AirOrchestra
AirOrchestra · a Torspan product
AirOrchestra — Setting it upOne computer. One morning. One week.
You buy a Mac. We put your company's own server on it — the software, the model, the database and every drawing you've got. You are in the chair for about ninety minutes of that morning, in five separate pieces, and you know the times before the day starts. Setup is in the price, and there is no setup fee.
The only thing you pay for before you start is the computer, and you pay Apple for it. No setup fee, no implementation package, no training fee, no migration fee — and the first month has no invoice on it either.
Three questions, and there is no form
Twenty minutes on the phone. Nothing to fill in, nothing to upload, and we do not take your files to size it.
How many crews roll out on a normal Monday?
Not how many men are on the books. How many foremen take a truck. That number picks the machine, and it is the only count in this whole conversation.
How many years of drawings do you want in it?
Drawings, cut sheets, submittals, dispatch sheets. That picks the disk, and we size it to two to four times what you actually have. You read us the numbers off your own screen — how many files, how many gigabytes, where they live. We do not receive the files. Not to look, not to size it.
Who in the office can plug in a computer and read a screen to me?
That is the person we call. There is always one. If there genuinely is not one, we say so and we do not sell you a machine with nobody on the far end of it — the install is not the hard part, the next three years are.
The rule we size by
Size to the crews you run today, plus one year of the growth you can name. Not to the plan. Memory cannot be added to any of these machines afterwards, so the machine is a three-to-four-year decision — and buying a Studio for a three-crew shop is two thousand dollars of your money spent to flatter a projection.
Under one crew that actually dispatches, there is no product here and we will tell you that. Over sixteen crews, the answer is a second machine, and a second machine is a second everything.
One line on that page is in bold: do not substitute the memory. The model that reads your crew's messages has to fit in it, and it cannot be added later. Invented configuration — yours comes off your own answers to the three questions.
Three machines, and the one you get comes off those three questions
All three are ordinary Apple computers you can buy on apple.com today. None of them is a rack, none of them needs a cabinet, and all three sit on a desk.
Mac mini
One truck to three. 2TB of disk instead of 1TB if you have more than about ten years of paper to load.
Mac Studio
A real shop. The chip matters on this one: 64GB is offered on the 16-core / 40-core part and not on the smaller one.
Mac Studio
Eighty hands. Ninety-six gigabytes is the ceiling of Apple's desktop line today, so this is the top of the ladder.
Above sixteen crews: a second machine
Not a bigger one — there isn't a bigger one. The ladder ends where Apple's memory ceiling ends, so a second division or a second region gets its own machine and its own database. That is its own conversation, and it starts the way this one does: how many trucks roll out on a Monday.
About that last column
Those are Apple's figures, published by Apple, for the machine before the memory and the disk you actually need. They are a floor, not a quote. Apple prices the memory and storage upgrades in the basket on the day you order, and that basket total is the number that goes on your receipt — we do not carry a configured price forward from memory and we never add anything to it.
Starting prices as published by Apple: Mac mini, October 2024 · Mac Studio, March 2025. Configuration ceilings read off apple.com/mac-mini/specs and apple.com/mac-studio/specs on 24 August 2026.
We check the machine can actually be bought, every time we quote it
Apple withdrew five memory options across the desktop line in four months of 2026 against the memory shortage. A tier that cannot be bought this week is not a tier, and finding that out after a signature is a bad start. So availability gets checked at the quote, every quote, and if the configuration you need is gone the conversation changes before any money does.
Apple rates the mini at a maximum continuous 155W and the Studio at 480W. That is the ceiling of what either can draw, not what it draws — the machine is idle between the morning and the afternoon.
What goes on the disk with it
An open-weight model under the Apache 2.0 licence, sized to the machine, held in memory so it answers at half past six instead of loading first. Apache 2.0 is the licence we require: commercial use and redistribution without a user-count trigger and without an acceptable-use rider somebody can revise later. The exact model, its version and its licence go on your receipt, and the previous one stays on the disk so going back is a command and not a download.
