Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
aws.amazon.com
aws.amazon.com
They don't yet display any reservation pricing for mac1 instances, but they do offer a "savings plan." https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/pricing/
If you pay for three years up front, you can pay $0.764 per hour, $6,692 per year, 29% off. I believe that's the lowest price Amazon will offer you.
For comparison, you can rent an equivalent Mac Mini from MacStadium for $139/month, $1,668/year. Or you can rent their cheapest model for $59/month, $708/year.
You can also buy the equivalent Mac Mini for $1,899.
Paying these premiums is all in the furtherance of a good cause called “Bezos getting another hundy billion to his name”.
I'd have loved to have seen mac pros, and virtual instances (subdivided, even if you had to maintain a dedicated host to run them on), but this is still a major quality of life improvement for heterogeneous environments.
1. You are a big company who needs Mac CI and your IT department has a strict "Cloud Only" restriction.
2. You are a developer for a cross-platform App who doesn't own a mac, but needs access to a real mac every few weeks or months for debugging/releasing.
But the 24hr thing kills it for me. I will never get 24 hours use out of it. Maybe a few hours. Why am I paying for the other 21 hours?
Maybe someone can wrap this SaaS in a other Saas and sell timeshares in a virtual Mac.
Unsure if you've seen the comments elsewhere in the thread but in case you haven't and this is a genuine question - because Apple's EULA forces Amazon to do this.
Is the answer simply "Because they can and they like money?"
That's exactly it. If you could rent Macs by the minute, you wouldn't need to own Mac hardware anymore to build Mac apps, and the cloud provider wouldn't need to own as much.
It seems this is Apple's sole motivation when it comes to anything developer related, which seems odd considering their goal is to commodotize software to sell their hardware - you'd think they wouldn't keep making it harder to make software for their platforms
That's precisely what the EULA prevents, otherwise Amazon would happily sell you smaller slice of time.
Yes but I'm more likely to vierualize on my more powerful and better value PC. The EULA is rather hard to enforce and I don't have any moral qualms in this particular case.
People always do this on HN. "I can only think of two things, so those are the only two things that can possibly exist."
How about a render farm? If your company only produces three or four videos a year, why build a render farm that sits idle for half the year?
You mean have opinions and open discussion? "I can only think of two things" doesn't mean "there are only two things exactly and everyone else is wrong". Welcome to the Internet, I see you are new here.
No, dismiss the possibility that there may be things that they don't know about or understand.
"I can only think of two things" doesn't mean "there are only two things exactly and everyone else is wrong".
But that's precisely what he said: "exactly two usecases for this service" He didn't write "I can only think of..." You're making stuff up.
Welcome to the Internet
I shall say the same to you, since I've been online since before the internet, back when you had to manually route e-mail, and it took a week to get a message from New York to Paris, if you were lucky.
I see you are new here.
Welcome to HN. I see you're new here. Be sure to read the rules about unhelpful snarky responses.
The cost of housing and managing a unit of hardware is nonzero. Actuals vary wildly by location, purposes, and sector; but if everyone can get their heads out of the hobbyist-tinkerer mindset for a moment and consider that lifetime TCO is a real and meaningful consideration for businesses, then the component that isn't buying/leasing the server itself is typically several hundred dollars, per physical unit, per annum. Public clouds don't nullify all of it, but they swing the needle dramatically.
Since my duty cycle for a Mac Mini is rather less than 20%, the economics even of on-demand instances immediately make sense, and having it inside the VPC boundary without hybridising is gravy on the meat since I'm consuming several other AWS services besides.
These two factors (lifetime TCO and scale-down) are the economic foundation of the value proposition of utility computing. The "I can build that in my garage for cheaper" crew aren't wrong, but they're missing the point.
Putting on my sometime cloud infrastructure product manager's hat, long-term observers of service pricing may also observe the common enough pattern of starting a new product with a relatively high price, one that selects for early adopters and other price-insensitive (and, you hope, glitch/MVP-tolerant) customer segments, then gradually ratcheting prices down in order to estimate (amongst other things) the price elasticity of demand. It's naturally easier to get cheaper over time, than go the other way. In this AWS's position on compute is congruent to any other commodity merchant⁽¹⁾ with the luxury of being able to withstand potential losses on a single product line. For most EC2 instance types I'd expect they have a very good model of the price sensitivities, but mac1 is undoubtedly a unique platform with elevated uncertainty in the price parameters.
Which is my long-winded way of saying, it'll likely be cheaper in a few months.
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⁽¹⁾ yes, yes, just like a fruit shop, very droll.
Are you factoring in the 24 hour minimum AWS charges for a Mac Mini?
On my team, we just have a Mac Mini sitting under someone's desk to do stuff that requires a Mac. It gets used for about 1 hour every day for a daily build. For us, AWS's offering doesn't make financial sense.
Even if we were to switch to only doing a weekly build, it wouldn't be worth it, as that would still cost around $1,250/year.
OSX seems more prone to bitroot regressions than Windows or Linux, I suppose Apple have a "you're with us, or you're against us" attitude and this even applies to base OS backwards (in)compatibility.
