How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2 | Hacker News Reader

How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2

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196 pointstambourine_man211 comments

Just spent 4h trying to set this up. It's a pain. If you ever stop a running instance, the dedicated host - for which you are paying - stays in "Pending" mode for indefinite amounts of time. I am still stuck at getting macOS to recognize my non-default volume size > than the tiny 30 GB it comes with. Huge pains for something that should not be so hard (a decently strong macOS VM). Would not recommend.

Disclosure: I work for AWS and am part of the team that built EC2 Mac instances

1) After every stop/terminate of Mac instances, EC2 runs a scrubbing workflow on the underlying Dedicated Host to wipe the Mac mini's non-volatile storage and reset the NVRAM variables, to enable same security posture as any other EC2 instance. This workflow also upgrades the T2 chip on Mac mini to the latest BridgeOS version if needed. It may take 30-60 mins for this scrubbing workflow to complete, and up to 2-4 hours if BridgeOS update is required - during which the host shows up in "pending" state. We're actively working on lowering this scrubbing duration and really appreciate your feedback here. Important to note - You are not billed for any duration(s) during which the Mac1 Dedicated Host is in "pending" state (or any state other than "Available").

2. Once you have increased the size of the EBS volume on your Mac1 instance, you can execute following commands within macOS guest to increase the size of your APFS container.

1. Copy and paste the first three lines

PDISK=$(diskutil list physical external | head -n1 | cut -d" " -f1)

APFSCONT=$(diskutil list physical external | grep "Apple_APFS" | tr -s " " | cut -d" " -f8)

sudo diskutil repairDisk $PDISK

2. Accept the prompt with "y", then paste this command

sudo diskutil apfs resizeContainer $APFSCONT 0

Since the EBS volume was resized after boot, an instance reboot is required before the additional disk size is available for your use.

That's interesting about the billing. Playing devil's advocate here -- if I provisioned a Mac dedicated host, used it for the ~1 hour that I actually need, and then repeatedly cycled instances for the rest of the 24 hours to maximize the amount of time that it spends in "pending", would I indeed succeed in paying substantially less than 24 hours worth of time while still obeying the Apple-imposed "one customer per day" restriction? Would this violate a TOS?

How much concern is there on your team that Apple will make breaking changes to internals that you rely on? I've seen that happen multiple times in the past to JAMF, seemingly without any heads up.

We have worked closely and transparently with Apple over the past few months not only on the product definition and platform design, but also on multiple architectural decisions for this offering. Many a times - even though not apparent in those moments (but only in hindsight) - Apple has nudged us in right directions that aligned with their future plans. Granted - it's challenging to keep up with the pace of both Apple and AWS - inadvertent regressions do get introduced with certain releases, but we're building mechanisms to catch and jointly remediate them early. Ultimately, both Apple and AWS are excited about this offering, and share the vision of bringing AWS benefits to all Apple developers. We only expect this collaboration to further deepen going forward.

Question: If you are already working with them, why do you have to use Mac Mini's, as opposed to, say, Apple giving you a special version of the OS that runs on "normal" hardware? Hackintoshs are real and there should be no reason for you to use Mac Mini's in the first place. Of course you can't use a Hackintosh, but the existence of this alternative suggests that this is a possible avenue to explore, especially when cooperating with Apple and keeping to a specific hardware that has the drivers or where drivers can be added easily.

This is The Question and it applies to every single one of these stupendously wasteful deployments of time, space, energy and capital.

Every single mid-sized IT shop in the world has an urgent and valid use-case to virtualize OSX in an efficient and portable manner. Most individual power-end-users have similar use-cases.

How many hours / dollars / gigatons-of-carbon / calories are wasted on this comically inefficient, user-hostile and gratuitously complex state of affairs ?

> How many hours / dollars / gigatons-of-carbon / calories are wasted on this comically inefficient, user-hostile and gratuitously complex state of affairs ?

Many, many more that are being "saved" by them not bundling chargers in iPhone. Kind of shows you where they stand.

Follow the $$$.

Apple's whole shtick is hardware/software integration; they'd have to make and sell the hardware for the VMs to run on.

Don't they already? Mac Pros are a thing. They even are rack mountable.

This is nonsensical. Apple is a hardware company before they are software. In addition, they would have to provide support for the software running on hardware that they don't know, understand or whatever else.

It would have been more likely for AWS to give specs to Apple, who could have then created a custom job for some extra monies.

In reality though, using Mac Minis is perfectly reasonable. It's likely the cheapest option for both Apple and Amazon.

Who would provide large-scale hardware support to AWS for this approach? Certainly not Apple as it’s not their hardware. Also in a few minth from now people will want M1 cpu’s and you wouldn’t have worked towards that at all. If someone is fine with the Hackintosh experience, there are ways to do it in AWS already now.

It’s an “as-A-Service” offering. The hardware is abstracted and you get you use MacOS and its services on demand. It’d be the same as asking Dropbox what happens when their underlying hard drives reaches end of life from the manufacturers. It’s not our problem.

A patched version of macOS that Apple provided could just be a AMI on EC2. They run it on x86 test boxes internally, at least until they complete the transition to Apple Silicon, so it should be possible.

Apple just doesn’t want to support it, and for developers, they want them to buy Macs to work on and only use VMs when absolutely necessary.

Because Apple is a hardware company. I wouldn't expect them to be supportive of a Hackintosh solution, to the point of making it difficult to operate.

I assume this is the v1 product, and simply preparing for the v2 using Apple silicon (M1? M2?)

Apple sells integrated hardware and software. They don’t license macOS to anyone else. Why would they start now having seen that strategy fail in their corporate history already?

Let's be honest. Nobody is running workloads on Mac Mini servers because they think it's a good server OS or good server hardware. They're doing it to run Xcode as part of a CI/CD pipeline (or some other kind of automated testing) in order to develop applications for iOS devices. No, there is no money in Apple for either licensing out their IP or building their own server brand. It's a loss leader or at best a break-even, low-margin business for them, but it's a compliment to their high-margin businesses (having more/better apps means more App Store revenue and helps keep users on the hardware/software platform). Not having a convenient way to run Xcode in an automated workflow is a strategy tax on their other, profitable lines of business.

Or at least have Apple send them Mac Mini hardware not in a Mac Mini case that would hopefully lead to a more integrated or robust solution than a computer sitting in a sled. Would this be beneficial?

Mac sold outside of a shiny brushed aluminum case?

