If the current offering is Mac Minis, chances are Amazon has built an industrial grade version of what https://www.macstadium.com/ offers, and have racks with tons of Mac Minis, probably with custom ducting for A/C and so forth.
Nobody will without Apple allowing it and taking part, and Apple has not been supportive of things like this. E.g. any macOS hoster and many companies doing macOS software would love to throw money at Apple for permission to run "hackintoshes", but no dice, and the structure of this offering suggests AWS didn't get special treatment either.
I don't think I'm understanding. You are saying nobody will do it without Apple's support, but then say that AWS is doing it. There have been Mac Mini hosting for years, so I'm missing what is different about this.
Nobody will put M1 chips on their own motherboards/blades without Apple support. This is just offering Mac Mini hosting integrated in AWS' platform, with some custom hardware (that AWS also uses elsewhere) attached to the Mac Minis for storage virtualization etc.
Gotcha. Yes, that was what I was referring to as well. I don't think I was very clear in my original comment. I just meant if AWS doesn't offer M1's via Mac Minis that someone else will.
> As always, I asked the EC2 team for access to an instance in order to put it through its paces. The instances are available in Dedicated Host form, so I started by allocating a host.
Dedicated Hosts (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/) are more pricey than virtual instances (most EC2) and Dedicated Instances. Not sure if it's possible to containerize/sell as many virtual instances off a dedicated server without paying a separate high license fee to Apple.
Apple’s licensing terms for macOS permit only the licensing of one unit of Apple macOS running on one unit of Apple hardware to one customer for a minimum term of one day. There is no option to purchase a virtual-machine or other shared-instance license when macOS is involved.
(Nitpicky points: I believe the customer can do whatever they want with their licensed cloud Mac hardware, such as dual-boot different releases of macOS or virtualize to their heart’s content, as long as they are the exclusive user of the Apple hardware underlying any instances of macOS. “One customer per Mac per day, no more and no less” is probably a better summary in hindsight.)
CI/CD for iOS, MacOS, and React Native builds. Right now the pricing for Mac instances for builds via Github, Gitlab, Circle, etc are ludicrous. For a certain developer velocity, these instances will probably be much, much cheaper than running builds through the CI/CD SaaS providers.
$26 per day according to TC, for a full Mini (6 core i7/32 GB RAM). If you do enough that you can get high utilization that is cheaper than the CI services. (e.g. travis wants close to double for 2 vCore/8GB VMs) EDIT: On the other hand, renting a physical machine at Macstadium is a lot cheaper, so you'll want to have the AWS integration or some flexibility...
Custom CI agents perhaps. Or maybe on-demand / shared build / debugging machines for a development shop that does mostly cross-platform mobile development and (very) occasionally encounters ios-specific bugs.
Build servers for iOS apps, it can also be part of a CI/CD flow for mobile or cross-platform apps because you need to be running MacOS to upload apps to App Store Central
Automated testing using browsers on target operating systems as well as other testing that requires the target operating system. CI/CD pipelines using Mac build tools is another.
Seems like a major new growth vertical for AWS and gives Apple the ability to vet this [if its successful] for potentially launching their own offering one day.
Interesting. The deciding factor for our family when buying a Mac or Windows 10 device for my wife’s small business was actually my need to upload iOS apps for review by apple.
I’m an after hours hobby developer, and use a windows desktop. It’s powerful and has all the tooling I require. And it supports all the games I want to play from the steam store.
So - I think apple will lose a little bit of business from people like me with this announcement, as I’m sure we would not have purchased a Mac when we did only a few months ago.
You only need it for compiling. There are plenty of cross platform frameworks that dont require to develop with xcode - and that's good in my opinion.
I built all my apps this way and faced the same problem as OP - so had to buy a Mac mini. It was the cheapest option ~8 years ago and I still use it today for the same purpose - just for compiling. I assume there are probably more of us.
My needs are simple enough that the standard inclusions in expo.io work without complication. I could imagine more complex apps need a more involved dev setup but not in my case.
Expo.io is good enough for my needs. Cross platform, just run it on my iPhone and and android simulator. Also, the way expo works is that not all updates need to go through the App Store approvals. I can quickly dev/test/release once I have the app container approved by the relevant store.