What are you doing with macs that naturally works out at ~one continuous 24h period per work-week on average? Turn on CI once a week Thursday midnight, and no one goes into the weekend before all test failures are fixed?
The money spent paying someone to set up a Mac server somewhere else, getting that somewhere else connected to your AWS networks, and ensuring that connection is secure, and generally integrating it into your existing cloud devops infrastructure (or, perhaps more expensively, not integrating it into your existing devops infrastructure), would, I'm guessing, be horrendously expensive compared to the premium Amazon charges on a relatively turnkey solution for use cases such as, "We need to run the occasional Darwin build."
Otherwise I agree. 24 hour minimum removes immediate scaling as an option, and for anyone who already has their own infrastructure the cost is prohibitively high. My hope would be that with time, at the very least the 24 hour minimum would eventually be removed, and ideally the price will come down too.
Perhaps it's good for render farms. Instead of building a giant render farm that sits idle between productions, you spin up a render farm only when you need one.
If you're already in AWS, your deployment infrastructure and tooling is already configured and tuned for AWS. Deploying a Mac EC2 instance is just adding another target. Whereas deploying to another provider is an unknown amount of work to integrate with their API (if they even have one). The wall-time cost of people's time and effort vastly outweighs the marginal savings you'd get by going with a low-cost provider.
The problem is not the first time setup. The problem is essentially what “uptime” you can provide. Once you setup an infrastructure many people come to depend on it.
Lets say two teams lose half a day when that CI/CD mac mini goes down then paying for a cloud provider to manage many instances and “sharing them ondemand” makes a lot of monetary sense.
Of course, paying a cloud provider may or may not make sense for hobbyists. Personally, I pay for cloud storage - thats super hard to get right.
Besides, if your cloud spend is already a fuckton, $24 per day extra is not going to make you blink.
MacStadium's prices are "rather less than 20%" of AWS's prices. To make sense, AWS would have to be comparable to MacStadium's pricing.
And don't forget the 24-hour minimum. If your duty cycle for a Mac Mini is only 20% per day every weekday, well, you can't rent a Mac Mini for less than a 24 hour period, so instead of paying for 20% of a month, you'll be paying for 20 work days, 60% of a month. On AWS, that would run you $546/month, 4x as much as you'd pay MacStadium for the entire month.
AWS's price is only comparable to MacStadium if you need five 24-hour periods per month (or less).
And, sure, AWS's prices will decline at some point, but I'm not expecting an 80% price drop this year.
Also, I'm more likely to transition to this because I'm familiar with AWS, I didn't know MacStadium existed before this thread.
If that's their target market (and not someone who wants a scalable Mac build farm available 24/7 and doesn't care about costs), then it makes sense - I pay a lot less than the price of a Mini to rent it 4 days a year, if Amazon can find 90 other people who want to do the same, all of us are better off.
So yes, AWS is still a shoo-in.
Don't even get me started on the data sovereignty and latency issues of a self-proclaimed "global" hosting provider that's only on two continents, neither of which we are operating in.
If you’re operating there, then your providers in all aspects will be more than limited.
Not at all. MacStadium is not inside the AWS network, so there’s nothing comparable about it.
I’m not sure why they went for a 24h minimum though. That defeats the entire point of cloud computing for me.
...however is the AWS price including a lot of value the Mac mini colo price doesn't? I believe the AWS price is dramatically higher unless you can batch the 20% duty cycle into full days (AWS is following Apple's EULA and only billing in 24 consecutive hour chunks).
I'm not a "I can build in the garage cheaper", I'm a "we use to build servers that way, run them ourselves (and steal meeting rooms form ourselves and put extra cooling in), and then I went off to do other things for 20 years and now I work at a huge company where we build our own cloud stuff...but if I were at a less huge company how would this stuff actually work out?" kind of person (i.e. I know the _theory_ of renting other people's servers, but the finer points of actually evaluating it are not currently in my grasp).
This is the hard thing for me. I just like having so much control of having hardware at home, and I've got static IPs. But it costs to power and cool them, and they aren't elastic like cloud/IaaS. Having started the move to VPSs and finding them very good for the price, I'm now trying to wrap my head around "cattle, not pets", but still with a micropreneur mindset. I think it's still worth it, and my home office is getting quieter with every server I relocate to somebody else's hardware.
But the real place cloud/IaaS shines for me is when you aggressively scale, both up and down. If you're used to pets and physical machines then you probably over provision a lot. With the cloud you can ride the CPU/memory line a lot closer and scale quickly when needed.
> You can also buy the equivalent Mac Mini for $1,899.
Not only that, but MacStadium lets you run multiple VMs on a single Mac at no extra cost. Amazon's offering is seriously underwhelming.
The more I use or learn about MacStadium, the less impressed I am with it (3 layers of virtualisation is overkill in my opinion!), but it beats the hell out of what Amazon has just announced.
The big problem with CI/CD on Mac is that Xcode does not allow you to run builds in parallel, so you need one Mac per build unless you use virtualisation.
To be honest I'm surprised that no one has added namespace/jail support to macOS yet. The XNU kernel is open source so this should be possible. In fact, can someone explain to me why there doesn't seem to be any sort of XNU hacking community?