Jony Ive rolling in his grave.

> It may take 30-60 mins for this scrubbing workflow to complete, and up to 2-4 hours if BridgeOS update is required

I’m curious. Did nobody at any point in time ever say ‘this is unacceptable’ about this? Because it sure sounds so to me. It’d be (much) faster to boot up a new instance than wait for your previous instance to exit pending state.

I suspect the macOS license precludes this.

Copyright law seriously needs to change. They should not have to jump through hoops like this simply to use a device that they already paid for.

Thank you. This was very helpful. I would have spent another few hours without your help. If I may make a suggestion, those steps you described should be performed out of the box when I launch the instance with a larger volume size to begin with. And the docs should mention what you wrote above in case someone resizes their volume after the fact. As far as I saw, the docs do already contain instructions for Linux and Windows. Would save others like me, many of whom I suspect will run into this same issue, a lot of time if it gave the macOS instructions you wrote as well.

Why is mac on ec2 so expensive?

This is a genuine question, I'm not being snobby or anything like that.

Not indefinite - there's a 24 hour minimum for macOS instances on the cloud...

That's not what I meant. I want to deploy a new instance on the host which I have to rent for min 24. But I can't because the host is "pending".

I just don't understand why Apple won't offer their own cloud offerings or just straightforward partner with some public clouds and offer servers more suitable for developers than forcing people to use desktops as servers.

They tried, but it's just not their DNA. Apple isn't a B2B enterprise company, they're a B2C consumer company that, as a side effect of their consumer success, ended up with a decent number of devices in enterprises. But they know they can't, and don't want to try, to win against the big entrenched enterprise players.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-apple-had-to-kill-the-xser...

Interestingly, AWS and Google weren't really B2B plays initially either. But AWS in particular recognized that if AWS was to be as successful as they had ambitions for, the were going to have to hire an enterprise sales force and do other things related to supporting enterprises.

Apple toyed with becoming more enterprisey at various times but their ultimate success came mostly from BYOD and enterprises proving Mac options because that's what many of their employees wanted. They do have business sales but it's still more of a pull than a push thing.

>Interestingly, AWS and Google weren't really B2B plays initially either

AWS was nothing if not a "B2B play" from the beginning. Having developed their own expertise with data centers and distributed computing, Amazon proceeded to sell that to other businesses.

What I was saying (poorly) is that they were not a sale to enterprise IT business.

AWS is a company that Amazon bought, which was already providing the S3 service. Unlike what most people think, Amazon did not take the stuff they were doing internally and spin that out as a separate service.

In fact, as far as AWS is concerned, Amazon is just another big customer — and not even the biggest.

That is untrue... did you just make all of this up?

Apple is still a very small and (relatively) focused company compared to the others.

That is also true. Buy I think they also recognized that they didn't really need to cater to enterprises to any significant degree in order to sell to them directly or indirectly. And in a way that probably wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago when probably most employees took the IT-managed PC they were given and lived with it.

Exactly. Apple benefited tremendously, especially after the Intel transition, from executives and younger employees showing up to the workplace with a shiny new MacBook Pro and just expecting it to work on the network. It started with those two groups and once IT found a way to support turn systems — or at least get them on the network/give them access to the file share — Apple didn’t need to do a lot of the glad handing for enterprise sales. If the CEO wants to use his Mac at work, IT will capitulate. And that in turn dovetailed with the broader BYOD movement with computers and phones.

Now, Xserve didn’t work for a lot of reasons, but Apple exited the server market, and even stopped making the Server variant of macOS (even though it was just a handful of utilities at the end), largely because I think it realized two things:

1. It could never truly compete with Linux (and to a lesser degree, IIS) without making significant tradeoffs that are anathema to Apple (lowering prices significantly, giving up usage control, and decoupling vertically integrated hardware/software).

2. The cost of truly making a B2B play would require resource investments and commitments into an area Apple doesn’t need to care about and that would come at the expense of areas that are both more profitable and less of a PITA.

Apple is the richest company in the world and amongst the most profitable tech companies, why would they bother with enterprise when they can allow partners to deal with the integration side and focus on doing their stuff their way.

(There is one notable instance where Apple embraced enterprise, and that was when Apple added Exchange support in iPhone OS and admittedly, this was a huge deal and was ultimately a fatal blow to Blackberry. But it’s the exception that almost proves the rule. Apple added support for Exchange but left it up to others to figure out the broader MDM situations.)

Having said all that, I have always been surprised Apple hasn’t offered some sort of build/test service themselves and integrated it into TestFlight. It could be a driver for the all-important services revenue (in my imagination, the annual developer fee would cover a certain number of build minutes a month and then additional minutes would cost money). I have to think that such a solution is either in the works or that Apple looked at the support challenges and just decided to let other people do it at scale for them.

The thing is that much of the cloud is very much a commodity and Apple has successfully made its products and services anything but a commodity.

>(There is one notable instance where Apple embraced enterprise, and that was when Apple added Exchange support in iPhone OS and admittedly, this was a huge deal and was ultimately a fatal blow to Blackberry. But it’s the exception that almost proves the rule. Apple added support for Exchange but left it up to others to figure out the broader MDM situations.)

Yep. There have been a couple of specific things. Exchange and now MDM profiles. Probably a few others. But minor tweaks to remove major enterprise blockers. Small investments to remove complete showstoppers is just common sense.

>Apple hasn’t offered some sort of build/test service themselves and integrated it into TestFlight

Seems pretty logical. Who knows? It's certainly the trend with container platforms generally.

Enterprise != B2B. The only customers for AWS are businesses and always have been, end-users don't rent VMs.

I am an end user. And I rent VMs on AWS.

I may not be the typical end user, but I’m also not a business.

Yeah, they certainly don't have the right DNA on the hardware side. On the software side, they've been working a lot more closely with JAMF recently, and there's quite a bit of enterprise support in the MDM space there.

Can confirm with this, when we approached Apple on MDM they all but opened an account for us with JAMF.

Apple Remote Desktop is a pretty neglected app but it’s fantastically good. It’s got so many features that make remote administration so very good.

They also bought Fleetsmith recently

I think their cloud play _will_ be B2C driven.

I predict they will build customer-facing 'cloud-powered features' where 'third party app code' can run on the apple cloud infrastructure 'on behalf' of a particular apple customer.

They will present a utility computing model to customers -- where each customer sees 'cloud-computing usage charges' displayed by app.

