Edit: Sorry, my napkin math assumed a unstated utilization rate of 40 hours per week, but that’s not a great assumption due to the 24 hour minimum. Still, some proportion of machines will be idle, though 75% idle seems like a bad guess.
Edit: Sorry, my napkin math assumed a unstated utilization rate of 40 hours per week, but that’s not a great assumption due to the 24 hour minimum. Still, some proportion of machines will be idle, though 75% idle seems like a bad guess.
Imagine you’re developing an app in regulated market and need to have Macs for CI/CD There’s a lot more to this than just keeping some Mac mini’s under your desk. How are you managing physical security in your environment? Do you have all the associated certifications in place? Can we see your last audit? Who’s fixing this when something breaks? What about your in house IT folks that done want to build out a whole new operation to manage Macs now? What if next week you need 5x as many instances but only for 2 days? That’s what your paying for in the price here, not just the cost of the instance itself and power.
When faced with all those requirements and challenges the pricing looks inexpensive.
It's great that there are finally multiple ways to do this without needing to buy a bunch of Macs just for compiling.
>>> 699/(24*0.65)
44.80769230769231 days
Nitro card obviously costs a bit, but for ROI on mac itself is closer to 6 weeks than 6 months ;)
Days where you're doing the same short-lived task many times won't be as expensive per build, but if you just want to do a nightly build, you're paying for months or years and utilizing a fraction of the compute time you're buying.
But what would be the point of running Linux on a Mac Mini on AWS?
I would be careful about estimating beyond how they view arm64 given that these are the highest perf/core arm64 devices they can put their hands on.
They're also likely pricing in some form of opportunity cost since the density of physical macs per unit rack space is almost certainly lower than the density of typical server hardware.
The most common Mac mini rack mount enclosure holds 2 minis in 1ru. I think at amazon's scale they could probably get 4 minis in 1ru with some custom cooling.
how dense do you think instances are on average in the amazon datacenters?
19 mod 7.7 = 3.6, 3.6 x 1.4 = 5.04 in^2
Presumably the greater waste of bottom side down is in higher number of shelves?
That sounds wasteful to me. Is that really the most common way for mac hosting companies to do it?
There's an image there that appears to have the units mounted sideways for perhaps 6 minis in 2 RU?
So not $699, but $899, since it's 16GB of memory.
Maybe the rules are a bit different for Amazon, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
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That isn’t what you said.
You're backpedaling now. Nowhere in your first comment was there any reference to degrees or margins - it was all or nothing (the "price is the price").
It's ok to admit you were mistaken.
Specifically for testing with multiple versions of MacOS: you could develop the code and then test on a custom AMI to make sure it ran in the version of MacOS, no need to have multiple systems setup. (Although I don't know much about Mac dev-- does Apple provide tools to do such testing already without running multiple OS versions?)
Otherwise, I guess it's all just about convenience.
I have never seen any business/professional mac hardware deployment which doesn't look custom build with some magic around it.
That alone might be much more expensive and needs a dedicated team.