out-of-band rescue console (an IP KVM) and switched, redundant power on two independent feeds.

• Rescue console: see the Mac's screen and use its keyboard even when macOS isn't reachable over the network — during startup, at the FileVault unlock screen, or after a crash. Coming soon in the console; today our team uses it for you on request.
• Power cycle: a hard restart for a machine that's stopped responding. Coming soon in the console; today, contact support and we'll do it right away.
• We monitor every machine's reachability around the clock.

Security & your data

• Single tenant. No other customer shares your machine, its memory or its GPU.
• Your data stays on your machine. We don't access its contents except to provide support you ask for, to respond to a security incident or abuse report, or when required by law.
• Back up what matters. Hardware can fail. Keep copies of anything you can't afford to lose somewhere other than the machine.
• Keep macOS updated and use SSH keys. Expose only the ports you need.
• Read our Terms of Service & Privacy Policy for the full details.

Support

We're a small team and we read every message.

• Email support@untangledtechnology.com — include your account number (it's on your console Overview, e.g. MC-10001) and the machine's name or IP.
• Call 330-702-5798.
• Check service status.