Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyre | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com