Today I found out that a range of Apple machines actually support Lights Out Management (LOM) which can be configured via MDM payloads.
Lights Out Management device management payload settings for Apple devices
You can configure Lights Out Management settings to remotely start, shut down and restart the following devices, as long as they have macOS 11 or later.
- Mac Studio (2025)
- Mac mini (2024) with a 10 Gb Ethernet card
- Mac mini (2023) with a 10 Gb Ethernet card
- Mac Pro (2023)
- Mac Pro (Rack, 2023)
- Mac Studio (2023)
- Mac Studio (2022)
- Mac mini (2020) with a 10 Gb Ethernet card
- Mac Pro (2019)
- Mac Pro (Rack, 2019)
You need to have one machine on the network that acts as a controller which will send LOM commands to other configured Macs on the same local subnet via Ethernet.
You can have a single Mac act as a controller and a device, which will give you some redundancy in the setup. The Mac which is acting as the controller needs to be on in order to receive the MDM commands, so it can’t power itself on, you’d need a second Mac to do this. What you could do however is have two Macs, each set up as a controller and a device and as long as one of them is up, it can control the other one.