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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

What exactly would Apple lose if they offered A subscription service ($199/year? $19/month?) that allowed registered developers the right to install macOS either on bare hardware or a VM? I can’t speak for everyone else but the only reason I bought a MacBook Pro was for iOS development; I have to imagine there is a number where Apple would be fine with dispensing with making/shipping/selling/supporting the hardware and would just sell the software. Heck, I’d be fine if it was a developer-only stripped down macOS that only ran Xcode and tooling that required Xcode (Xamarin, Flutter, and Ionic development and IPA compile step). Seriously: what is the harm to Apple is allowing/selling this?

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They would lose the ability to sell hardware.

They would have to specify which hardware was supported, which would automatically give those suppliers a boost and Apple would lose the markup.

If they didn't specify supported systems, they'd have to support more hardware, which is a pain.

They would lose branding(the "best" Mac is this build + subscription not their top of the line model), would have to support lots of additional hardware, would have to support the setup, offer tech support, training for their support etc. . In short, not likely.

Instead they may considering offering cloud instances for running XCode etc. that they can rent out.

It would encourage the proliferation of low effort/lowest common denominator/“checkbox” ports to their platforms, which directly opposes what they want. By requiring a hardware purchase, they select for devs who are serious about their presence on Apple platforms and are more likely to invest in the quality of the iOS/macOS versions of their apps.

Of course a lot of low effort ports find their way into the App Store anyway, but if you compare how many of those iOS has vs how many Android has, the difference is staggering. On macOS the advantage is less clear since desktop platforms have throughly been colonized by Electron, but it still holds an advantage thanks to a bevy of small shop Mac exclusives.

It's actually not too bad to run macOS in a VM -- this is an option Apple doesn't explicitly support, but they also realize how useful it can be for automated testing of apps and browser compatibility. The company line is that they only support macOS on a VM on a "legitimate" Mac, but realistically it's not hard to find guides on how to virtualize it on a Windows host.

With the ever notable exception that graphics acceleration straight up does not exist at all in macOS in a VM. The only way to get it is to use virtIO on a Linux box to pass through a secondary AMD card, I believe.

That seems to be the case.

Note that you'd have to user vt-d, in combination with vfio, not virtio. Vt-d allows for PCIe passthrough. VirtIO is a family of paravirtualized hardware like HDD controllers and network interfaces.

Besides the name-switchup, you're completely right.

https://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Virtio

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-virtualizati...

I have a 16 core Ryzen Threadripper. Built a kvm install of Mojave, gave it 8 cores, 32GB of RAM. It wouldn't so well for someone who wanted to actually use it as a Mac, but for me as a cross-platform C++ developer, it's totally ideal. No separate keyboard, no KVM (the other KVM) switch, just boot the VM and there's a faster more powerful version of macOS waiting for my compile/edit/limited-run workflow than I could reasonably ever get from Apple.

Note: I own a couple of Mac Minis too, just for the license of course.

> Seriously: what is the harm to Apple is allowing/selling this?

The harm is they will make less money than currently.

One of the best features of macOS is its tight integration with the hardware. If they officially supported custom hardware, not only would they create tons more work for themselves and likely slow down the progress of the OS overall, they would also dilute their brand.

They'd lose a bit of money, which is more than enough harm to justify, really.

Check out macincloud.com

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