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Comment by dfabulich | Hacker News Reader

> Since my duty cycle for a Mac Mini is rather less than 20%, the economics even of on-demand instances immediately make sense

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.

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This is what I mean by "hobbyist mindset": driving straight past the huge neon sign flashing TCO, assuming that some idiot (that's me) has failed arithmetic 101 (totally possible, my undergraduate mathematics ruined me for sums, isn't everything an infinite series?), and blithely disregarding the cost and time I'll need to obtain authorisation to establish a new commercial relationship, authorisation from legal and security to have our IP and/or customer data in yet another facility, then the overhead of managing the technical and billing elements, and the compliance reporting, and so on.

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.

AWS is available on all continents except Antarctica.

If you’re operating there, then your providers in all aspects will be more than limited.

That's rather the point. MacStadium is only on two continents.

I have an app I need to compile on a Mac that I only make changes to maybe once a quarter, or four days a year. That's an ideal use case for on-demand AWS Macs, and I'll probably transition to that if the Mac Mini in the corner ever decides not to boot or not to accept a mandatory OS update when I have to use it someday.

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.

If you haven't you may want to consider https://www.macincloud.com/ where you can rent it for $1 per hour when you need. Your use case seems very suitable for that. It is roughly same price point as AWS but can stretch your dollars longer vs AWS 24 hour upfront.

If you’re not testing/using it the rest of the time, doesn’t that affect the quality? Dog-fooding is usually a better idea, right?

Sure, but then I'd have to use an iPhone. The machine is the main thing to my customers, the app is just a tool for monitoring its status and the Android app and webserver shows the same information.

> 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.

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.

That 24 hour minimum is based on Apple license agreement.

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