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Comment by askvictor | Hacker News Reader

I've recently been developing a cross-platform (gui) app in python + qt. I develop on a Windows machine, but want to run pyinstaller on a Mac to make a Mac package available. Unfortunately, not having a Mac, I can't do this simple thing. I played around briefly trying to (illegally) get a MacOS VM running, but gave up. This would solve my problems (well, not testing that it actually works as expected on a Mac, but much better than nothing)

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> trying to (illegally) get a MacOS VM running, but gave up.

I've tried this myself and failed.

But I genuinely wonder, why you think this is illegal. I mean, do you think that Apple's T&C are laws? I can't think of anything else that activity would be in violation of.

Breach of contract pertains to civil law.

Apart from breach of contract (which is already mentioned), there’s also the practical issue of acquiring a license. Apple no longer sells licenses for macOS separately. This means that getting ahold of a macOS license without resorting to copyright infringement will be difficult.

>breach of contract

Does this matter if you never signed a contract with Apple in the first place?

Ha. But then surely it's 'breach of copyright' or something, because you don't have a licence or otherwise permission to use the software.

You'd be "signing" the macOS EULA as part of the install process.

This depends on where you live.

> I've tried this myself and failed.

I failed at it too, but then some bright spark wrote this script that works like a charm. Bear in mind that the VM might be too slow for normal use.

https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox

Brilliant! I'll give this a try, thanks.

You're right, T&C are not laws.

They better figure this out and release some good VM support because I have very little interest in buying all of their stuff just so I can run my build.

I did get the VM to work eventually and have been experimenting with builds on that. The VM is slow so I'm starting to lose interest in doing any more grunt work for an extra 10% of revenue. Ah, who am I kidding. I'll do it because I'm just as greedy as they are.

I've never had problems with getting a macOS VM working (using VirtualBox) --- all the stories about Hackintosh made me think it was going to be very difficult --- and even Apple seems to freely let you download from their servers, without any authentication, all the files that can be made into an installation ISO (search keyword: InstallESD.dmg), so I was indeed quite surprised the first time it booted and installed successfully. I didn't even have to do any specific driver-hacking or similar. I suspect Hackintoshing on real hardware is a lot harder.

you might also have lucked out with your hardware. e.g. I think nvidia gives it problems, and I assume the same is true in a VM

Why not just use a CI server?

Doesn't that have the same problem? You have to get hold of a CI server running OSX, either physical or in the cloud, and neither is easy since they're expensive and non-rackmountable.

Define easy. Travis CI is free for open source and probably not prohibitely expensive for businesses. CircleCI might be even cheaper.

You don't need a dedicated server running macOS, which would be more problematic as you say. There are plenty of CI services supporting macOS. Looking at the pricing sheets of CircleCi, Github actions and TravisCI. CircleCI was only one listing lower maximum concurrent and varying cost based on machine size and type. Others only listed total minutes without differentiation between machines. As long as you are using it only for making builds and daily testing instead of anything compute intensive that takes long time, the prices should be reasonable. There are also free tiers for open source projects.

In my experience developing cross platform open source software, doing builds isn't the biggest problem. The situations when you need to debug platform specific behaviour, integration with OS and verifying that your software is properly packaged for macOS is when you might want direct access to a real machine.

Github actions also chatges more for mac. Mac minutes count as 10 minutes each! But Azure Pipelines does not.

I'm guessing that is because they need dedicated workers for MacOS while linux/windows can just run on any node. Macs also do not have a lot of data-center related features like IPMI so running them in a headless setup is not as easy.

Basically apple forces everyone to only run MacOS on it's own hardware and it's own hardware is unsuitable for the usecase.

(And yes I know about the imgix mac pro cluster)

Sure, it's totally reasonable. Just pointing it out as the parent comment said that they didn't differentiate (and IIRC it's not too obvious on the pricing page).

After searching for a while was able to find it, but it wasn't easy. Seems scammy to claim that you get x minutes in their main pricing page without even an asterisk. Imagine going to store buying 1kg of fish and after paying them giving you only 100g and suggestion that you can get 1kg of potatoes instead. Others at least call it execution credits that there is some non obvious mapping involved.

The new MacPro comes in a rack edition

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