Ultimately, the cloud-compute/cloud-storage charges will tie back to the customer associated usage costs for storage or some other abstract usage based model of for cloud resource costs.

"Apple Cloud: build features for apple customers using usage-metered cloud resources -- with the customer paying for the usage charges they incur."

Am I wrong to think there are workloads that can only be run on Mac? Seems like a competitive advantage.

The only workloads that can only be run on a mac are those which are Apple specific, such as building/testing iOS apps.

Anything that requires Xcode to build. Depending on what's being built, if you're developing a cross-platform or Mac app, you might need a Mac somewhere in your pipeline.

Unfortunately, Apple makes it somewhat uneconomical to use Macs in small bursts, as their license requires that Macs are leased for at least 24 hours.

Tldr, they live on expensive hardware that is well marketed and has polished software attractive to consumers.

Neither hardware costs nor marketing is an issue for Apple in the B2B space. Plenty of successful B2B hardware costs more and has tons of marketing fluff.

The reason Apple doesn't do well B2B is nothing about their technology or marketing, it is likely all about their business operations. Apple is notorious for driving their own product-development lifecycle with heavy priority on their own design language. This is completely the opposite of how B2B sales work, where it is not uncommon for some development cycles to be dictated directly by a few (or even one) customer. I can't see Apple playing well with these expectations.

> This is completely the opposite of how B2B sales work, where it is not uncommon for some development cycles to be dictated directly by a few (or even one) customer.

Development and sales (and support). Look at how many SKUs competing laptop manufacturers have because enterprises will specify some combination of ports and memory and CPU, and if the manufacturer doesn't have that particular combination, there will be no sale.

(Having said that: it's not obvious to me whether this is still as much of an issue as it used to be.)

I could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud Computing platform within the next 2 years.

- They would be vertically integrated with Apple Silicon

  - Apple themselves are increasingly depending on cloud services

  - Async/Await in Swift will likely land next year, making Server-Side Swift much more appealing

  - Apple is greatly increasing cloud / Kubernetes hires

  - Could share a single Apple Silicon ARM architecture from client(ios) to dev(mac) to cloud

> I could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud Computing platform within the next 2 years.

Apple, as a company, does not "do" long-term support; they're the anti-Microsoft when it comes to backwards compatibility. As soon as you start being an infrastructure service provider that means you HAVE to offer an LTSB branch of your OS, and Apple does not want to do that (and macOS has stagnated a lot since Apple devoted most of their OS engineering efforts to iOS). Apple doesn't offer a "real" server OS SKU at all (the "macOS Server" app package is for SOHO management, not for use as a high-availability application server OS).

...which means that Apple would have to provide an offering using Linux or BSD - such as a "naked" Darwin distro - but again, Apple does not want to have to support that, and I'm sure devs don't want to see the IaaS OS scene fragment further, and Darwin is far, far removed from being yet another Linux distro.

Amazon offers ARM cloud systems - why should Apple risk their profitability by competing in an arena that doesn't pose any risk to their bottom-line? And what do they have to gain?

This is the fly in the oinment.

I would love to see Apple have an LTS branch of macOS, but I just don't see this happening. Too much would need to change in the company for that to happen.

From a macOS developer's standpoint, it's really a huge PITA there is no LTS. But, we adjust. Because we have a low-level product (compiler), we sometimes get into a situation where we need to sunset a product before we would normally do that, just because the older product doesn't run on the supported macOS versions. Doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

I’m dubious. The only way I could see this happening is if it was some companion platform for iCloud/iOS apps. I just don’t understand what anyone has to gain from Apple making an “open” cloud platform.

Apple however doesnt run on their own OS for their webservices though. Nothing in the way here, but just a note.

Makes sense if they start auditing / security reviewing of what gets pushed to their platform. Would be yet another Apple's security & privacy play.

Obviously would work as FaaS or PaaS.

One of the rules on these Macs in AWS is that you have to rent them for a minimum of 24 hours at a time and you have to rent the whole machine.

I think they don't want to cannibalize Mac sales. If you want to make an iPhone app, you have to buy a Mac to do it. They don't want to make it easy for you to rent one just to compile the app.

That's the only reason I need them, to compile a binary and submit it. But can apple dictate licensing terms like this? If aws buys a mac, can't they use it however they like? Or are there terms limiting this in the purchase agreement.

It's in Apple's EULA: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...

> A "lease period must be for a minimum period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours."

Why not set up the servers in EU where likely this is non enforceable? If you bought a Mac mini you bought it, apple cannot tell you if you can/cannot lease it out. Imagine if Mercedes was trying to tell you that you can only rent your car(which you paid for) for a minimum of 7 days or something equally stupid. It's insane.

That might be entirely unenforceable in the U.S. as well, but I doubt most companies are clamoring to go up against Apple's lawyers to prove it, and those that might (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) so they could include it in their offerings might have to worry about Apple throwing even more resources at the case to make it extremely unprofitable to do so, and also that Apple might specifically do stuff to make it harder afterwards for that company. That applies equally as well to companies in the EU.

I'm not sure if it's accurate, but I and many others see Apple as a fairly vindictive company, from stories about how Jobs operated to how they treat developers that speak out. My impression is that it's part of their DNA now.

The reason why it’s enforceable was because of psystar.

I don't know about relevant EU law here, but even if Apple's terms are not enforceable in the EU, when you sell to e.g. US customers you would be subject to US law anyway, and Apple could go after you in the US. It doesn't matter that the servers are located in the EU.

In addition to legal barriers there are also technical ones. You have to run a scrub job to delete all data by prior tenants on a change of tenants. That job neccessarily has to overwrite the entire SSD and thus adds both wear to the device as well as takes time (around 30-60 minutes according to [0]). The SSD is soldered onto the PCB so it would be hard to replace it with something virtualized (or smaller that'd take less time to overwrite).

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562532

So you won't be able to rent out one device to dozens of tenants per day who each use it for ten minutes or so while ensuring inter-tenant isolation.

Last, those Apple rules might as well be non-enforceable legally, but Apple might still retaliate by e.g. removing apps from their store that were uploaded by tenants of those EU companies.

Theoretically you don't need scrub entire disk but just drop FDE encryption key in < 1s

Setting up servers in the EU and using them in the US would introduce a ton of latency.

