I really fail to see what Brian Stucki did wrong? He’s subject to the whims of Apple licensing way more than AWS is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.