My only need for a Mac with expo is for the upload. The apk file is taken care of with the command above.
I have an iPhone I use for development and testing. Bonus points is that expo is cross platform, so I can publish to google play with the same single code base too.
I’m always developing without xcode. Using expo I can write apps in react native on my desktop and vscode. Mac only required for the upload to the App Store.
Yeah, I was about to buy an Apple laptop since I also have been doing more and more cross-platform app development. Didn't like borrowing others' laptops and doing the laborious process of switching to my icloud profile just to upload some apps to the app store.
I'm definitely out now. I was never the target audience for Apple products anyways so maybe they're not too worried about this
Alternatively, Apple might gain revenue from iOS and macOS builds becoming more accessible
Wishful thinking: resurrect the xserve. Give me that 1U Apple appliance so I can stop stacking up Mac Minis (we have an incredibly non-trivial amount of iOS development happening across multiple divisions. Current Mac Mini count: 8)
The pricing makes this pointless for small businesses. $1/hour and minimum tenancy of 24 hours means each time you're updating your app you're spending $26. After 25 app updates you could own a brand new Mac Mini (assuming you never need to spend an extra day testing). Buying a used Mac makes even more sense.
MacStadium also already rents out Mac Minis starting at $59/mo.
I think the Amazon offering only makes sense for big corporations where (1) IT doesn't want to support macOS/exotic hardware on their network (2) it's easier to just charge to your your existing AWS billing than get a hardware purchase approved by your boss
Agree, but my needs are simple and I develop using expo.io. So once my app is published often minor changes can be pushed straight through to my app without App Store approvals. So it would be $26 per upload (ouch), but my “upload” may only be once every few months so I’d easily be ahead.
I can't seem to find pricing for this - anyone understand AWS better than me?
It's not listed on their dedicated host pricing page at https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ , and if I go through the web console to create an instance, I'm prompted to create a Mac dedicated host without any indication of how much I'd be paying.
$999.99 per month. "We wanted to redefine how people interact with macOS, on a deeper, ... and more granular level. Truly redefining the user experience and rethinking what was really possible, in the cloud."
No mention of pricing that I can see, and I don't see it on ec2instances, AWS's pricing page, or the spot-pricing widget on the console.
Am I missing something?
Edit: And the reserved instances widget (I was going to guess based off this cost) just flat out breaks when you pick mac. I guess we're still in the "If you have to ask, it's too expensive" stage, or something.
Does that include their Mac Cloud offering with custom networking/subnets, or the per Mac Mini rentals? Generally the cloud services (similar to AWS) are pricier.
Cloud services to build/deploy for iOS already exist and are nowhere near this over-the-top expensive so no, I don't think cross-platform devs are the target market here.
This could be huge for the ecosystem. For example, there are ways to use third-party iMessage clients (e.g. through Matrix) that require you to keep a server running on your local macOS machine signed in to your AppleID - this could let developers create hosted versions of those services
One Mac (serial number) per instance, so you probably couldn’t host iMessage or other access to Apple Services without getting burned after a couple days (and AWS wouldn’t want you doing it and getting a whole rack of Minis banned from iCloud or something).
"The instances are launched as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum tenancy of 24 hours"
These are just rentable Mac Minis, not VMs. This will have only one use case and that's for build servers. Unless anyone has scalable AppleScript jobs to run?
In terms of "other people's computers" it seems to fit well. Nice to be able to build/CI test against macOS without having to provision and maintain apple hardware.
It's against Apple's T&Cs, though. If you're doing it at home by yourself, who cares. But a company that's interested in automated testing etc. isn't going to see it as an answer.
Get an old old old Mac pro from ages ago. Upgrade its motherboard. Then upgrade its RAM. Then upgrade its hard drive. Then upgrade its power supply. It will still be an "Apple-branded computer" because of its case. It will just have received a bunch of upgrades. Big "haha" to them.
(Or if you're actually a corporation just buy a Mac.)
You “can”, in a technical sense, but not legally—Apple’s licensing for macOS only allows it to be run on Apple hardware. (You can run a macOS domU on another OS’s hypervisor, but that hypervisor has to be running on a Mac.) This matters when you’re a corporation.