Besides that, I forgot where it came out about the amount of money Amazon retail makes on it’s dedicated Apple store. Also, Apple and Amazon Video have special deals where you can do in app purchases of video within the app on iOS devices and the purchases are charged directly to your Prime account. No one else can do that for physical goods.

Apple and Amazon have been chummy since Jobs licensed the “one click patent” when the iTunes Music Store opened in 2003.

"...But can apple dictate licensing terms like this? If aws buys a mac, can't they use it however they like? Or are there terms limiting this in the purchase agreement..."

Yes, no, and yes.

what about buying second hand macs? I am not agreeing to any terms there, how can apple still enforce those rules then?

It's not the hardware that's restricted, it's the MacOS usage/license. You agree to that when you install it.

Apple can't practically enforce that against you, an individual using a mac in your home. But then again you're probably not reselling your mac's functionality directly for profit to others. They for sure can seek to enforce it with AWS or others who sell it commercially. It's the reselling of their software and functionality for profit that is covered by the terms of the agreement.

I agree that what you want to do should be possible and cheap, but generally if you build something for a platform you'd also want to test it on that platform, no? What you say implies that you compile the binary and don't test it before submitting?

Automated testing should be done at CI stage, and you can submit a binary to Apple without having to send it live on the AppStore (TestFlight is for that), or you could send it to other beta distribution channels

This works until you have a bug you can't replicate on a developer machine that your CI misses. This is a common thread on open source projects:

> issue opened October 2013

> __ is broken on MacOS

> __ should fix it but I don't have a Mac to test.

An alternative version of the last step:

> I do have a Mac but ___ can’t be replicated on my specific dev-tainted environment, plus I’m using macOS Y and you use macOS Z which is a pain for me to set up a VM for, if at all possible.

The raise of a few free macOS CI mitigated that a bit but the offer is honestly poor (except at CircleCI, props to them), and seems like Apple could care less so much they’re now actively making that harder than ever.

> I’m using macOS Y and you use macOS Z which is a pain for me to set up a VM for, if at all possible

If Apple should be sued for anti-consumer behavior this is why... It costs time and money to fix software with every MacOS release and I'm getting close to suggesting we add a 50% Apple tax on products to pay for the additional support it entails.

He said it was a pain. Not that it can’t be done. If you are running on a Mac, you can set up a VM for an older version of MacOS on it. It’s allowed in the EULA.

Precisely.

As a matter of fact I went through the trouble to set up 10.9 through 10.14 in VirtualBox, driven by gitlab-runner via the virtualbox executor[0] (which is pure genius: it uses linked VM clones from a reference VM to spawn parallel runners, as well as using snapshots once SSH is ready after first boot for <2s spawn + full state reset).

Given the painful macOS on VirtualBox situation, at the time I wanted to move to VMware Fusion[1] but lacked time to implement an executor. It seems someone took that in their own hands and implemented a specific runner (in Swift!).

[0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/executors/virtualbox.html

[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues/1679

[2]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues/1679#no...

I have an iPhone for testing mobile apps. I only need MacOS for the building and submitting.

Phones/tablets are a good point, haven't thought of that.

AWS can use the Mac any way it wants, but the license terms are part of MacOS.

Can Microsoft dictate the terms under which you can use their software?

Some companies only charge for commercial use of their products. So the “it’s free” argument doesn’t really hold water.

Yes. Software companies dictate whether their software has to be run on a dedicate host, the allowed number of cores, etc. all of the time.

Companies have tried to “rent DVDs” digitally by playing the DVD on their hardware and streaming it. It got shot down by the courts.

Apple had rack-mount servers. They got rid of them. I don’t know the exact reasons why, but I assume it’s because there weren’t enough people buying them and they couldn’t make enough profit on building and supporting them.

I did find it interesting that Apple took the entire last run of that hardware for themselves, so that they could run their own internal VMware clusters on real Apple hardware for their developers.

There’s no way that Apple could build an AMI to run on hardware designed and built by someone else. Apple has a small number of people who really know what they’re doing, and they get shifted around to whatever project Apple thinks is most important — whether that’s hardware or software.

Apple needs to own the whole enchilada here, for multiple reasons. So, they can sell Apple hardware to AWS for inclusion inside of AWS data centers. But it has to be real-deal Apple hardware, running real-deal Apple OS, even if it is under a hyper visor like VMWare.

I suspect they don't believe there is a market for them or at least not enough of a market to justify the development expense. I know they've tried producing a "server" in the past and even a server version of their operating system, but it didn't seem to go anywhere. Unless they had a way to meaningfully compete with Windows and Linux (really, linux) the only viable market I can see is for build systems, and that's pretty niche.

With Servers you have to maintain a good supply chain and deal with institutional buyers. It's almost a parallels business to the rest of their offering. They won't get support at the genius bar...

Server OS seemed to be targeted at small businesses to run on a Mac Pro or Mac Mini connected to NAS and hosting internal applications. But it wasn't very different from regular OSX.

I think with their recent hiring spree for core K8s contributors and another factor they may well do. It’s something they’ve dipped their toes into in the past for iCloud services.

If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud services where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud, so I could see them extending that model to a time slice of compute as well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the previous model was too limited for most use cases, but it’s not fundamentally broken.

I don’t think the economics of the M1 with 32+ cores make sense unless they go down the route of either build a cloud platform and amortise the cost of the chip design over a larger number of devices (or a chip let approach, but I’m not sure this matches their general design approach).

Also I’m pretty sure they think they have a competitive advantage over traditional x86 and ARM vendors so they’ll likely want to strike while that still holds.

> If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud services where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud, so I could see them extending that model to a time slice of compute as well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the previous model was too limited for most use cases, but it’s not fundamentally broken.

The average Apple consumer customer can make plenty of use of cloud storage. What use does the average user have for cloud compute resources?

Unless Apple starts offloading some processing to the cloud, and gives them some free, I'm not sure how regular users would use this, and offering it for free assuming the majority of people won't use it is just asking for some popular app to come along that takes advantage of that and screws up the economics. Not to mention people probably won't be happy to have a limit and pay for overage use for stuff that is likely provided by free on other platforms (if Google Photos prettifies your photos for free and Apple does it through metered compute with some given free, that's bad optics).

Also, Apple has quite a lot of effort into specifically running things locally rather than in the cloud. For example, Photos.app does all its facial recognition and 'Memory' creation locally.

I think the developers got some cloud storage for ‘free’.

