The 24 hour minimum pricing model for these really sucks. My understanding is that this is a condition of Apple's license to Amazon to run macOS on these machines, and I can't work out why they'd do it.
Edit: oh hello, i'm at -4! Anyone care to defend your outrage at my outrage? What makes this seem at all ok? This seems so fundamentally screwy to me. Questions like how Apple is allowed to ban other browsers[1] show related type of confusion over the vast ecosystem control that seems to be spreading, but there at least there's some cloudy App Store Apple clearly retains some rights of control over.
First-sale rights in America is fairly narrow in what they permit, but in America at least, there's very much been an idea that consumers become owners of the things they buy. It feels like a modern regression that there have been so many asterisks added to this straightforward & obvious right.
As far as I understand it, those EULA agreements aren't enforceable in the EU.
That being said, NVIDIA don't have any obligation to sell to you in bulk if they find out you're installing consumer GPUs in a datacenter, so there's obviously an incentive to follow them.
For software you can also have person A buy something, then give it to person B who didn't click a license agreement. But this isn't really necessary -- the case where Microsoft got slapped for motherboard locking Windows XP and had to undo it shows that if software is integral to the operation of a device rights to its use are transferred along with the sale of the item, much to the chagrin of CNC companies everywhere who have yet to be challenged on this.
It's relatively common for companies to use shell companies or employees to buy hardware off the record for investigative purposes. Place I used to work at would investigate buyers for this reason (difference being we really did give our customers free reign with the equipment, we just had to try to stop fraud and other things).
You are legally allowed to reverse engineer them and provide your own software but Nvidia pretty much buys whole departments at universities to have the bleeding edge of hardware obfuscation. The stuff they do to make the chips inscrutable is absolutely bonkers.
The leadership sitting on a board with a mandatory retirement age at 65 who is 64 will lobby all involved to change that rule to keep going to 70. The terms are negotiable. You would have to think in our time of climate crisis that using 7 or 8 hours of a 24 hour slot and wasting all that energy for 16 hours is not something the law firm that negotiated the terms would be embarrassed by. To make it right, a regulator could force Apple to limit the rental minimum slot time according a labor board's idea of a programming work day at 7 to 16 hours and not 24. Write a letter and email your politician?
This is about a minimum 24-hour rental of Mac Minis tho.
From https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/#Pricing:
"Billing for EC2 Mac instances is per second with a 24-hour minimum allocation period to comply with the Apple macOS Software License Agreement"
A potentially bigger reason (for requiring 24hr) is to incentivize people who need a max for small bursts (eg build server, testing a website with safari etc) to just buy macs.
I imagine a reason to require bare-metal hosting because everyone is lauding apple on how snappy and lively the M1 is and if they’re split between N number of VMs then you may have a worse experience and apple is protecting that.
It's not like Amazon doesn't have the ability or experience to research business decisions before they're made.