You can't really test apps if there's no graphics acceleration. If you want graphics acceleration, you'll need to run a macOS VM with GPU passthrough using virtio or Proxmox. I did that for a bit until I just gave up and bought a Mac.
I don’t know about the legalities, but according to Apple you are only allowed to run macOS on real Mac hardware. Anything else is probably an EULA violation or something.
As an aside, in the script you link to is this line
It's going to be out of their hands on this one. Apple have pretty strong EULAs.
Microsoft's licensing for clouds is also a pain in the arse. You (the cloud platform) have to pay for a full months license the moment an instance is created. The way it's structured you have some wriggle room, e.g. you have your placement algorithm land new instances on where Windows instances have already been in a given month, so you don't incur additional licenses (because the license "transfers"). It gets worse if you start wanting to do things like run SQL Servers, where it's the entire month license outright with no prorating, and it applies to a specific instance instead of the machine/VM slot.
Strangely enough, despite all the trends in the market, operating system vendors are determined to make it harder for people to pay them to use their stuff, rather than easier.
Strategically it makes sense. Apple is a hardware company, so making it difficult to run their OS in the cloud means more people need to keep buying their hardware. Microsoft has their own cloud, where they don't have to deal with the license requirements they force on other cloud providers, which gives them a competitive advantage over their competitors (when it comes to windows servers). The key is that these companies don't just sell operating systems. Red Hat on the other hand, which doesn't have competing market pressures, is much more friendly to licensing in a cloud environment.
But is using legal mechanisms to reduce a competitor's advantage (where the competitor licenses your product) considered to be antitrust? In the internet explorer case one of the major disputes was whether Microsoft manipulated its API to favour explorer versus other software.
IANAL, but I think only if you have monopoly power (at least as I understand US antitrust law), and MS doesn't really have a monopoly on the server OS market.
> Microsoft's licensing for clouds is also a pain in the arse. You (the cloud platform) have to pay for a full months license the moment an instance is created.
This is exactly how I would expect the licensing to work.
Can't you also bring your own licenses for AWS/Windows? This all makes sense to me too... if you want to run a Windows instance, you need a license for Windows (on top of the hardware fee). Microsoft says that AWS can loan you a license (if you need one), but AWS would still need to hold a full license.
But they will have to update to Big Sur in the feature. So if they don‘t set the limitation now they will have to „worsen“ the service later, it‘s best to the set the limitation now even if not required.
They still think of themselves as a hardware firm, this restrains usage elasticity to a level where system hardware scaling is a dominant cost driver rather than system performance.
Besides the inefficiencies of physical space at AWS sites, it is also a fine business for the cloud provider as it generates a less volatile usage pattern than normal. As Apple is acting as a monopolist by dictating the same terms to everyone, they further remove any competitive advantage of providing anything else.
I think you are missing the point intentionally. You can't run those apps on an Apple iPhone, but I suspect you knew this.
It's ok to take the literal definition of the word monopoly and take it to its logical conclusion, I suppose. The U.S. government will not do that, however.
If you don't like it then leave. That's how Apple operates. I still can't comprehend why people insist on licking Apple's shoe soles but then complain that it tastes awful.
I vividly remember a video interview with Steve Jobs from a long time back when he was clear that Apple is not a hardware firm, it’s a software firm, and admitting that it took him far too long to realise that.
It's reasonable to think running CI service is similar to just running httpd. But what divides? Anyway CI service runs Apple software like Xcode. Even httpd uses Apple's TCP stack.
If you ran a webserver hosting Great Cat Pictures on some Macs, for instance, your customers might pay a subscription fee to access your site, meaning they are paying for you to do processing and storage on their behalf. So that's an example that's clearly not leasing or subletting the devices.
Likewise, you might read it that Circle is simply providing a service to users, and the users are paying a fee for the service.
But a CI service will set up your dev account, your container image, to run your jobs. It'll even let you shell in, and it tears it all down when you're done.
And it really starts to look like leasing when they also charge for time used on various hosts. (IIRC, Circle charges for this a bit obliquely as max parallelism.)
