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Comment by alufers | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how bulletproof Apple's macOS license is. Perhaps one could find a country where the "you can't run it on non-Apple hardware" clause is not valid, and get some good lawyers. Then just run a standard data center with normal multi-socket virtualization servers, and for each one buy a dead mac to have the rights to the software. Perhaps one could hot glue a powered off Apple motherboard inside of this server and claim that it is Apple hardware now.

Maybe it's risky, but you could easily compete on the per hour price with these shops, that have to buy actual macs, disassemble them and run all this custom infrastructure to support this.

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> Perhaps one could find a country where the "you can't run it on non-Apple hardware" clause is not valid

Some of us recall the era of the officially authorised Apple clones.

In my case, I was a level one tech at the time, and so I ended up fixing far too many of the damn things.

As is the way with IT, the non-Apple manufacturers treated it as a race to the bottom. They put out cheap-ass products that were built in an equivalent cheap-ass way. Sure you could buy a clone 30%(or whatever) cheaper than the Apple equivalent, but you got what you paid for.

I for one celebrated the day Apple killed off the Apple clone license regime.

The whole point of the Apple platform is the tight integration between hardware and software and, statistically speaking, the generally high quality and reliability of Apple hardware. As above, I have witnessed first hand what happens when you legally decouple the two ... its not pretty.

To pre-empt the people who will point me at some blog-rant where someone's Mac "broke", well sure, when you build millions of machines, there will inevitably be some that break ... but I doubt anyone can seriously argue against Apple reliability overall.

After the keyboard fiasco I'm not convinced Apple's first party control is really all that great. Non-removable batteries, RAM, storage too strike me as repair hostile. It's a luxury brand now. The hacker spirit is long gone.

Apple seems to be held up to much higher standards, perhaps due to volume or a simple product line up.

but most hardware makers have fuck ups equal to; or worse yet they seem much less talked about.

ask your IT person about recent XPS models desoldering themselves or cooking themselves in peoples backpacks when they should be a asleep for a very recent example

Other brands get plenty of criticism. And often without folks rushing in to defend them using whataboutism.

not defending them at all, I dont really care, but it seems like Apple problems are all anyone talks about for an entire news cycle and continue to be talked about for half a decade, yet people very quickly forget about issues with Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung even if they make news at all.

Exceptions only for really serious issues like Samsungs phones spontaneously combusting and Lenovos Superfish.

Apple only produces a few device models at a time. Where Lenovo and HP have a laptop configuration for every use case or every price point under the sun, Apple has three tiers at most.

That makes developing for Apple products relatively painless, but it also means that if they mess up, a significant portion of their customers are affected. Combine that with the sales numbers they're pulling off, and the end result is that Apple messing up is a bigger deal in practice.

There's plenty of news about other manufacturers, too. It doesn't seem to get upvoted to the front page of Reddit and HN as often, but tech news sites report about all kinds of failures. I don't know why people keep upvoting Apple, whether it's positive news or negative, but for some reason Apple just attracts a lot of attention. If you look outside vote based news, there are plenty of "Lenovo publishes UEFI firmware patches" news articles too, they just don't get as many comments.

That has already been done, but it's not really the point of this; the point is to put M1 chips (or M2, M3 etc) in a blade-like enclosure for non-standard workloads (like GitHub runners).

The fact that it also has a legit serial number and macOS software license is a nice bonus, but if it was realistic to run ARM builds for iOS and macOS on other hardware, it would be done. AWS has the same thing, you can get bare metal Macs as much as you want.

As for running macOS itself; for server services that really doesn't make any sense, you'd be running Linux (like Apple does themselves for their services). That just leaves exactly why GitHub is doing what they are doing: you'll want a proven toolchain that can keep up with ecosystem changes, so your customers can run Xcode workloads and the likes.

There were some services that used (slightly) older Xcode builds on random x86 hardware, but neither the price nor performance was what the market wanted (I think) so they all disappeared without much of a trace. The only one left that does stuff like this is Corellium but that's not as much a build or device farm as it is a debug/reverse-engineering facility.

Corellium runs on ARM hardware, of course.

The days of x86 macOS are numbered. I don't think there are good ways for running ARM macOS on non-Apple ARM CPUs and I am not even sure there are ARM servers comparable with M1 in single-core performance (maybe latest AWS Graviton?)