Makes you wonder what kind of hardware Apple is using for all their own cloud services (web, mail, messaging, icloud etc.).

When I was there, a variety of brands of hardware, mostly running RHEL. In fact running OS-X in datacenters was verboten, and eventually limited to a couple of small racks running on their own network segments where you could put in a mac pro if desperately needed to.

I remember when I worked at a startup and we were trying to get a team at Apple to purchase our SaaS product. They wanted the software hosted on a Mac, so we ran it on a Mini to demo. Also strange things like presenting them in Slides instead of Powerpoint. But this was also like 10 years ago.

That’s not strange at all. I use to teach fitness classes part time at Coke’s headquarters. We were told specifically not to bring in drinks or water bottles from competitors.

> We were told specifically not to bring in drinks or water bottles from competitors.

Ridiculous :-))

There was a time when they made this guys:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve

With their new CPUs maybe it is time to bring them back?

I mean surely they are not going to license Dell to put a M1 chip in a rackspace computer.

Considering how they've been making Mac servers more and more irrelevant, I wouldn't have my hopes up.

I was running OSX in a datacenter on campus, so I think you mean the huge server farms like where mesosphere etc were famously in play?

Somewhat surprising since unlike their customers, there's no license restriction to Apple running macOS on different hardware. Maybe they didn't want to maintain a separate fork only for internal use. And having their own OS makes it more challenging to port apps to AWS/Azure.

The real question is how would this be beneficial to them? Almost everyone runs production systems on either Linux or Windows, so they would be an outlier, and the only one debugging and contributing to the operating system/libraries/etc.

I've read before on HN about people using Mac hardware in production, when they needed access to macOS graphics API, but since this only concerns a software implementation, and hardware was standard until M1 processors, it's reasonable to assume that Apple could port that part of OS to Linux, if they needed to use it from servers.

"Running OS-X in datacenters was verboten"

Why?

I'm not an Apple insider, but I can imagine many reasons.

For one thing, the tcp stack is ancient, and easy to syn flood. (It was forked from FreeBSD in 2001ish, before FreeBSD added syncookies and syncache). Synflooding os x makes the whole network stack unresponsive, including other interfaces like localhost.

Maybe they didn't want to run into a tech debt thing of "we can't push this update to consumers even though it would cause no issues for them, because it would break X and Y on our backend servers and the two would have to diverge for some time until we come up with a fix."

Apple has a self host cloud division as well as AWS according to news reports. Unclear if they run on Linux but it seems likely they must, even a bit if using AWS. Theoretically they could probably upload custom AMIs with macOS.

Apple uses GCP as well as AWS.

I don't believe its possible to get macOS (or atleast wasn't) onto an AMI in anyway.

I'd say it is possible to run Darwin on AWS, but I have never tried. FreeBSD runs well, so we know that any OS with drivers will boot on AWS.

They're Apple after all, so they can build macOS to boot from a standard environment - UEFI, kernel that doesn't check the copy prevention string on SMBIOS, etc.

Us, mere mortals, are more restricted, as we don't have the keys of the kingdom.

Don’t they use AWS like everyone else?

They used to rely heavily on AWS and Azure, but they've moved a lot in-house now.

Apple has been using GCP and AWS for years.

My understanding was they ditched Azure.

Big tech companies with large bandwidth requirements don’t use AWS.

Netflix doesn’t use AWS for video, Facebook doesn’t use AWS for most stuff, Google and Microsoft obviously don’t now because of competition but they didn’t before GCP and Azure were things.

I'm really curious what they use for their CI. Do they compile all of their iOS apps on Apple hardware? Or do they get the luxury of using proper server hardware and software?

Lots of Mac Pros, some virtual machines.

Well there will be a ARM Mac Pro, so hopefully that will be rack mountable. And any Cloud customer can have it hosted.

I do wish they have less restriction on macOS usage timing. And a services for Web Developers to test their site on Safari. Which is currently impossible to do with buying a Mac.

It seems to me that the licensing situation—you have to lease a whole machine for a minimum period of 24 hours—will make the Mac Pro a poor choice in most contexts. The Mac Mini at or near its base configuration may remain the most sensible option.

It would be kind of crazy to imagine, if the M-series processor for the Mac Pro is among the best performing CPUs in the world - which it may turn out to be - that these processors would be virtually inaccessible in the server space in any relevant way. It seems like something which should not result from a free market.

I wonder how "usage" is defined here: for instance, if I run a managed service on a fleet of Macs in the cloud, which serves many end customers from each machine, is this allowed under the terms?

>if I run a managed service on a fleet of Macs in the cloud, which serves many end customers from each machine, is this allowed under the terms?

IANAL (and haven't read the full EULA) but probably. The 24 hour restriction seems to apply to leasing. I would assume that running a multi-tenant managed service (or, for that matter, serving web pages) from a Mac would not be seen as leasing.

> It seems to me that the licensing situation—you have to lease a whole machine for a minimum period of 24 hours—will make the Mac Pro a poor choice in most contexts

Not necessarily. A Mac Pro would work well for single-tenant usage where you want to run a series of applications that can each burst to the whole machine but not take long to finish.

They will...

Because Apple really doesn't care about anything to do with developers. It's too tiny a percentage of their user base.

> Because Apple really doesn't care about anything to do with developers.

Are you serious?

Apple's single biggest event of the year is a developer conference. They aren't putting on week-long events for video editors.

They also provided a bunch of Mac minis to Mac Stadium for OSS developers to build on.

They added virtualization to the M1 (it isn't on the A series) and have HyperKit built into the OS is all specifically for developers.

> They also provided a bunch of Mac minis to Mac Stadium for OSS developers to build on.

Well, Apple isn't giving them away, but they do indeed sell them to Mac Stadium.

It's my understanding that Apple donated hardware to multiple projects. That said, I can't track down a link right now either so it's just my recollection.

Virtualization is available on A14 but not made available to developers. (In fact, all of XNU runs in EL2.)

Isn't computer users a tiny part of all Apple users?

They could probably just kill that part and make enough money on iOS anyway.

It's a large part of their Mac user base.

That being said, I don't think Apple has enough people who would be interested in hosting on MacOS to justify an Apple cloud offering. I think they know that.

> It's a large part of their Mac user base.

Is it really? Lots of devs use Macs, yes. But compared to the sheer number of regular, non-dev users, that has to be tiiiiny.