If it went to court, Circle might argue the hosts can only be used within their larger CI system, that they don't guarantee a particular task will complete on a given host, and that they're not providing other requirements for virtual hosts, e.g. dedicated routing or names. And then Apple's lawyers might counter all that.
So this is where I think lawyers would start digging through case law to figure out where providing a service ends and leasing begins.
I've done iOS builds using Github actions. The build minutes cost 10x as much as Linux. Anyone out there offering MacOS in the cloud is doing the same thing. Just racking Mac Minis. It means you can't slice CPUs or memory like a VM so it's less efficient and more expensive.
I doubt Apple supports this in any way. It means that if you want to develop Mac/iPhone apps, you no longer have to buy Mac hardware. I'm surprised they aren't making this harder.
Wow. That is insane and stupid and incredibly fucked up. I've had to rent Macs in the cloud on a rare basis to test certain latest-version Safari issues, and it's always a crap connection and a miserable experience. But is it enforceable for them to stipulate the minimum length of time of a VM lease?! That's your machine. You paid for it. If you want to rent it out to someone for 3 hours that's your prerogative. I don't see how they can possibly enforce that or how it could be legal as a seller to tell someone how to use their hardware.
AWS needs to buy a lot more mac machines from apple. Without the limit everybody would start a vm for a few minutes to run a ci job and stop the machine. So there is no „sharing“ of a machine within a 24 hour window if you only need the machine shortly.
You can get more than 10 times as many ARM cores on a server chip compared to a M1 Mac. There is no way it is more energy efficient or cost effective to run 10+ Macs versus one server. Amazon designs their own chips, too.
But until now nobody was able to build an ARM cpu as fast as apples cou. Every server arm cpu in the past was still a lot slower than intel cpus, despite packing a lot of cores on a chip.
What other thing is worth doing on MacOS at scale in an off premise cloud? I'm genuinely curious if there isn't something I'm missing out on. Build and test for Apple related stuff is the only thing that comes to mind.
"These are just rentable Mac Minis, not VMs. This will have only one use case and that's for build servers."
It's difficult for me to believe that a hyper-scaled cloud deployment like AWS will rent individual mac minis to people. It sounds like a business idea I would have and then come to realize how labor intensive and inefficient the entire thing was.
At the same time, I wonder why there is not a well developed, well documented cross-compiling toolchain available for (whatever you are doing with a mac build server) ? Why not use your local (laptop) mac to do the dirty work and then run a (very complicated) cross compiling chain on a much cheaper, non mac, cloud instance ?
In the past when we needs iOS jobs to run from Jenkins we literally plugged a Mac Mini into the wall and forwarded a port from the router so it was reachable as a build agent by our cloud instance of Jenkins.
Interesting. I guess it's not the first but does the MacOS EULA really allow for this? Or does AWS have a special license? Which would beg the question as for the need of real hardware. (Sure you can break a EULA but at some point it would violate ToS and Apple could easily block updates).
> The instances are launched as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum tenancy of 24 hours.
This almost sounds like they are using first sale doctrine to just lend it for a day. Like I can lend a movie but I can't make my own movie theater (right?).
Also I'm very curious of these are in-tack macs or shucked and put in a frankenstein case of dozens.
> Powered by Mac mini hardware and the AWS Nitro System
Similarly, other Mac server farms use Apple hardware. I can't think of the name right now but I remember one popular provider racking trash can Mac Pro's.
Rentable Mac Mini (or Mac colo of all flavors) has been a thing for easily 15+ years. https://www.macstadium.com/ is one of the original providers if I recall correctly. I remember renting a macmini for a month when the app store on ios first came out because I couldn't afford a macbook.
AWS is largely taking other peoples efforts and putting the Amazon brand on them.
The video in the article literally shows trucks and pallets of retail Mac Minis being unloaded to be installed into a data center, so I think that’s exactly what they are doing. I doubt Apple would commission custom hardware for AWS when VMWare has most likely been begging for years to no avail.
"I dont see Amazon going out and buying 50.000 Mac minis and racking them" ...
you usually don't see this kind of thing unless you work at the actual place, or you have a colo where Amazon also hosts stuff. Unless you work there, you don't actually know whether they buy that number.