Probably because (from what I've heard), even using xnu is extremely painful, let alone hacking on it.
And it's not like you can re-compile your changes to xnu back into a working MacOS machine
Wow, that's just awful, but it would it explain it. Thanks!
Nowadays, however, Hackintosh tends to rely entirely on patching the kernel in memory, even on esoteric platforms like AMD. Custom kernels are really inconvenient for a few reasons—they get set back to stock after every update (which potentially means your computer won't boot, if you forget to put the custom kernel back before your machine restarts), and Apple releases XNU's source on a ~6 month delay.
I would love to see more kernel experimentation, but I think there's just not a lot of reason to do it? If you're on a Mac, you don't need to add support for new hardware.
That said, it would be great to get a kernel which e.g. disables TCC, or maybe which removes Big Sur's signed snapshot stuff. Both of those feel like achievable tasks, and they would have a real use!
To the hobbiest market, yes. But large companies, at which this seem to be aimed, work with names they know, not names they don't.
The company I work for would pay more to use Amazon than MacStadium for equivalent products. That's just how corporate bureaucracy works. It shouldn't, but it almost always does.
Yes it does. The Xcode GUI only allows one build at a time, but you can run multiple `xcodebuild` command line builds using the same or different versions of Xcode in parallel, even under the same macOS user.
For running tests, there used to be problems if you were trying to invoke the iOS Simulator for different versions of Xcode in parallel, but those issues were fixed 4 or 5 years ago.
I've setup and used a set of bare-metal Mac mini CI runner, each configured to run two jobs in parallel, and the Xcode pieces of that are rock solid and didn't need _any_ workarounds to enable parallel jobs.
This isn't true. "xcode-select" forces you to set a system-wide Xcode version. If you have a job that uses one version and a concurrent job selects another version, it will potentially break the first job.
The only reason this would make sense is if you needed to actually host something with >99.9% uptime or high bandwidth needs on a Mac.
Paying by the second is also ideal for these use cases. You run a build occasionally, but it mostly sits idle.
Pay by the second would perhaps be preferable but unless I am reading this wrong you have to pay by the hour and it's relatively expensive.
Under the new agreement, you must:
* Rent to only one organization
* Rent for 24 hours at the minimum
* Use it for some set of "approved" development work
…among other restrictions. And Brian Stucki is celebrating these changes?! This is a sick joke. You're enjoying a significantly tightened EULA that benefits nobody but yourself, a EULA that means that a single CI build now costs $26 on AWS instead of 50 cents; one that means that more than half the comments here are confused why AWS is ripping people off.
Shame on you Brian Stucki, shame on you MacStadium, and shame on you Apple. Your EULA changes are absurdly hostile to developers, since now they're either going to have to buy Macs themselves or rent from MacStadium-like services. Shame on you both for colluding together for making this situation horrible and then having the guts to write that blog post.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but Amazon, I feel so sorry for you. You didn't deserve this.
Software patents are still not recognized, let's hope this continues for a long time.
- EULAs cannot deny permissions that are allowed under consumer rights.
- It's also worth adding that software licences behave slightly differently to EULAs in that software licenses are designed to provide additional rights above what copyright laws typically allow (this is particularly true in the case of open source licenses) where as EULAs are often (though not always) designed to place restrictions on top of existing consumer rights. Hence why they're often considered invalid.
- I'm not 100% on this specific point as it has been a few years ago since I've investigated it but there was once some contention about whether it's even legal to place a licence agreement to the user after said user has already purchased the product. However companies could still use an EULA to revoke support -- much like a company can revoke warranty if they suspect the device has been opened up (eg the tamper strips). The rules here might have been clarified in court since I've last investigated this point though.
- "The European Patent Convention states that software is not patentable. But laws are always interpreted by courts, and in this case interpretations of the law differ. So the European Patents Office (EPO) grants software patents by declaring them as "computer implemented inventions"." source: https://fsfe.org/activities/swpat/swpat.en.html
- Even the FSFE (Free Software Foundation Europe) quote above only tells half the story regarding Software Patents within the EU. There are some restrictions on what counts as a "computer implemented invention" plus also there are also national level patent offices that override the EPO at a local level. Wikipedia has some good summaries about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eur...
Not saying the EULA would definitely be enforceable, just that it's not that simple in this case.
Even if MacStadium was not involved in this at all, making a blog post about a change that hurts your competitors and talking about how you are somehow better than them and deserve to exist is remarkably poor taste.
It also happens to align them with people who are in the business of selling or renting Macs, sure. But the point is not to screw AWS or MacStadium's competitors. The point is to sell Macs.
I'm pretty sure that MacStadium didn't limit their rental to one customer per hardware box out of spite for their customers, but because that's what Apple expected of them. So their were being held to a higher standard than some of their competitors, who had much higher profit margins by putting multiple customers on one machine.
So I think he is justifiably happy that Apple created a fair competition by clearly spelling out the legal rules for everyone.
The fact that Apple's official rules are close to what they were doing adds additional credibility to this interpretatio, because it suggest that they were following Apple's guidance before it became legally easy to enforce
I wouldn't put any blame for how these rules look like on MacStadium, because if Epic cannot negotiate with Apple on eye level, I'm confident that MacStadium never will. It's probably more like they received their future laws as dictated by their fruit-shaped God.