With ARM Macs, Apple has killed the Hackintoshes, which I never found appealing anyway.

It was like those folks that put Ferrari logos on red Fiat sport models.

Either get the real deal or something else

Yeah, I never understood the appeal. macOS but you have to mess around with hardware and drivers. No thanks. The appeal of macOS is that it just works with Mac hardware.

Messing around with hardware and the software that runs on it is how you really learn how computers and software work. The original Mac SE and Mac IIs came withe a hardware debugger you could enter anytime with a literal button on the front.

If I wanted buttoned up single-use OS there is iOS. But almost no one wants that as their primary OS because they want the customizable, extensible OS.

I did this with Linux and PCs 25-30 years ago when I was in high school and college. I don’t have time or interest in that anymore. Besides, the small amount of embedded work I do scratches my hardware itch better than any PC could, with their layer upon layer of crap (management engines, etc.).

Appeal was simple - at the time of peak Hackintosh (with Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs), you were able to get much better performance both CPU and GPU level for fraction of the price while still having MacOS experience (as it brings together best of both the GUI as well as Linux terminal functionality). The overhead of having to mess around with updates was well worth it at that time.

Long time Mac user here. The Hackintosh is what allowed me continue to use MacOS after Apple finished the PowerPC era. Because they also dramatically raised prices on the Pro workstations. It was now out of my budget even though the price of PCs were falling. I used a Hackintosh for years for 1/2 the price of the equivalent Nehalem based MacPros. You may not like them but they serve a purpose and they have a fan base.

"Because they also dramatically raised prices on the Pro workstations."

The PowerMac G5 Quad cost $3300. The Base model Mac Pro that was release less than a year later cost $2200, and it greatly outperformed the G5.

Base model PowerMac in 2005 - $2000 Base model MacPro in 2012 - $2500

Adjusting for inflation from 2005 to 2012: $2,000 becomes $2,359.67

After adjusting for inflation, Apple raised the price by $140 between 2005-2012, but they also 6x the base RAM and WiFi became standard. Not to mention the significant performance and efficiency improvements.

I don't know how much the WiFi upgrade cost on a G5, but if it cost more than $140 Apple actually reduced the price of the Pro workstations during the switch to intel.

By good fortune the PC I built from eBay parts was 100% compatible with a hackintosh macOS 10.6, even down to wireless and bluetooth.

This allowed me to experience using macOS as a daily driver (at home) while saving up for an eBay macbook (macbook pro 13 mid-2010)

The Hackintosh community is a vital step of "try before you buy" for many like myself.

On the other side of this the ibm x3550 m2 and m3 in any configuration ran OS X SL right out of the box without any customization besides the bootloader, a happy accident I discovered

For GitHub and most other companies running racks of macOS, the use case is testing/building macOS/iOS software. Even if you could build the stack you describe, I wouldn’t want my tests/builds running on a hackintosh build with unsupported processor and virtualization layers. I doubt there would be a huge market.

If it were 1/10th the price it could be worth moving most of the build process there. If you need the extra validation you could do some final testing on official hardware.

Maybe but it shouldn’t be that big of a difference. M series processors are very energy efficient. Minis aren’t that expensive.

Note: 10x is the multiplier for GitHub actions. So maybe I’m wrong but I’m guessing it’s more capacity than cost and that gap should narrow.

Not that I have found... My team runs our virtualization infra for end user computing (VDI) and our dev div runs almost entirely on MacOS. One of the frequent requests we have as we scale out more globally is to get virtual Mac desktops. There are a few providers that we have found, stateside but they don't scale well. There is of course EC2 offerings from AWS, which is basically what they are doing at Github with Mac minis.

We're looking at something similar as we migrate from VMWare. Any recommendations for VDI for Mac?

No not really. We have found a few smaller players but their ability to scale concerned me. We talked to one and I asked "if we do a new acquisition and I need 2000 Mac desktops in a month. What would you do?". I was surprised that they were as honest as they were, they simply said they could not procure that many in that period of time. We are a big AWS shop, I think a solution we are toying with is using Mac ec2 instances and building an orchestration layer that essentially setup one for a user, load the base tooling, enroll in MDM and email the customer with login details. Im not sure what protocol we would use yet though.... anyway... tldr NO.

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