In fact, I bet you they do buy over tens of thousands of Macs of all kinds every quarter, if only to satisfy the demand for hardware for engineers and for testing purposes.
AWS is playing the long game and betting that M1 based servers start to take off. It's very risky (and expensive) but it would pay off if they are correct.
They would be first in the market and be years ahead of their competition.
macstadium has been doing this for a while, but it can be unstable and annoying at times. If they can be better than macstadium then it is compelling for iOS dev shops who don't want to maintain a fleet of mac mini build servers. Also amazon can use it themselves for their own CI services
I doubt this is a play at M1 servers. M1 servers on Apple hardware is not what AWS wants people to use when the alternative is other AWS servers. Only for running macOS there isn't an alternative.
Because they'd much rather use their own high-density server designs instead of dealing with Macs that really aren't made for datacenters, and M1 has no clear must-have benefit over those justifying that effort outside of the macOS use case.
Now if Apple were to selling/license M1 chips to them, that might be different, but there is no indication that's going to happen in any way, and then the current work based on Macs wouldn't really be preparation for it.
I disagree. I think it’s obvious that if they went into it big, they wouldn’t just buy retail Macs. The current work would be testing the market and the experience of providing MacOS as a server. If there’s demand for server M1 chips, why wouldn’t Apple sell them? It’s a completely different market from their laptop consumer business. Bottom line: if the market demands M1 on servers, there’s billions to be made supplying them.
Apple clearly isn't interested in others offering macOS servers on non-Apple hardware, their licensing practices make that clear. If not to run macOS, AWS customers have no reason to demand M1 cores, and AWS has little reason to want to buy M1 chips over their own designs. And Apple and AWS are not the kind of companies to go in a deep partnership with shared designs etc over something like this.
> Someone points out Circle let’s you ssh in, while afaik GHA and Pipelines don’t
That's mostly a convenience feature, you can ssh into GH Actions' macOS instances through something like an ngrok tunnel, or run a terminal sharing tool within to basically do the same. See for instance https://github.com/fastai/fastmac. I doubt that's a key difference.
Given how M1 is technically impressive (not only CPU but also for Neural Engine), one can dream Apple will resurrect XServe with multi-socket later versions of their silicon.
This kind of performance with this kind of power efficiency would be game changer in data center.
Interesting that they’ve mentioned M1 support. That makes me wonder if VMWare is going to get together with Apple and make a ESXi port to Apple Silicon, as the Mac Mini and Mac Pro were long standing on the HWL since they were the only rackable devices on the market legally allowed to virtualize macOS. I’m fairly certain that Apple used it internally for testing.
(AWS will probably at least attempt a port of their Nitro hypervisor to M1 as well, since it’d make the machines infinitely easier to manage at scale since Macs no longer have a NetBoot or Internet Recovery option).
AWS does not use netboot, EBS volumes appear as local NVMe drives because their custom Nitro PCIe cards handle that. In the Mac case, they connect the cards using Thunderbolt.
The Mac instances will NOT use an AWS provided hypervisor until Apple's terms change. Currently the hosting provider is only allowed to lease the whole machine, only the end user can do virtualization.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadFor those wondering
Also for those wondering
The macOS EULA says you can only run it on Apple hardware, so your options are basically Mac Minis or the new rackmountable Mac Pro.
Dedicated Hosts (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/) are more pricey than virtual instances (most EC2) and Dedicated Instances. Not sure if it's possible to containerize/sell as many virtual instances off a dedicated server without paying a separate high license fee to Apple.
(Nitpicky points: I believe the customer can do whatever they want with their licensed cloud Mac hardware, such as dual-boot different releases of macOS or virtualize to their heart’s content, as long as they are the exclusive user of the Apple hardware underlying any instances of macOS. “One customer per Mac per day, no more and no less” is probably a better summary in hindsight.)
I’m an after hours hobby developer, and use a windows desktop. It’s powerful and has all the tooling I require. And it supports all the games I want to play from the steam store.
So - I think apple will lose a little bit of business from people like me with this announcement, as I’m sure we would not have purchased a Mac when we did only a few months ago.