What Apple did here is create a monopoly for MacStadium, at least in the near future, and remove services like AWS from consideration completely. Brian's claims that they were simply offering their services in a way that "felt right with what Apple would have wanted" is marketing drivel. I don't care if I am getting a single core out of four, I'm not trying to browse Safari on this machine. Just run my builds and give me what I pay for; that's how CI works for literally everything else.
Why can't any business rent out physical Macs on a 1:1 basis on the same terms as MacStadium? It looks like they can, and if so then it's nothing favorable to MacStadium specifically: it's just not favorable to fractional renting like AWS.
I don't see what the bit I left off ("at least in the near future") changes.
There's nothing structural that favors MacStadium over other businesses with the same model.
This is nothing like a monopoly.
It's like Netscape had a monopoly on browsers because they were the first to ship when HTTP 1.0 was finalized.
There is nothing dishonest about asking Apple about its future business plans and following Apple's rules. If you base your entire business on skirting rules then don't come crying when they are suddenly being enforced. It's on you to make your business work.
It's not only marketing drivel, it's a downright strange statement. I mean with which other product would you consider the wishes of the anthropomorphized business which created the product in terms of how you use it? Normally the product is meant to serve the consumer, not the other way around.
Thing is he's only happy because those rules are good for them. The way he talks about renting partial CPUs being somehow 'wrong' and makes them look like a ripoff is misleading. Just because you can get a VPS or hourly billed CPU time does not mean you can not get a full machine as well. But cost matters a lot, especially to smaller developers.
I think it could be argued that it shouldn't be Apple's place to set the rules of the competition. If MacStadium is correct, that the best experience is one-user-one-machine, then their business model should win out. It's not fair competition to rule out all other business models.
It's clear that you have never worked with Apple. This is not how Apple does business. Apple sets the terms and you either agree or GTFO.
This simply isn't true. Any business can follow Apple's licence and do exactly the same thing.
> I’m happy to have an absolute guideline from Apple
Before this, it was a legal grey area. Now at least the rules are spelled out and are clear. More importantly, they are the same for everyone. I think we could all argue over what the "right" limits might be (or if there should be any), but at least MacStadium, AWS, and whomever else wants to rent out cloud-based Macs now know where they stand.
AWS is offering dedicated bare metal Mac Minis for rent with virtual NICs and virtual storage powered by AWS Nitro, there is no macOS virtualisation.
No, it hasn't. If you're using "VM" to include bare metal, then you are using the wrong term for something. The definition of the word "virtualization" has not changed.
The new instance name is “mac1.metal” just like AWS’ other hardware as a service offerings:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-ec2-bare-metal-i...
GitHub Actions, Semaphore CI, CircleCI, Bitrise, they have all done actual virtualisation of macOS for a number of years too. Yes it's a slightly more specialised problem domain, but nothing about this is correct.
That makes no sense, sorry.
It seems unlikely that they could successfully sue me if I buy a bunch of Macs and give some people physical time-limited access (say, students in a classroom). What makes the difference? Remote access? Charging rent? I'm not sufficiently invested in these matters for a deep dive, so hoping someone with legal knowledge could chime in.
of course like with anything in the legal system it will take a company like Amazon that has their own team of $1,000/hr lawyers to face up against Apple's team of $1,000/hr lawyers in order to get a precedent setting case
Second, I wonder on what legal basis they can actually impose usage restrictions of a whole Mac (hardware+software) via an EULA as long as I don't breach any copyright (which I don't think I do if I rent out usage of the entire system for a few hours).
AFAICT (again, not a lawyer), everything rests on section 1.J.[1] "Except as expressly permitted in Section 3, you may not rent, lease, lend, sell, redistribute or sublicense the Apple Software." being enforceable. (Section 3. contains the infamous terms for Leasing for Permitted Developer Services with the 24hr restriction). I don't know if such terms would hold up in court. If I read the thing correctly, the the EULA forbids people from lending their MacBook to a friend, or even resell it, which strikes me as quite absurd.
In a broad interpretation, the prohibitions on rent/lease/lend/sell of "the Apple Software" would apply to the whole system (harware+software), which would forbid me to sell my old Mac. This would never hold up in court. But in a narrow reading, where the prohibitions only apply to the software, separated from the hardware it does not look like there is anything stopping me from renting out (access to) the entire Mac to a single user[1], for whatever purpose and duration I want. So those 24hr and "development purposes" would be moot.
[1] There's probably more than enough precedence to uphold number-of-users restrictions of software, e.g. Windows Server CALs.
- running apps in the cloud, not for q/a, but as a farm for adclicks and fraud. People already do that - farm for generating and submitting low quality games primarily to sell ads. People already do this. - Use backup images on systems with Secure Enclave in order to crack the encryption. Someone security company whose clients are state level actors, and increasingly, law enforcement, are doing this with iphones. I don’t know if a mac cloud makes this possible for other hardware - The M1 is an Apple exclusive SoC with a lot of bespoke, specialized chips, and unified memory, and is only going to get faster for future Macs. I can see people trying to access a cloud for that, while ignoring the branding that links consumer, end-user experience with “Apple”. (Esp since Nvidia has bought ARM, and that RISC-in-cloud is becoming a big deal)
I am not saying those are a good enough reason to set the ELUA the way Apple did, but that I get why Apple might do this.