What is not on this page, and will not be until it is measured
There is no tokens-per-second figure here, no “answers in under N seconds,” and no claim that some percentage of the work stays on your machine. None of that has been measured on this hardware, on this work. When it has been — named machine, real turns, a date printed on it — the number goes on this page as a measurement. A placeholder on a spec sheet is the one thing in this trade that gets checked line by line.
You buy it. Your account, your card, your company's name.
We do not sell hardware, do not mark it up, and do not take a referral fee. There is no line for a computer on any invoice we send.
- Because owning it is the whole claim. “The computer is yours” cannot survive a purchase order with our name on it.
- Because the warranty attaches to whoever bought it. A machine bought by us and handed over puts us in the middle of a three-year warranty conversation that is none of our business.
- Because it is your capital asset, on your books, with your depreciation treatment. That conversation belongs to your accountant and we do not have it with you. We say that sentence and move on.
- Because we are not a reseller, and becoming one means sales tax in every state we ship to, returns, stock, and a margin you would be right to ask about.
- Because the day you fire us there is no argument about whose computer it is. That is worth more in the room than it costs in convenience.
If you ask us to buy it for you, the answer is no. What you get instead is fifteen minutes on a screen share while you click — and that fifteen minutes is where the wrong memory option gets caught, which is the whole reason it is on the clock.
The rest of the basket, and every line of it is yours
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| AppleCare+ required, not recommended | A dead logic board out of warranty on a Studio is a week of your dispatch and an invoice nobody budgeted. Price it in the basket the day you buy the machine. |
| A UPS with USB signalling | Sized to the machine, so it can shut down cleanly when the power goes. A computer interrupted mid-write is a database recovery conversation conducted by telephone. |
| A second disk external SSD, at least twice the internal one | The backup copy that lives in the same room. It is in the same room on purpose: restoring from off-site over a shop's upload speed is the part that takes the day. |
| Somewhere off-site your choice, your account | Storage you already pay for, your own NAS, or a service you pick. Encrypted before it leaves the machine. We never hold a credential to it. |
| Cellular failover on the office router recommended, your equipment | The mitigation for the one genuine step back from cloud software: when your internet is down, the field cannot reach the office machine. Said out loud, here → |
When the box turns up, leave it shut
This is on the spec sheet in those words, with the reason next to it: a machine helpfully set up in advance on somebody's personal Apple Account, with a cloud drive syncing the document folder and the disk encryption switched off, is ninety minutes of undoing on a morning that was budgeted for five hours.
Where it goes — decided on the sizing call, not on the day
- In the office. Not a supply closet, not on top of a filing cabinet in the hall.
- On a wired connection, not on the office wifi.
- Not boxed in behind a space heater or under a stack of paper.
- In a room that locks, because from that morning it holds every record the company has.
- On the company's Apple Account. Never on anybody's personal one.
That is the whole of what somebody in your office physically does. Everything after step four is software, and software travels — a shop forty minutes away and a shop two thousand miles away get the same morning.
Our clock is about six hours. Yours is about ninety minutes.
You are not in a six-hour call. You are in five short ones, and you get the times the week before, so the day can be planned around a shop that has work to do.
| Roughly | What you are there for | You |
|---|---|---|
| 8:00 | The Mac's own setup screen. You create the account and you set the password — there is no account of ours on that machine. Auto-restart after a power cut gets switched on and then tested, not assumed. | 20 min |
| 8:35 | Disk encryption on, and you write the recovery key down on paper while we watch you do it. A second person in your office gets a sealed copy the same morning. | 15 min |
| 10:35 | Your own outside-reading account. You at the keyboard, us watching and typing nothing. Your organisation, your company card, your ceiling. | 25 min |
| 12:00 | Your people and your jobs, imported off your own list — and the eight different spellings of one man's name that every crew list on earth contains, reconciled with you on the phone. | 15 min |
| 1:40 | The first real message, from a real phone, about a real job, in your hand. Then a foreman does it. Then the receipt gets signed. | 20 min |
Times are the shape of the day, not a contract. A vendor who says “block out the day” and a vendor who says “I need you at 8:00, 8:35, 10:35, 12:00 and 1:40” are read as two different companies, and they should be.