I built all my apps this way and faced the same problem as OP - so had to buy a Mac mini. It was the cheapest option ~8 years ago and I still use it today for the same purpose - just for compiling. I assume there are probably more of us.
About 50% of my MacOS usage is replicating bug reports from users. I don't know how I would do that without having one on my desk.
Maybe more iOS specific bugs are introduced when doing iOS specific development (like using iOS tooling and techniques).
My only need for a Mac with expo is for the upload. The apk file is taken care of with the command above.
I have an iPhone I use for development and testing. Bonus points is that expo is cross platform, so I can publish to google play with the same single code base too.
I'm glad it's working for you, so far, but try to do anything slightly interesting and you'll have problems.
I'm definitely out now. I was never the target audience for Apple products anyways so maybe they're not too worried about this
Wishful thinking: resurrect the xserve. Give me that 1U Apple appliance so I can stop stacking up Mac Minis (we have an incredibly non-trivial amount of iOS development happening across multiple divisions. Current Mac Mini count: 8)
And that royalty is basically very low overhead. Keep in mind, hardware isn't software, and it does have a very high overhead.
MacStadium also already rents out Mac Minis starting at $59/mo.
I think the Amazon offering only makes sense for big corporations where (1) IT doesn't want to support macOS/exotic hardware on their network (2) it's easier to just charge to your your existing AWS billing than get a hardware purchase approved by your boss
The post says they’re based on Mac Minis, but also use AWS Nitro. Is this custom AWS specific hardware?
> Thunderbolt combines PCI Express (PCIe) and DisplayPort (DP) into two serial signals,[7][8] and additionally provides DC power, all in one cable.
From the Wikipedia entry at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)
It's not listed on their dedicated host pricing page at https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ , and if I go through the web console to create an instance, I'm prompted to create a Mac dedicated host without any indication of how much I'd be paying.
note: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21333408
Slogan for new product line: "A silver lining."
EDIT: It shows up now.
Ah, it presumably comes directly from @flardinois's reporting for TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/30/aws-brings-the-mac-mini-to...
Am I missing something?
Edit: And the reserved instances widget (I was going to guess based off this cost) just flat out breaks when you pick mac. I guess we're still in the "If you have to ask, it's too expensive" stage, or something.
And I assume on top of that you'd have to pay the $2/hour dedicated host charge.
I'll keep the Mac Mini around.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/
I'll still keep a Mac mini since I like Logic, but this is very very good for say a Unity or Flutter developer who needs to deploy apps to iOS
Much much cheaper to just buy a second hand mac mini and leave it plugged in to your router.
These are just rentable Mac Minis, not VMs. This will have only one use case and that's for build servers. Unless anyone has scalable AppleScript jobs to run?
https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox
(Or if you're actually a corporation just buy a Mac.)
IMO their price gouging is ethically much worse than someone making a hackintosh and using it to enrich the MacOS software ecosystem.
And sued.
As an aside, in the script you link to is this line
> VBoxManage setextradata "${vm_name}" "VBoxInternal/Devices/smc/0/Config/DeviceKey" "ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc"
I think that’s Apple’s way of reminding you about their rules regarding host machines.
Live by the walled garden die by the walled garden
Microsoft's licensing for clouds is also a pain in the arse. You (the cloud platform) have to pay for a full months license the moment an instance is created. The way it's structured you have some wriggle room, e.g. you have your placement algorithm land new instances on where Windows instances have already been in a given month, so you don't incur additional licenses (because the license "transfers"). It gets worse if you start wanting to do things like run SQL Servers, where it's the entire month license outright with no prorating, and it applies to a specific instance instead of the machine/VM slot.
Strangely enough, despite all the trends in the market, operating system vendors are determined to make it harder for people to pay them to use their stuff, rather than easier.
This is exactly how I would expect the licensing to work.
https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macos-big-sur-adds-leasing-te...
From the new EULA (not just for Amazon, paraphrased by 9to5mac):
* Apple software and hardware must be leased “in its entirety to and individual or organization”
* A lease period must be “for a minimum period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours”
* Customers must now accept software agreements for all installed software of leased hardware
* All of these changes are only offered for “Permitted Developer services,” which are now spelled out for users
* Developers may now “install, use, and run additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments”
* The “lessor” such as Macstadium is fully responsible for making sure that all of these new requirements are upheld
It's ok to take the literal definition of the word monopoly and take it to its logical conclusion, I suppose. The U.S. government will not do that, however.