The flip side from my perspective. A monthly dedicated host on MacStadium is much cheaper than running an AWS Windows 2019 Server ondemand, or even with Reserved Instance pricing.
Why does that matter to me and the company I work for? Because Unity is behind on their Linux version, so CI builds are going to run on either Mac or Windows. I don’t really care that much about elastic compute for this, though being able to use AMIs matters more. The main reason we have not moved to using Macstadium dedicated hosts is that I would need to set up something like Chef as configuration management for what would be essentially a fleet of pet servers.
But if our team wants to deploy to either Mac or Windows as production systems ... I would be discouraging them from doing so.
If instances are totally ephemeral in the same way as we are used to with linux vm's maybe that runs the risk of creating a real problem for apple services?
These rules are 100% down to Apple, absolutely nothing to do with AWS and MacStadium in terms of decision-making.
Apple don't want the perceived value of their machines to become lower, want to make sure there's no possibility of performance issues due to multiple tenancy, and want to make sure this doesn't become a way for people to have a personal Mac without having a Mac.
Maybe in another year or two, assuming nothing came out of this which Apple didn't like, they might loosen the rules slightly.
It's really not Apple's business to try to protect people from "performance issues due to multiple tenancy". People who buy these things already know how this works.
And it absolutely is 100% typical of Apple to do this kind of thing. They don't want third party companies to provide offerings which might cause them problems or degrade their brand/perception.
I'm not at all saying these terms were added to benefit AWS. More that they were a condition of Apple doing this first official cloud partnership.
For example, it wasnt hard to predict that a company which basically gives away its OS for free, and nearly makes all its money selling the hardware to run the OS would start with licensing terms that led to more sales of macs.
This idea that Apple is worried about an EC2 instance replacing a personal Mac is way, way, out there. What is much more likely is that a developer buys a lower cost, not Apple laptop and uses that to connect to a Mac on EC2 for the few tasks that require a Mac. Again, it's an move _against_ developers, it's not designed to make the lives of developers any easier.
Joking aside, the software license agreement was certainly a cause for personal celebration. It might be helpful for you to compare macOS 11 to previous versions. (Linked in my post.) If I/MacStadium did anything, we showed that there was a need for this sort of service and that both Apple and developers would benefit with some official way to do it. Amazon joining is further proof of that.
I’ve always pushed for the safe road at MacStadium (and my company Macminicolo before that) even if it meant losing out on gray area business. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve answered “but what if Apple shuts this service down?” Not anymore.
With the new Eula, the guidelines are now set. Doing everything above board paid off.
I'm less clear on why you're happy that they didn't allow more stuff, like renting by the minute or for arbitrary purposes. You seem to depict companies that were doing this as "below board", while you as "above board". This is certainly true now, but before the changes both would have been a grey area - I don't see much of a difference.
Would I be correct saying that you're happy because in one stroke Apple has moved you from grey area to explicitly permitted, and part of your competition from grey area to explicitly forbidden?
For the record in no way I think that Apple took this decision to favor you or anyone else except themselves. It just seems that you won a regulatory lottery.
An example closer to home is that entrepreneurial activity in Silicon Valley is often attributed to California law forbidding non competes in employment contracts. This is regulation, without which, as you see in nearly every other state, workers are severely bound by their employment contracts in the work they can do while and after being employed by a company.
If regulations seem to benefit incumbents, it’s because incumbents exist and therefore can play a role in setting regulations. The counterbalance to this should be public pressure and political action, but incumbents recognizing that do much to dissuade the public from pushing for such action, including convincing people of pithy, but 180 degrees wrong ideas such as “regulations always benefit incumbents”.
The intended purpose is to help the new entrants, but I don't see Microsoft or AT&T losing anything or their smaller competitors gaining anything after the regulatory action against them.
> An example closer to home is that entrepreneurial activity in Silicon Valley is often attributed to California law forbidding non competes in employment contracts. This is regulation, without which, as you see in nearly every other state, workers are severely bound by their employment contracts in the work they can do while and after being employed by a company.
That's a matter of negotiation. I always (successfully) negotiated with my employer to exclude my personal projects from the contract. I find that employees have a lot more negotiating power than they realize.
> If regulations seem to benefit incumbents, it’s because incumbents exist and therefore can play a role in setting regulations.
I think that's synonymous with the original statement made by OP. You're just providing another reason why it's true.
AT&T lost big. It ended up going bankrupt.
The "AT&T" you know today is not the same company. It is Southwestern Bell, which bought the AT&T brand in the bankruptcy fire sale and renamed itself.
It did so because AT&T was a more valuable brand than Southwestern Bell. Looks like it worked.
So basically SBC was one of many companies spun off from AT&T, then it bought up several of the other Baby Bell companies spun off, too. Really, it was AT&T buying AT&T.
It worked on paper, but the victor was still from the same tree.
> It is Southwestern Bell, which bought the AT&T brand in the bankruptcy fire sale and renamed itself.
