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Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

If M1 macs were like iPhones, where a new one was released every year, I could see it maybe being useful to pay for something like this.

But since they aren’t, and since an M1 mini only costs $699, it doesn’t make sense to me. If you use it 24/7, even the cheapest provider is going to be more expensive than just buying one (or 3)

Even if you only use it for building/compiling iOS software, it’s probably still cheaper to buy one because even if Apple releases a new model, the model you can buy today is still going to be good for building for at least half a decade. Also, if there is a new model, the old model will drop in price!

AND even if you don’t have the cash to buy a $700 computer, you can still probably find a way to finance the purchase for a lower monthly payment than whatever this type of service would cost.

Does anyone have a real world example where a service like this makes sense? (Even if it were cheaper than AWS’s prices)

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Mac automation for things like CI is a pain in the ass (at least for small businesses) and their virtualization story for e.g. older version of the OS blows, despite having had a built-in hypervisor for a really long time.

"Load this specific OS, install these other programs, download some data, get it to this overall state, then run this script and send the output somewhere else, then destroy it when you're done" is actually a pretty big pain to do with macOS, without paying someone. Not that rentable M1 Macs solve that problem, exactly, but rentable, managed Macs in general can be useful for this, when you're renting from places with the automation in place to do easy virtualization or re-imaging.

They mentioned the main use case when they launched the initial Mac ec2 instances.

Any company that does something on iOS/macos needs mac hardware to run builds on, there is no other (legal) option. The status quo (even at very large companies) is some mac mini's under someones desk/in a closet somewhere.

This is basically replacing the cost of that setup (ie the oncall for it/hassle). The AWS service is even more expensive than things like MacStadium because you also get AWS network connectivity and other features.

Is this really true?

There really isn’t a cross compiling chain that would allow me to build a macOS app on a freebsd system (for instance) ?

I've manually done it before (on Linux). Technologically it's not that hard to do, but legally is where it becomes a problem. IIRC the Xcode license (which applies to the iOS SDKs) requires you to use them on Apple branded computers.

I don't know why Apple cares so much about that, especially since they're already collecting their yearly $100 tax from developers on top of the 30% revenue cut. I guess at their size, extracting every last penny is how you get to a trillion dollar valuation?

So unless you have a strong legal defense ready, you should probably just pay Apple.

EDIT: I should clarify that by "it's not that hard to do", I mean that it's easy because someone else already did the hard part :)

https://github.com/tpoechtrager/cctools-port

No. If you want to build things for the Apple ecosystem, you need to use the Apple ecosystem.

Cross-compiling is possible, but breaks the Xcode/Apple SDK license terms.

https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross#packaging-the-sdk

https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/xcode.pdf

If you need to run a CI server or something, the cost of the hardware itself is not nearly the only cost you have. With this, you have it hooked up in reliable power supply, very good network connectivity and all the other physical concerns abstracted away.

CI is what comes to mind. If you want to run tests or build artifacts on a Mac every time any developer pushes a commit, you really need something remote rather than a physical device on your desk.

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