Will a 2019 Mac desktop with 8 GB of memory and 1 TB SSD be sufficient (3.6GHZ quad core intel chip) for running knots? I don’t think ram or SSD can be really upgraded on this computer.
You could just about manage it, but the storage is your issue - 1tb is right on the limit at the blockchain itself is around 800G. You could try with a pruned node. I have knots running on a 2012 macbook pro with 8gb, but it took forever to download and verify the blockchain (pruned). But, it’s doable.
I’ve built a full stack that will run on a pruned node:
Bitcoin Knots
Datum Gateway
Mempool
electrs
Sparrow (your wallet doesn’t run on your node, but this fork of Sparrow works with the new pruned-node version of electrs)
It is only working on Linux so far, but it probably would port to Mac fairly easily (Windows is the only OS that tends to be a problem child). I’ll take a look. Which version of Knots are you looking to run? Legacy (Pre-RDTS) or the new hard fork (BLAKE2b)?