Southwestern Bell was the same subsidiary that broke off from AT&T Corporation. AT&T Inc was the merger of the companies that were originally broken up from AT&T Corporation. Here is the org chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T#Chart_of_AT&T_Baby_Bell...
AT&T became even bigger after the breakup: https://www.businessinsider.com/att-breakup-1982-directv-bel...
You think that AT&T Corporation going broke and selling to a company that originated from the AT&T Corporation, which later renamed itself to AT&T Inc is a good example of a government-imposed corporate breakup?! It literally divested from those companies only to have most of them merge under the same name again.
Quite a few observers, including people internal to Microsoft, felt it cost the company significant momentum at the time, and confidence after.
Before the court case, Microsoft was a brutal competitor (remember the Simpsons episode?). Not so much after.
The best cases occur where they raise a floor uniformly. For example I would prefer to add anti pollution systems to my paint factory, because I live in town too, and I just don't want to pollute. It would raise the price of my paint $1/gal, and not enough customers will chose a product just because it polluted less. Many of my competitors feel the same. If we all do it everybody benefits and nobody suffers relative to their competition. This is even more important in cases where the customer can't signal through the market, e.g. electricity generation. These can benefit incumbents but not necessarily hurt new entrants, especially when they are cap ex rather than op ex (e.g. minimum wage rather than an additional piece of equipment).
There are many bad examples as well, some of which raise a floor asymmetrically. For example FB, or at least their CEO, is willing to have the CDA's section 230 abolished because they have such a dominant customer base and enough cash that they believe they would be able to afford to do the resulting government mandated controls and fight any lawsuits, while a new entrant would not.
I don't know how any competition would be negatively impacted by Apple implementing these terms, unless the competition was already selling services that were on a short-term basis (below 24 hours).
And to circle back around, this EULA enables MacStadium's hardware hosting competition to enter the market... thus comes Amazon into the playing field. I just don't see how having to compete with Amazon is, all of a sudden, a better deal for MacStadium. If anything, it just highlights the volatile nature of running a business in the Apple ecosystem.
> For the record in no way I think that Apple took this decision to favor you or anyone else except themselves. It just seems that you won a regulatory lottery.
"Congratulations, you're a winner... your prize is to compete with Amazon!" Some would certainly wear it with a badge of honor!
At least this puts a barrier to entry.
Almosto all of MacStadium post is about those competitors, did we read something different?
And Amazon would be much more of a competition were they allowed to rent by the minute, it's their selling point!
Macstadium competes against other short-term rental companies but also against real Macs, Hackintoshes on physical machines, Hackintoshes on virtual machines (inc EC2), and non-consumption.
Hacks on VMs are a pretty direct competitor I’d think.
MacStadium isn't doing short-term rentals not because it can't but because the EULA doesn't allow it. Anybody doing short-term rentals is doing it on Mac hardware so they can just as easily sell long-term rentals. Aside from MacStadium being a major player in this field, I see absolutely nothing that favors them compared to their competition. In fact, it seems to have created Amazon as a competitor.
And the Hackintosh thing is the reason a Mac hosting companies exist in the first place. If Hackintoshes were allowed, there would be no companies offering Mac hosted hardware. I don't see how that's related to this particular situation tho. Apple created the need for Mac hosted hardware so blaming Mac hardware hosting companies for this is a bit backward.
> Hacks on VMs are a pretty direct competitor I’d think.
The VMs have to run on Mac hardware as well.
Various options have different drawbacks, including EULA violations, but all represent viable alternatives for some (therefore competition) to Macstadium.
Anyways: I read your blog post back when it came out. Whether Apple took your input into account when making the EULA, I don't know; I am sure that you must have some sort of amicable relationship at the very least. Running services "on the border" like this is never easy, but I would think that your business model (which includes buying a huge number of Macs) has probably kept Apple mostly on your side. I know the work you've done to keep it this way and to be honest, I was happy for you when Apple announced their rack-mountable Mac Pros and gave you a mention at the Mac Mini event.
The problem from my side (at least where you and MacStadium are involved) mostly lies with the blog post you wrote. Look, I get it, Apple's changes make the EULA work for you. That's great! But I'm sure you also realize that spelling this out clearly in the way that they did means that the "gray area" becomes a black area for basically everyone else. What I didn't appreciate is you calling it a "gray area" and coming up with rationale for why what they want is not reasonable. Apple came in, almost certainly looked at your business specifically, made its rules to hurt developers and these companies, and now you're writing blog posts about how Apple is your friend and you were right all along. It feels like you've decided to start singing praises for a bully that decided to leave you alone, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
There's still a huge hole for a service that lets you rent a Mac for the a couple minutes so you can build your Xcode project. It's not your fault that doesn't exist, it's Apple's. But could you maybe not publicly celebrate that Apple has created a situation that happens to help you and make it generally worse for others? Can we stop trying to normalize or even argue that sharing a Mac is something wrong, something that Apple would think is ruining the "performance experience" you should get from a Mac?
So, you give him all this shit and you're not even using his service?
>There's still a huge hole for a service that lets you rent a Mac for the a couple minutes so you can build your Xcode project. It's not your fault that doesn't exist, it's Apple's.
