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Comment by jjeaff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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