A run that is allowed to fail
Before anything is handed over, thirty real turns go through the model on your machine and get scored against what they should have done. If it does not pass, the day stops there and you have a computer and no invoice.
It has to be able to fail or it is not a gate. The score goes on the receipt as a number, so there is something for later drift to be measured against.
Your paper, read while nobody is there
Everything you have goes onto the disk in the afternoon and the reading starts. It runs through the night on a machine nobody is paying by the hour, and day one begins with a system that has already read what it was given.
This is the single largest thing you get for nothing out of owning the machine, and it is the thing a per-page cloud charge makes expensive.
A restore you watch, not a job that says it worked
Late in the day, the backup gets opened and put back. A named day plan from a named date comes back. A named photo opens. A generated PDF draws. The application starts against the restored copy and answers one question.
A backup job that exits without an error proves a file was parsed. A backup that has not been restored is a belief. Then a receipt, dated, signed, one copy each.
And again, on a second machine that is yours
An office iMac, a spare laptop, anything with a disk. Restored, verified with the same four proofs, then wiped with your person watching. After that, once a year and after any hardware change.
Never onto our hardware. Putting your database on a computer of ours would make us, for that afternoon, the holder of a complete copy — which is the exact thing the written commitment says we do not do.
What is on the receipt you sign
One page, dated, signed by whoever did the install and by your person, one copy on your machine and one in our register.
- Machine, serial, the configuration as actually built
- The basket total you actually paid, and the order number
- AppleCare status and expiry
- macOS version, application version, model version and licence
- The acceptance-run score
- Backup target class — never a credential — and the first backup's timestamp
- The restore receipt's number
- Disk encryption confirmed; recovery key confirmed held by two named people
- The update window you chose
- Whose name is on the install
The rest of that day, which you are not in
Between your five pieces, the machine gets its network reservation and its firewall, and the path from a phone in the field gets stood up and then tested from a phone on cellular data — not from the office wifi, which proves nothing.
Then the runtime: the database, the application, the local model server bound so that nothing but the application on that same machine can reach it, the document reader compiled, the overnight jobs installed, and the health check green.
Then the model itself, installed from a disk we shipped ahead so the morning does not start with a large download on a shop's connection, pinned to an exact version, and warmed up so the first question does not wait.
Remote, by default, and that is not a compromise: after “power on,” every step is software on a machine we can see through a session you opened. Where we would rather be in the room, it is to watch an office manager use the thing for a morning — which teaches more than ten scheduled calls — and that is a reason of ours, not a service level we publish.
Week one is not a training programme
It is a week in which your crew does real work with it and we watch quietly. Every scheduled minute below is a minute a working shop is giving us instead of giving a job, so there are not many of them.
| Day | What we do | What you do | What has to be true by the end of it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Twenty-minute health check. How the overnight reading went, whether the first night's backup ran, how much queued, how the machine is holding. And we read every turn's lane — what stayed, what went out, why. | Normal work. Your person sends the foremen one sentence: message it like you'd text me. | The overnight reading actually ran. If the drawings are still unread, it will answer badly all week and you will conclude it is stupid rather than unfed. |
| 2 | Health check. First look at how it does on your vocabulary — your job names, your equipment tags, your abbreviations. Corrections go into your configuration, not into something somebody remembers. | Normal work. | At least one man has sent something nobody told him to send. |
| 3 | Health check, and fifteen minutes with your person: here is everything that left the building this week, here is what triggered each one, here is what it cost. | 15 min | The office has seen the cost screen with real rows on it. This is the day the ownership argument stops being a sentence on a website. |
| 4 | Health check. Tune what triggers the outside reading against your real traffic — the default is a guess until it meets your photographs. | Normal work. | No routine crew message has left the building. Checked in the record of the turns, not assumed. |
| 5 | Health check, and a second backup verification — a different night's archive opened and looked inside. | Normal work. | Two separate nights are restore-readable. |
| 6–7 | Nothing. Nobody calls a contractor on a weekend without a reason. | Nothing. | The weekend passes without us. A machine that cannot survive a weekend unattended will not survive month two. |
| End | Thirty minutes with the receipt in hand. Turn counts by lane. What got read and what did not and why. What the outside reading actually cost against your ceiling. The three things we changed. The one thing we could not do, and what it would take. | 30 min | You can say, without being prompted, one thing it did that saved you something. If you cannot, we say so out loud and name what we are changing. |
Seven checks at the end of it, pass or fail, on the receipt
- Disk encryption on, recovery key held by two named people in your office.