If we're talking for CI of builds, sure. But in that case, one wouldn't be much affected (the C in CI means continuous, so you wont just rent for a few minutes).
Otherwise, as a user, I'm quite satisfied with less developers being able to build XCode projects and submit apps without even owning a Mac to test them on. Looks like it would bring a delluge of poorly ported apps based on cross-platform APIs and only tested in non-Mac platforms (if that).
Will we get some lower quality apps, sure, do those already exist? yeah. It just sounds like gatekeeping for not much benefit.
Thanks! I try to add the ocassional low quality comment for balance :-)
>so I am going to say that an elitist "screw people who cant afford an overpriced mac" is not a good thing imo.
Well, my intented meaning was more like "Don't create/sell apps for a platform you dont even own to test in".
The main reason to go for "by the minute" builds on the Cloud for a machine you don't own is to either help with porting to an architecture you don't use, or to churn apps with some cross platform framework to a platform you don't use/care about.
I think the latter would be more frequent.
If they were mere poor hobbyists guys legitimately coding for the platform, they'd own a machine, either new, or second hand, or whatever. It's when you don't code in the platform, but only want to target it for selling that you have an issue...
You can also go for "by the minute" builds on the Cloud for a machine you do own. Suppose the developers and testers have Macs on their desks, but you still want to have your CI run in the Cloud. Now I'm not an expert on cloud pricing so I could be wrong, but I imagine you could benefit from paying by the minute in that case, depending on the specifics of your situation (builds per day, time per build, total cost of ownership of having a build farm in house).
As for your other comments: I know what CI is; I use it daily! The way my CI runs (which is how most CI is!) is that a when a commit gets pushed a machine gets spun up to build it, then a few minutes later it shuts itself down once the compilation is complete. Why would I want to pay to have a Mac for an entire day in this scenario? I'd have to be pushing code every few minutes to have any hope of efficiently using one machine.
And believe me, I hate cross-platform garbage apps just as much as you do. But I am not in favor of putting arbitrary restrictions on how people can write their apps. Xcode used to be a soft-requirement to build apps and look how well that worked out: native developers have to stick with it all the time, even when it's acting up and being buggy, and developers who couldn't care less have reverse engineered it to the point where they either generate an Xcode project from a source tree and build from the command line, or they just package their own app bundle themselves with the magic bits that Xcode would usually apply. Trying to stop people from making garbage apps by limiting their tooling options rarely works. And, in fact, I personally know people who go services like MacStadium (VNCing in) to use Xcode for the couple days it takes to set up a build system with the right certificates and profiles, then they never touch a Mac ever again. It's the native developers with their own Macs who want to use a fresh machine to build their code for Mojave or something that they aren't running on their personal computers.
“This 23 hours of global warming is proudly sponsored by the Appleverse.”
https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSBigSur.pdf
Under: "Leasing for Permitted Developer Services"
Except as otherwise permitted by the terms of this License or otherwise licensed by Apple: (i) only one user may use the Apple Software at a time, and (ii) you may not make the Apple Software available over a network where it could be run or used by multiple computers at the same time. You may not rent, lease, lend, sell, redistribute or sublicense the Apple Software.
Make of it what you will.
> (...)
> either going to have to buy Macs
Why not ditch the entire Apple ecosystem while you still can? Show them that we, developers, don't like feudal lords that like to tell us what we can and cannot do with our systems. So others won't dare to copy them.
If you were able to run a business that was fun, that made you money, and that enabled you to help other people have fun and make money (i.e., your employees), would you not do that out of principle? I'm genuinely asking.
That's very shortsighted. You can make money without Apple. And by doing so, you show that you value open, generic compute systems. Also, the prosperity of your business won't be at the whim of Apple.
All businesses have constraints. In this business, you're subject to the Apple EULA. In others, you're subject to government regulation or pricing pressure due to commoditization. That's not short-sighted — no industry is forever, and there's money to be made now. Why not deploy their expertise toward financial success (and, presumably, fun)? There's demand for these services — someone's going to fill it.
For folks who don't value 'open, generic compute systems' over 'putting food on the table', the closed nature of Apple's ecosystem is just the reality they need to deal with. They're not making a moral tradeoff, just a practical one.
Are you suggesting MacStadium and co should shut down their businesses out of principle? Will you employ them once they do? Where will their customers go?
I'm just saying that as Apple gets more power this may get worse, hence the shortsightedness remark.
Apple obviously doesn't want companies like AWS to be renting Mac Minis as some sort of VDI solution. That's consistent with the (shitty) practices of Microsoft with respect to Windows, which confines Windows 10 hosting to Azure services.
Given the nature of Mac, an AWS MacOS service is unique in that it's very clear who the manufacturer of the underlying hardware is. Apple, given it's control-freak nature wanted to have a model that accommodated both their needs and the provided a clear, multi-provider model to do what developers need.
Windows 10 hosting is not confined to azure services, you can even bring your own license to AWS, or host your own terminal services, or run your own virtual apps, or literally anything.