So this is hard to defend other than gouging.
And under the new EULA they don't allow renting a VM, only a device in its entirety
Likewise, you might read it that Circle is simply providing a service to users, and the users are paying a fee for the service.
But a CI service will set up your dev account, your container image, to run your jobs. It'll even let you shell in, and it tears it all down when you're done.
And it really starts to look like leasing when they also charge for time used on various hosts. (IIRC, Circle charges for this a bit obliquely as max parallelism.)
If it went to court, Circle might argue the hosts can only be used within their larger CI system, that they don't guarantee a particular task will complete on a given host, and that they're not providing other requirements for virtual hosts, e.g. dedicated routing or names. And then Apple's lawyers might counter all that.
So this is where I think lawyers would start digging through case law to figure out where providing a service ends and leasing begins.
Even more interestingly, I wonder if this could be an exploratory step for an Apple that's thinking about designing dedicated cloud chips.
It's difficult for me to believe that a hyper-scaled cloud deployment like AWS will rent individual mac minis to people. It sounds like a business idea I would have and then come to realize how labor intensive and inefficient the entire thing was.
At the same time, I wonder why there is not a well developed, well documented cross-compiling toolchain available for (whatever you are doing with a mac build server) ? Why not use your local (laptop) mac to do the dirty work and then run a (very complicated) cross compiling chain on a much cheaper, non mac, cloud instance ?
> The instances are launched as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum tenancy of 24 hours.
This almost sounds like they are using first sale doctrine to just lend it for a day. Like I can lend a movie but I can't make my own movie theater (right?).
Also I'm very curious of these are in-tack macs or shucked and put in a frankenstein case of dozens.
Similarly, other Mac server farms use Apple hardware. I can't think of the name right now but I remember one popular provider racking trash can Mac Pro's.
I dont see Amazon going out and buying 50.000 Mac minis and racking them.
Do you think Apple is delivering heavily customised and rackable "Mac mini" servers to AWS?
Or is there a 3rd party converting Mac mini suitable for AWS.
Or is AWS actually rack Mac mini computers?
I wonder if this will be an AWS exclusive for N amount of time? I am sure other cloud providers will want their own Mac "servers" now.
AWS is largely taking other peoples efforts and putting the Amazon brand on them.
you usually don't see this kind of thing unless you work at the actual place, or you have a colo where Amazon also hosts stuff. Unless you work there, you don't actually know whether they buy that number.
In fact, I bet you they do buy over tens of thousands of Macs of all kinds every quarter, if only to satisfy the demand for hardware for engineers and for testing purposes.
They would be first in the market and be years ahead of their competition.
Now if Apple were to selling/license M1 chips to them, that might be different, but there is no indication that's going to happen in any way, and then the current work based on Macs wouldn't really be preparation for it.
The details line up exactly, including:
- You must rent them for at least 24 hours at a time. - You must rent out one machine per end user.
I just feel sorry for all the smaller providers who have done this for years.
I wonder if this was Apple’s update prompting AWS, or AWS pushing Apple to make the change — or both.
[0]: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...
Someone points out Circle let’s you ssh in, while afaik GHA and Pipelines don’t. Is this a key difference?
That's mostly a convenience feature, you can ssh into GH Actions' macOS instances through something like an ngrok tunnel, or run a terminal sharing tool within to basically do the same. See for instance https://github.com/fastai/fastmac. I doubt that's a key difference.
This kind of performance with this kind of power efficiency would be game changer in data center.
Looking forward to Graviton3 as well.
(AWS will probably at least attempt a port of their Nitro hypervisor to M1 as well, since it’d make the machines infinitely easier to manage at scale since Macs no longer have a NetBoot or Internet Recovery option).
The Mac instances will NOT use an AWS provided hypervisor until Apple's terms change. Currently the hosting provider is only allowed to lease the whole machine, only the end user can do virtualization.