I found lots of stats on the internet about what percentage of developers use Macs, but none about how just many Mac users are developers, so it'd be fascinating to see that number of anyone can find it.

Apple claims there are 20m registered developers on the App Store [1]. If each of them buys a Mac once every 4 years, that's 5m Macs per year. IDC estimates that Apple shipped 18m Macs in 2019 [2]. So 28% of all Macs would have gone to developers. If developers buy more expensive machines (or more machines) than the average customer, their share of sales could be significantly higher.

However, I don't quite believe that there really are 20m active developers on the Apple platform. Evans Data estimates that there is a total of 27m developers worldwide [3]. It's not plausible that 74% of them should be writing software for Apple platforms. On the other hand, not all developers using a Mac are developing for the App Store. A lot of them will be Web developers.

I wouldn't be surprised if developers' share of Mac sales is 30%. Maybe it's just 20%. I don't know, but it's definitely not tiny.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/04/app-store-hits-20m-registe...

[2] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/01/13/apple-mac-shipments-dow...

[3] https://www.future-processing.com/blog/how-many-developers-a...

It's not about the percentage of users.

Developers fuel their platform. Without developers MacOS and iOS are nothing. Apple knows this.

They definitely care about devs less than Microsoft. They know that they have a relatively captive rich user base and devs will kowtow to them in order to develop stuff they can sell to that user base.

That's the real target.

And you can see it by how they treat the development tools (stuff like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25563276 or the many deprecations, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562604). Or CI/CD setups using their tools.

Why do you think people buy iPhones? Because the Apple logo on the back? Once you put a case on your phone, most people can't tell the difference between one brand and another.

People like iOS because of the software, both the OS, and the software which runs atop it. This is why WWDC is Apple's single biggest event of the year.

Likewise, people don't buy Macs because they are metal and have a shiny fruit on the backside. Developers were among the first to migrate to Apple back in the 00s when they discovered its Unix underpinnings made it great for doing web development.

This idea that Apple doesn't care about developers doesn't hold water. If they didn't care, they wouldn't have bothered to add Hypervisor support into the M series CPUs. This is a feature which has almost no purpose outside of software development or as a server platform and Apple doesn't make dedicated server hardware so where does that leave us?

But they make the software the other 99% use. That's what makes them important.

HN's policy of automated title mangling strikes again - the original title is "How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2." That is, this article isn't a discussion of the mere fact that it was added (we discussed that a few weeks ago), but it has pictures of rackmounted Mac Minis with their custom hardware.

As of this writing, only 1-2 of the comment threads are related to the actual subject of the article (why Apple doesn't produce a rackmount form-factor machine, why you can't virtualize macOS on commodity x86 hardware) and the rest are just about the fact of Macs on EC2 (why Apple doesn't run their own cloud, whether the pricing is cost-effective, etc.).

Is there some licensing issue with Apple that requires this minimum monthly usage?

It appears aws is charging $1/hr with a 24 hr minimum which is similar to every other provider out there that is offering MacOS instances.

I was excited to see that AWS was offering these as I assumed it would be priced just like everything else - hourly with no minimums.

I literally need access a few hrs a month for submitting binary updates to the app store. And I suspect there are a lot of other users with this same use case which may explain the consistent policy of minimum monthly usage.

Big Sur's licensing states:

3. Leasing for Permitted Developer Services. A. Leasing. You may lease or sublease a validly licensed version of the Apple Software in its entirety to an individual or organization (each, a “Lessee”) provided that all of the following conditions are met: (i) the leased Apple Software must be used for the sole purpose of providing Permitted Developer Services and each Lessee must review and agree to be bound by the terms of this License; (ii) each lease period must be for a minimum period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours;

It seems that if you could still buy macOS separately you could buy more copies than computers and lease these out for 24h while sharing the hardware with much higher granularity which would lower the cost significantly.

However it seems that no version of macOS since Lion (2011) is available to be purchased standalone anymore.

It is a shame that Apple forces such a wasteful and inconvenient process but it is more profitable for them and apparently they are legally allowed to do so.

I suppose you could purchase older, broken machines that come with a license.

Yes, this is directly from the macOS T&Cs: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...

It's also per-instance, so if you use one to run a build or automated test suite and tear it down afterwards, it costs you 24 hours each time. Some simple napkin math: if you average running two builds/test runs per day, not including weekends, you'll pay somewhere over $12k/yr. Crazy.

We test some cross-platform software with an installer, and there's automated tests for every Windows version since 7, dozens of various Linux distros/versions (including x86 and ARM), but we never got around to automating Mac largely because of the complexity with getting back to a "clean" environment (eg: what you get with a fresh EC2 image). Having relatively few users compared to all other platforms plus the cost being a couple of orders of magnitude higher, I doubt we'll take advantage of this. Too bad.

Disclosure: I work for AWS and am part of the team that built EC2 Mac instances

The 24 hours minimum is applicable to the allocation duration a Mac1 Dedicated Host, and not to the instances running on that host. Put differently - once allocated, a Mac1 Dedicated Host can only be released from your account after 24 hours. You can however can launch, stop, start, and terminate as many mac1.metal instances with fresh macOS AMIs on that host as you need while that host remains allocated to you.

Additionally, Savings Plan (https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/) on Mac1 instances can provide up to 44% savings over On-demand prices for longer term commitments.

Ok that sounds promising. I haven't really used dedicated instances so I'll have a closer look at this. Thanks!

Couldn't you keep the instance the first time every day ? I don't know Macs that much but I assume that AWS could offer a way to wipe it without breaking the instance.

> It appears aws is charging $1/hr with a 24 hr minimum which is similar to every other provider out there that is offering MacOS instances.

How much per month? Around $720?

You obviously expect to pay over the odds for cloud VMs, but that's really expensive. I would have thought someone as big as AWS would have been able to negotiate more favourable terms, but it seems not.

Given I'd expect a lot of these to be used as iOS build servers, it's worth noting that Azure DevOps gives you 1,800 build minutes on the free tier, which AFAIK you can use with their MacOS agents.

AWS might as well have negotiated good terms, but why give those to customers? People use AWS even if cheaper alternatives exist.

Mac Stadium charges $720/year.

You'd probably have less TCO if you just buy a mac mini and sell it when a new generation comes out. If you take good care of it you can sell it for 30% of the original purchase price.

For one device sure. If you need a small fleet then you have to pay someone to manage them and that gets more expensive for quite a while.

That seems... expensive.... Wouldn't it be cheaper just to buy a mini?