If you do BYOL of Windows 10 on a non-Azure cloud service, you need to meet specific Microsoft EA requirements, and you must run on dedicated hardware. If you look at the AWS BYOL model for Workspaces, it very similar in cost to the Apple on AWS model. (https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing)
That post exudes happiness at the guidelines, like an oil company that just got a regulation passed banning solar energy. I understand the happiness at finally getting validation that Apple is alright with this business model, but that's separate from exuding happiness at the terms of that validation.
The vast majority of the time, situations are complex than internet users think they are. There are two sides to every story, &c. It's fine to make your point, but please stick to the HN rules and make it substantively and thoughtfully. The fact that rage rants get heavily upvoted makes this more important, not less.
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?
(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 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.
Not only are they bleeding the developers at build, test and sale time. They are providing a shitty experience while doing it.
Of course from an economic point of view they are right! For businesses it still makes sense to do this most of the time (especially since webapps are crippled on iOS) due to the large user base. If they didn't have that user base I'd bet very few people would tolerate this crap.
This is one of the handful of reasons that I boycott Apple, I find their business practices morally unacceptable.
[1] Sub-standard for CI/server use cases.
(Although personally I'm not a fan of phone notifications either)
Worse, there's issues that are specific to Apple devices (iPad rendering of certain CSS, works everywhere else, including Mac's own emulators, but renders fubar on the actual iPad), leaving the debugging/fixing process a trial and error issue. It's horrible.
And even worse, this can't be debugged on anything but a Mac anymore, so if you don't use Mac as your primary dev platform, you're near-screwed when it comes to trying to resolve web app issues that only arise on their platform.
Then there's mobile app management, which is just as bad in it's own way. We had an app on the App Store for three years, then all of a sudden during one minor maintenance update they decided it wasn't allowed on the store any more and immediately pulled it. Thousands of business users affected, and two months to get the app propped back up on a custom business distribution channel, thousands of dollars worth of process re-development, etc.
Apple is the absolute worst platform for business-productivity programming. They screw the developers with a far stiffer rod than any other company has ever done.
In my mind, despite this Apple is successful because they make fantastic hardware. If Apple didn’t have the fastest chips and stellar cameras, they wouldn’t be successful. Developers jump through so many hoops because the customers are there.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20200511183317if_/https://github....
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20201108115438/https://docs.githu...
> Except as otherwise permitted by the terms of this License or otherwise licensed by Apple: (i) only one user may use the Apple Software at a time, and (ii) you may not make the Apple Software available over a network where it could be run or used by multiple computers at the same time. You may not rent, lease, lend, sell, redistribute or sublicense the Apple Software.
This seems like a gray area, "does running a build on your behalf constitute renting out the build environment to you" is a very hard question.
What's maybe more of a gray area is whether apple can assert the user doesnt have these rights in their eula.
MacStadium is renting those macs to a single customer for longer than 24 hours. MacStadium is following the rules. MacStadium is just providing a platform.
You're not really expecting MacStadium to snoop on each customer's usage and business model to enforce Apple's rules? AWS certainly won't be doing that.
If Apple told MacStadium or AWS to stop offering Macs to a customer such as GitHub due to some EULA violation committed by GitHub, they would probably do that.
I don't understand why your comment is trying so hard to frame MacStadium as hypocrites.
MacStadium customer here. It's an arm's length setup. They don't ask what you're doing, just give you the keys to the machines. BUT, when MacStadium's (likely) biggest customer is running thousands of hosts for CI jobs, and even lists you as the vendor in their docs, it's perfectly obvious that multiple end user jobs are being run on that host per 24hr per.
It really boils down to who Apple is going to bother to audit / sue.
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)
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.)
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.
So if we could just rent Mac VMs that would be nice. But this is pretty much useless. You get only a single machine for a really high price.
Theoretically I could run VMWare on the rented machine, to run multiple virtual copies of macOS, but then I'd be doing all the maintenance that I don't want to do.
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
This kind of performance with this kind of power efficiency would be game changer in data center.
Looking forward to Graviton3 as well.
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.
> 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.
For 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.
You can only use this for: "Permitted Developer services."
This is defined as "continuous integration services, including but not limited to software development, building software from source, automated testing during software development, and running necessary developer tools to support such activities."
(from: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind... )
So, no servers and no hosting stuff, and no personal use of desktop applications like Photoshop etc
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...
(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.
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
I'm sure it's possible of course, but I wonder how painful it would be to setup. Fighting EFI/secureboot? Some other bootloader?
Especially this these devices cannot be booted unattended - if it ever powers off, I need to: take it out of the closet, plug it in my desktop, turn off file encryption, put it back in the closet, boot it, VNC in, and finally turn on file encryption again
This is the reason.
Datacenter customers (really, any customers racking minis) likely represent a meaningful share of Mac mini sales. Changing the form factor would mean these high-value customers would need to re-tool their racks to support a new design. Even Apple is not immune to the pressure of large customers.
Much much cheaper to just buy a second hand mac mini and leave it plugged in to your router.
For CI/CD providers, it depends on how they offer the underlying macOS environment. If they target enterprise workloads that have stringent compliance needs, then this offering is a net benefit especially if the enterprise is already on AWS. The cost isn't cheap but there are many ways to price it as a value added provider.
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.
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.