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Comment by shp0ngle | Hacker News Reader

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shp0ngle

The 24 hours is dictated by new Big Sur EULA.

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

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But the original post says they're not using Big Sur. The available OSes are Mojave and Catalina. Unless that term exists in those licenses too?

But they will have to update to Big Sur in the feature. So if they don‘t set the limitation now they will have to „worsen“ the service later, it‘s best to the set the limitation now even if not required.

Good point!

Weird limitation. Hopefully Apple updates this.

They still think of themselves as a hardware firm, this restrains usage elasticity to a level where system hardware scaling is a dominant cost driver rather than system performance. Besides the inefficiencies of physical space at AWS sites, it is also a fine business for the cloud provider as it generates a less volatile usage pattern than normal. As Apple is acting as a monopolist by dictating the same terms to everyone, they further remove any competitive advantage of providing anything else.

I vividly remember a video interview with Steve Jobs from a long time back when he was clear that Apple is not a hardware firm, it’s a software firm, and admitting that it took him far too long to realise that.

So this is hard to defend other than gouging.

They are mostly an hardware firm that packages a nice experience in the box. Nope, 12% of market share isn't a monopoly.

How about being the only way to even build an application for 50% of the U.S. mobile market?

99% of said apps are actually nothing more than CRUD Web forms, or crap games easily done with WebGL + WebAssembly, so no it isn't the only way.

I think you are missing the point intentionally. You can't run those apps on an Apple iPhone, but I suspect you knew this.

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.

If you don't like it then leave. That's how Apple operates. I still can't comprehend why people insist on licking Apple's shoe soles but then complain that it tastes awful.

I surely can, given that part of my job is to develop mobile Web apps.

They just updated it two weeks ago. There's no reason they would change their mind again quickly.

They do this very intentionally. If they wanted to be available on AWS they'd allow OSX to run in a VM which they don't.

They do allow OSX to be run in a VM..... but only if the hypervisor is on Apple hardware :P

And under the new EULA they don't allow renting a VM, only a device in its entirety

Wow. That is insane and stupid and incredibly fucked up. I've had to rent Macs in the cloud on a rare basis to test certain latest-version Safari issues, and it's always a crap connection and a miserable experience. But is it enforceable for them to stipulate the minimum length of time of a VM lease?! That's your machine. You paid for it. If you want to rent it out to someone for 3 hours that's your prerogative. I don't see how they can possibly enforce that or how it could be legal as a seller to tell someone how to use their hardware.

Does this EURA works to effectively kill handy macOS CI service like CircleCI and force users to use VM rental service like this?

If you ran a webserver hosting Great Cat Pictures on some Macs, for instance, your customers might pay a subscription fee to access your site, meaning they are paying for you to do processing and storage on their behalf. So that's an example that's clearly not leasing or subletting the devices.

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.

I don't see why you couldn't run a CI server as long as you don't let the clients access the machine.

Circle CI does let clients access the machine IIRC you can SSH into the host if the job fails and tinker around to debug issues.

It's reasonable to think running CI service is similar to just running httpd. But what divides? Anyway CI service runs Apple software like Xcode. Even httpd uses Apple's TCP stack.

I've done iOS builds using Github actions. The build minutes cost 10x as much as Linux. Anyone out there offering MacOS in the cloud is doing the same thing. Just racking Mac Minis. It means you can't slice CPUs or memory like a VM so it's less efficient and more expensive.

Does Apple gain anything from AWS for forcing it to rent for a minimum period of 24 hours?

AWS needs to buy a lot more mac machines from apple. Without the limit everybody would start a vm for a few minutes to run a ci job and stop the machine. So there is no „sharing“ of a machine within a 24 hour window if you only need the machine shortly.

Well, it's better than nothing!

I’m pretty sure if Amazon wanted to negotiate custom terms, they’d have the clout to do so. This is an alliance between two giants.

I doubt Apple supports this in any way. It means that if you want to develop Mac/iPhone apps, you no longer have to buy Mac hardware. I'm surprised they aren't making this harder.

See below. They changed their EULA terms to allow it just now. Macstadium’s blog has the details.

These are the new EULA terms.

Apple use this themselves.

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