Just checked - yes it is after about 2 months.

Isn’t that true for all EC2 instances? That’s not why one buys EC2

This, although I think the 24 hour minimum set by apple kinda undermines the scalability asset.

Obviously the 24 hour minimum means you’d be better buying one for most CI uses, which I think is what most people want them for.

However I think I remember a image can that also manipulated used apple hardware for the metal api? They would still benefit from the ability to scale on at least a daily level.

From an AWS employee:

https://twitter.com/WindexCowboy/status/1333876188385841158

> The use of the Dedicated Hosts concept keeps the license requirement decoupled from the instance life cycle. While you do need to allocate the Mac for a minimum of 24 hours, you can launch and terminate a fresh mac1.metal instance on that box as many times as you like.

Yes...ish.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562532 for a huge caveat: scrubbing the old instance takes anywhere from 30 minutes to 4 hours.

So there are time constraints that make this far from ideal.

Amazon's cloud offerings are generally quite expensive compared to owning yourself. That's why such a small part of Amazon's revenues can be such a large part of their earnings.

Aren't you paying for the network access as well as not having to manage the hardware? Rack space, networking and usually cooling etc all add up.

Also consider purchasing a refurbished mac mini.

I bought one on ebay for $350 2 years back, I've added 16 GB RAM and a samsung evo SSD. At a total cost ~$500, this old mac mini is a beast.

Yes, that has been my plan for a while. But due to low memory on older systems, you can't upgrade to the newest versions of MacOS.

I had just assumed they were not user upgradeable. So knowing now that they are, I'll have to take a look again.

Macstadium seems to be offering pricing of $59 per month, which is much more competitive versus buying the hardware outright.

CI services like Travis and Circle do Mac/iOS builds and give each job a minute or two at a time — I guess this is different because it’s a service rather than “leasing” the machine?

Well, Apple is a hardware company first and foremost, their business model is to sell you a Mac regardless of how little you use it. Letting a third-party rent a single hardware unit to hundreds or thousands of people per month and capture most of the profit while doing so is against their business model, so not surprisingly they try to prevent that from happening.

How do you test the updates without a Mac? Sorry I’m sure I’m missing something

Yes, Apple requires a 24-hour minimum.

Yes. It's licensing.

So when I buy a mac mini at Best Buy, am I somehow agreeing to that policy?

When you click accept in the initial setup that has a link to T&Cs that informs you can return it for a refund if you don't agree.

How legally enforceable clickwrap such as that is varies from country to country.

These are pretty expensive for most uses — another article of theirs calculates ~73 days to equal the cost of outright buying one and the 24 hour minimum is a high floor for, say, nightly tasks.

One thing I've been wanting to do for a while is integrate with iMessage. iMessage stores a local SQLite database of message history. A forever-running MacOS instance could sync that with The Cloud and open up some pretty cool applications.

I believe the 24hr minimum is a requirement by Apple not AWS.

I remember reading somewhere that renting a Mac mini node from AWS has the same rental policies as renting a physical Mac mini from a rental company.

It makes a lot of sense to have a 24hr minimum when renting a physical machine delivered to a workplace, but it seems weird to have the same policies when renting a Mac mini on the cloud.

It would make sense for a third party to require 24 hours minimum, but it seems really weird for -Apple- to be dictating what a third party rental company's minimum rental duration is. I understand it's for the license (i.e., "on this day the one seat license was used by X, on this other day, Y, and all other times by Z"), but that seems kind of arbitrary.

It's Apple's new license agreement specifically for "rental" companies like AWS and MacStadium. Apple specifically says that Mac hardware and software licenses must be for a minimum time period of 24 hours, and cannot be shared between customers.

> Apple requires companies lease hardware and software "in its entirety to an individual or organization," ensuring peak performance and a one customer to one machine setup. Lease periods must be 24 consecutive hours and customers need to review and accept licensing terms for all first- and third-party software.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/12/apple-outlines-de...

Like I said. It's Apple enforcing it on third parties. Which is really weird. Like if Disney forced minimum rental periods on Blockbuster back in the day.

it's arbitrary but it's more the license for MacOS and not the Mac hardware itself. If you (are able to) flash linux on the Mac, you won't be bound to the MacOS license terms and can rent it out without the consecutive 24 hour minimum, although at that point you might as well just run a graviton2 instance.

I would be super strange and non-intuitive for AWS to impose something like this, they have nothing to gain and a lot to lose (actual customers, image, as people will make fun of them for this silly limitation).

As other posters have said, it's a MacOS license limitation :-(

another article of theirs calculates ~73 days to equal the cost of outright buying one

The purchase price of a machine is far from the only cost of adding a machine to an enterprise. Depending on how a company is set up, that 73 days could be as little as 10 or 20 days. There are a lot of other factors to consider, especially if (as it is where I work), only two departments uses Macs, and the rest of the company is Windows.

Its pretty standard with AWS. You also get much better performances from an old laptop than most VMs. You don't pay for the hardware but everything else.

Considering how much Apple has been helping MacStadium and the volume of Mac minis going to rack based installs, I'm surprised Apple hasn't made them a little more rack mount friendly.

Seems like they could just make a special case-less sled with only minor tweaks to the existing mini design. Obviously they would need to build a sled/ server chassis too with networking and power delivery.

All the big players who rack Mac Minis already have custom rack equipment that fits Mac Minis of this form factor. I suspect the design hasn’t changed at all primarily for this reason.

Yes, but putting the minis in a case in a rack is wasteful. Both in terms of raw materials used, and energy efficiency. Considering how much of a deal Apple makes out of saving a few power bricks from the landfill, manufacturing thousands of enclosures which end up in server racks wasting power seems out of place.

It sounds like upper management said no to the server market years ago and doesn’t want to sell a “server”. But they’ll happily sell you a Mac mini to build a server farm.

Arguably, mac minis are servers that can be repurposed as desktops. Even in their marketing blurbs Apple advertises mac minis as build and render farms.

The Mac mini isn't intended for that type of use... they do make a rack mount Mac Pro ( https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack ). Give it a generation to get to the M series chips.

> The Mac mini isn't intended for that type of use

The mini absolutely is intended for use as a server. It's what Apple provided to Mac Stadium for OSS projects to build on. Very few Mac Pros are used for CI servers, they are mostly used for video and audio processing.

you've said it like, 4 times in this thread that apple is "helping mac stadium". What do you mean?

