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.
Sorry, but dedicated hosts are expensive AF, it is not a virtual machine, you pay for the hardware.
$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...
As with everyone else, the answer is CI/CD. Having run a team that built out its own Mac build farm... it's a pain.
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.
Builds without having to maintain your own macs.
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/CI systems for Mac and iOS apps, I would guess. Definitely not for running generic web apps.
We have an internal application that would benefit from having local access to our network infrastructure (VPC) without needing a VPN.
Fuzzing binaries comes to mind as well.
I have the same question. Why would I want this over a Linux instance (assuming the latter is cheaper)?
You can't build for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS on a Linux machine. Well, not legally / non-hackily anyway.
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