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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Oh poor you. If I want to test my app on OSX safari I have to either buy a mac or find a hipster.

I feel your pain. A (pirated) hackintosh VM doesn't cut it, as I need 3D acceleration to test a very complex WebGL app. And it's the slowest browser from the bunch. Safari is the new IE6 for me. I hate it with passion.

GPU passtrough?

From what I gathered you have 2 solutions for GPU passtrough : if you're a Unix guru and have plenty of time to spare you might make it work with Xen or if you have money VMWare looks easier but you may need a license and special hardware (if you have a regular Nvidia graphic card it won't work, you need an ATI or a Nvidia Quadro).

No. You just need to read Alex Williamson blog, for nvidia you need to patch drivers a bit - it is not hard. And compared to the price of macpro with discrete GPU - not that expensive either.

http://vfio.blogspot.bg/

just googling vfio kvm leads you to very thorough arch linux topic (with a bit of drama on the end, whatever)

For anyone else, thinking hmm, that sounds easy. The TL;DR is that you don't "just need to read" Alex's blog, you need to read, think, try, fix, bug search, rinse, repeat, take on board a number of complex ideas and concepts, and/or buy ideal hardware. The arch linux topic is very long! I've read most of it as it came in, but reading that whole thing for tidbits and fixes that Google doesn't always turn up isn't quick or easygoing. Good luck!

That was 3 years ago. Right now the process is more streamlined.

Of course I assume that people that frequent hacker news are geeks and tinkerers.

Yeah, I'm definitely a geek and tinkerer, but testing in Safari is work stuff I don't like, and the only way to do it properly is with actual Apple hardware.

+1 for this. At least Microsoft gives us the option.

  >> or find a hipster

Seriously? This is a pretty outdated characterization...

Not on my home country where people earn 500 € on average and most IT guys around 1 000 € on junior positions.

Republik Österreich? ;) Low wages for tech people... Although, the average I believe should be higher.

No way, wages are much higher than the ones he mentioned. Maybe Hungary or Romania, sure, but Austria?

EU West Coast, all the way to the left.

I have a feeling that you are from Poland :)

No, but it also starts with a P a bit into the EU west coast. :)

Portugal then. As you can see it's the same on east side of Europe

Well at least the food is great.

Liked Krakow a lot, specially the subterranean bars. :)

No you don't.

http://www.macincloud.com works very well, and they have billing by the hour and versions of OS X ranging from Lion through to El Capitan.

No connection with them, just a satisfied customer.

I mean, if you want to test Windows, spin up a VM or VPS on any number of providers. But that's not really what we're talking about here.

A much cheaper way is to get it tested from freelancers on Upwork/Elance who have OSX!

Sometimes you need to see the issue first hand.

Not only that, you need an iPhone and several iPad versions too because they are all different. Supporting Apple devices suck unless that is your main dev platform.

If you have a mac, you can install Xcode and get access to all the iPhone and iPad emulators emulators which gives you some mileage.

This is not true. Each version of Xcode works with simulator runtimes of the most recent two major iOS versions only.

Also, no simruntime for 7.0 and before works in El Capitan, regardless of Xcode version.

Although in all honestly, it's much less of a problem. Only about 6% uses an iOS version before iOS 8 at the moment. (I'm one of 'm!)

Interestingly, by doing this developers have a harder time supporting me (iOS 6 and 7 on phone/tablet). The result is forgoing app updates and even new apps altogether that I can't download. This pushes me to upgrade, and keeps the iOS adoption rate quite high. Facilitating devs in supporting old iOS versions does the opposite. I'm not a fan of this but I can easily imagine the benefits for Apple.

I thought you could download old versions. They just don't come installed by default. Xcode -> Preferences -> Downloads.

Looks like you can, but only back as far as iOS 8.1

Ah, that makes the parent complaint make more sense then for sure. Thanks for checking (been a while since I used xcode).

You're right, it only goes back to iOS 8.1, but you do get the devices for all current iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and watchOS.

Of course having a real device is much better, but as a web developer, this helped me pick up a Safari only bug very easily without needing to spend on a real device.

You can use OSX's debugger in Safari to remote debug a web page in the simulator, which I think is pretty neat.

Is that any worse than Android? I certainly wouldn't think so, given that there are way fewer Apple models and they tend to have way better distribution of their software updates.

Aren't there hosting places where you can rent a mac by the hour or by the month? I just googled "rent a mac" and found a couple. No clue how legit or shady any of the sites are though.

Fair cop :-)

Yea, let's be devicive without cause.

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