Different things at different times. In this case just that Apple knows Mac Stadium is one of their bigger Mac mini customers and works with them.

It will be a beautiful day when we can run macOS workloads in a container/vm.

There's Anka https://veertu.com

There's Orka too, but as far as I can tell, you have to run it in MacStadium's cloud https://www.macstadium.com/orka

I've been waiting on an excuse to ditch my faltering Mac. Being able to RDP into an EC2 and build iOS apps or even run an emulator will be huge! Yes I know there were a few other providers before, but hadn't found one that worked in my pipeline.

Where's the win over getting a <$700 Mini (new or used) at home and RDPing in when you are out?

Fair point, but I just really prefer on demand usage. I'm averse to maintaining a mac mini (even having it plugged in and hooked up to the network). To have a server guaranteed to not have issues is the win for me. Also, pay-as-you-go generally works better for my line of business than the upfront investment, even if there is a breakeven point.

If the break-even point is a couple months, I don't even consider renting unless it's a really short term thing. Different strokes.

The official intro video shows four, yes four, Mac Minis sitting in a closet soon to be replaced by EC2 instances.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn3miC_tTH0&t=1m10s

"We have to maintain each individual device." There's an effete millennial joke in there somewhere.

Apparently industries have much more faith in APPL than in AMD. It took way longer to have Rayzen computing nodes than ARM M1 ones.

These aren't M1 Macs, they're x64. There's nothing AMD CPUs can do that Intel cannot, though maybe the cost/usage patterns benefit one vendor or another at certain points in time.

Apple have made it so building/testing iOS apps requires access to OS X, and OS X can only be run on Apple hardware, so they've ensured there is some segment that requires access to Apple hardware.

Given that these are x86_64 Mac Minis, I'm surprised that Apple and Amazon couldn't work out a virtualization agreement that would allow Amazon to run macOS on their existing hypervisors. Higher education has been trying to do that with Apple for a decade now, but they don't have Amazon's clout.

Apple is adamantly opposed to allowing this use case. It doesn't matter who is asking them.

Ever since Lion(? IIRC when the license terms changed) there was nothing preventing a hypervisor to run on bare Apple metal and host macOS in VMs; in fact a frequently used one is VMware ESXi/Vsphere.

It just seems that the market isn't there and people just go for full-machine MacStadium rental or use their own hardware.

As of Big Sur [1], the license explicitly requires providers to rent out an entire machine at a time.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macos-big-sur-adds-leasing-te...

Indeed.

Also, the "purposes" of Section 3 explicitly lists CI as "(B)", followed (confusingly) by "B.".

> For purposes of this Section 3: (A) End User Lessee means a Lessee who is the end user ultimately using the leased Apple Software solely for Permitted Developer Services; and (B) Permitted Developer Services means 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. Each Lessor must provide Apple with advance notice prior to leasing or subleasing the Apple Software pursuant to this Section 3 by contacting Apple Developer Relations (https://developer.apple.com/contact/macos-license/).

> B. Subleasing. A Lessee may further sublease the Apple Software pursuant to this Section 3 provided that such Lessee complies with all of the terms of this Section 3. A Lessee subleasing the Apple Software (who shall also be considered a Lessor under this Section 3) must fully relinquish exclusive use and control of the Apple Software and the Apple-branded hardware on which it is installed to its Lessee during the lease period.

From which I understand that e.g 1. MacStadium is a "Lessor", 2. GitHub is a "Lessee" that does subleasing and has to lease for 24h minimum, and 3. a GitHub Actions user is a "End User Lessee" but could lease for fractions of 24h.

Strangely this means that GH cannot provide macOS on its own!

Also, this seems to mean that GH has to provide bare metal to its users, not VMs ("must fully relinquish exclusive use and control of the Apple Software and the Apple-branded hardware"), which is too bad given what you can do with VMs[0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25568613

> Amazon said it is using Thunderbolt to connect its Nitro controller to the Mac Mini and provide its basic suite of EBS storage, networking, and security/ management features.

That's pretty cool; they bridge ethernet/IP (I assume) to SATA or NVMe on Thunderbolt.

Does this mean we can finally compile for the Apple platform without owning an Apple computer?

Yes but there’s a minimum rent period of 24h, which means you’ll lose the benefits of a cloud provider over an on-premise OSX “build box”.

Strange, Apple should be subsidizing compilation for Apple's platform instead.

That moves less hardware.

If they actually wanted to make it easy to develop software they would allow compiling on other platforms, and ideally provide a VM to test on.

This is why I support IE and Edge on personal sites but not Safari. You can download free VMs from Microsoft for web testing, but you have to pay Apple to make things work on their platform.

You could already do it using CIs like BitRise, Circle or even GH Actions. CIs are probably cheaper due to the AWS 24h minimum.

Also, MS offered host Mac builds years ago for Visual Studio Team Services - now known as Azure Devops.

Hmm. Glad to see it happen, but expect better hardware. E.g. optimized for heat and such.

Very neat how they bring the entire Nitro platform through the Thunderbolt ports.

When would I need this?

Who is the target audience for this novelty?

Developers who don't have regular physical access to a Mac.

My use case might be too specific. But, at home I have a Windows Desktop and Laptop. In the office I use a Mac Mini. Currently, I need to test Apple Pay for Safari. This requires test iCloud credentials. On a mac, this is difficult or prohibitive to swap between live iCloud and test iCloud logins. On Windows, testing via browser emulation is shaky at best.

Also, easily sharing access to a "cloud" (read: remote) instance of macOS with other developer staff is beneficial.

Seems like the type of thing that would change pretty quickly if developers demanded an experience that wasn't complete trash.

How quickly would Apple fold if all of a sudden there weren't third party applications for their devices?

The problem is that it is chicken and egg. If all the developers switched their ecosystem would be crap and they would need to fix the experience or the users would leave. However right now it is profitable to target their users, even if it is awkward, so why wouldn't Apple (from an economic incentive) milk the developers for every penny they have.

Apple is very much biting the hand(s) that feed here.

It's one thing to say that it's a chicken and egg problem for existing businesses that make money in the Apple ecosystem. It's another thing when you are still seeing new development efforts.

It's 2020, this shit has been happening for a while, and it's no secret. I haven't figured out why a self-respecting developer would subject themselves to that nonsense.

I assume this is for co's who'd prefer rolling their own iOS CI/CD pipeline(s).

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