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Comment by tehbeard | Hacker News Reader

One has to wonder how much of Github's subpar experience for it is down to mac market share not making it worth improving, and Apple's own strangehold on the hardware and "odd" licencing (I know that with AWS due to Apple, you are stuck with a minimum 24 hour allocation, compared to being able to spin up half a dozen Intel/AMD/ARM instances for a few minutes then terminate them and only get build by the second.)

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Interesting so another unfair advantage for Apple themselves. AWS and other vendors can't offer per second or minute billing but I assume they're doing it for the 25h of credits.

Well, GitHub is certainly in control of their own platform and a problem entirely done by themselves. For example, not making pre-release Xcode versions available on their images, or by default selecting 1-year-old versions of macOS (and as a result throwing everyone into a side quest just to get started)... and ultimately charging 3x the regular pricing for this is absurd.

> charging 3x the regular pricing for this is absurd

macOS virtualization is pricey by Apple's design. This is not just a GH problem

Surely if Microsoft (this big corp, that happens to own a cloud) wanted to find a way for GitHub to offer a pleasant experience, they would have.

> happens to own a cloud

macOS hardware or virtualization is beaucoup bucks in every cloud. As I said, this is not just a GitHub (or Microsoft) problem.

Arguably, they've done the best they can do without partnering with Apple directly. Are you suggesting that they should invest in hacking MacOS to improve the customer experience?

I didn't know you could virtualize macos.

The license restricts you to only virtualize macOS on Mac hardware, and only 2 VMs per physical machine.

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