Compute offerings - Mount Thor

Mount Thor offers Apple Silicon Macs in two ways. The difference is who manages the Mac itself.

	Mount Thor-managed	Customer-managed
Who manages the Mac	Mount Thor	You, typically through your own MDM
What you get	Machines on demand: bare metal or virtual machines	A fleet of Macs at a Mount Thor site, placed for you
How you get a machine	Create it in the portal, with `mthr`, Kubernetes or the API	The Macs are assigned to your account when your fleet is set up
Operating system and software	The image you choose; Mount Thor keeps the host running	Whatever you install and manage
Access to a machine	Through Mount Thor: `mthr bm ssh`, `mthr vm ssh`, desktop sessions	Through your own tools and network
What the API offers	The full compute lifecycle	The capabilities enabled for your account (below)
Charged	Per Mac, in 24-hour windows	Under your contract

Mount Thor-managed compute

Mount Thor allocates, prepares, monitors and wipes each machine. You choose a machine class and an image, then connect with the CLI or the portal. When you are done, release the machine.

Bare metal gives you one physical Mac. You sign in as a permissive, non-root user.
Virtual machines give you an isolated macOS VM with administrator rights.

Compute types compares the two and helps you choose.

Customer-managed compute

Your organization manages its own Macs at a Mount Thor site. Mount Thor runs the site and keeps an inventory of your Macs. Anything more is up to you and your security model: each of these capabilities is on only if you want it.

Capability	What it gives you
Inventory	List your Macs and read each one, by serial number
Problem reports	Report a problem with a Mac to Mount Thor’s operations team
Events	Webhook notifications about your Macs

You choose your account’s capabilities with your Mount Thor contact, and the API refuses anything else. See Customer-managed compute for how each capability works through the API.