- Two nights of backup, and one restore receipt.
- The reading backlog down under five per cent of what was loaded, or a named reason and a date.
- Zero routine crew turns routed out, checked in the record.
- Outside-reading spend under your own ceiling, with the itemised screen shown to the office at least once.
- At least one unprompted message from every crew.
- The machine survived a full weekend with nobody touching it.
A failed check does not mean a failed shop. It means we do not start month two pretending.
The point of putting the seven on paper is that somebody has to be able to say the week did not go well. A week that is graded by whether anybody complained is a week that always passes.
Setup is included in the price and it takes about a week, and most of that week is us rather than you. That has been the deal on the price page since before there was a machine in it, and the machine does not change it.
Two people in your office, and both of them are named
The person we call
One named person who can physically reach the machine, has the password, and has the authority to click the button that lets us look at the screen. Named on the order form. Not “the office” — a person. A support arrangement addressed to a company reaches nobody at twenty to seven in the morning.
The person who holds the sealed envelope
A second named person holds a sealed copy of the password and the disk recovery key. This exists because the first one will eventually leave, and on that day a Mac with the disk encrypted and no known password is a brick. Checked once a year, by us, as a job on our list.
If both copies of that key are genuinely gone, nobody opens that disk. Not us, not Apple. The answer is a wipe and a restore from your backup — which is why the backup is tested rather than assumed, and why this sentence is said on the day the machine goes in rather than on the day it is needed.
What starting costs
- No setup fee. No implementation package, no training fee, no migration fee, no onboarding tier.
- No invoice in the first month. Fourteen days is the category's number and fourteen days does not contain a payroll close. A month contains four payroll weeks, a safety walk, a delivery that showed up wrong, and at least one argument about hours. That is the test.
- The computer, once, to Apple. On your account, your card, your company's name, your asset.
- Your own outside-reading account, metered, to that vendor. Your ceiling, your bill, and we never see it. How that works →
The machine is the setup fee, and it buys you something you own instead of buying us a margin.
Every piece of equipment you have ever bought came with an install charge on it, so refusing one takes a sentence of explanation. Here it is: you are already being asked to buy a computer before month one. A fee on top of that does not add revenue, it doubles the height of the only wall in the conversation — and it is the wall we would rather answer than build.
What's live today
Where the morning described above and today's machine are the same thing, and where they are not.
Standing today
- The three questions, the sizing rule and the one-page spec sheet. Nothing about them needs code.
- Setup done for you, included in the price, about a week, most of it ours — the arrangement on the price page, unchanged.
- The application, the database, the document reading and the overnight jobs. Built, running.
- Buying the machine on your own account, and no line for hardware on any invoice we send. That is a refusal, not a feature, and it costs nothing to keep.
Arriving with the machine
- The one-signature install bundle. The morning above is written down step by step; the single signed package that lays the whole thing down in one pass is being built, and it is what keeps that morning the same length every time it is run.
- The model on your disk, and the two lanes. The same note is on Your computer, with what it means for what leaves the building.
- The staged update with the automatic roll-back. How an update is meant to reach you →
- The measurement. No throughput figure exists for these machines on this work. Until one does, no speed claim is made to anybody — which is also why the machine is sized from crews and paper rather than from a number nobody has taken.
This block is not a schedule, and there are no dates against the second list. If you want to know when one of them lands, write and ask, and you will get an honest guess from a person writing the code, labelled as a guess. The same block for the application itself is on What it won't do.
It starts with a twenty-minute phone call and three questions.
Nothing to fill in, no demo to book, no calendar on this site. Write to us, say roughly how many trucks roll out on a Monday, and you get a written answer from a person.
Do not substitute the memory. It cannot be added later.
That line is in bold on the one page we send you, because it is the only decision in the basket that cannot be fixed afterwards with money.