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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

> Corellium and their virtual iPhone cloud product (only publicly-available “complete” solution)

Corellium won their legal case, allowing them to rent [1] iOS Cloud VMs for security research, https://hn.algolia.com/?query=corellium

If iOS can be virtualized on Apple Silicon Macbooks, it could reduce demand for commercial iOS virtualization services.

  Individuals: $400/month
  Business: $60,000/year

[1] https://support.corellium.com/subscriptions/pricing

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my god, $4-$8/hr who is paying for these VMs?

This is cheaper than 8xH100 GPU compute time for AI.

This is such a left-field comparison. One H100 costs $25,000, whereas one Macbook Pro/iMac/iOS device costs roughly a tenth of that. It's not at all surprising that it's cheaper to rent something that has CapEx costs 2 orders of magnitude less than that of 8xH100 ($200k for the GPUs alone).

I think the point was a $4-$8/hr VM is pretty small potatoes compared to other common corporate expenses.

The H100 was a terrible example to support that point because it has a much better (rent vs buy) value proposition.

The problem is that H100s are enterprise products while Apple ones aren't. If you have trouble with your H100s how does it compare cost-wise with having trouble with your consumer Apple hardware?

Depends on the kind of trouble you are having.

Many corner stores can fix a smashed iPhone screen.

These people: https://www.corellium.com/about#:~:text=Who%20we%20serve

No, those people are almost certainly paying far below list price.

There's probably some enterprise level deals going on there (as with every service provider), but they will still be paying them A Lot of Money every year.

attackers and defenders of zero day vulns in iOS black boxes

You say that but companies routinely pay projects like Circle CI similar orders of magnitudes for chunkier CI builds (one place I know having builds take 30 minutes.... with 64 shards. Basically paying like 5-10 bucks per commit)

You still gotta do hardware management yourself in other words but CI is good business!

> Basically paying like 5-10 bucks per commit

Which isn't actually all that much, compared to the amount you pay your developers.

And not much compared to a bug in prod or waiting 3 weeks for a release (the value proposition of CI/CD)

Still, saving cloud spend by making the build faster or using self hosted runners is probably worth it.

Definitely, if you can cut costs, do it.

An additional several thousand dollars per month for any moderately-sized team, especially if you've got a bunch of microservices, sounds very expensive to me, and would probably get axed quickly by any devops team I can think of that's actively working on reducing their costs.

I mean if you're paying 5+ digits a month on CI it starts being reasonable to say "maybe I should do things to lower the absolute cost of this". 5 dollars time a big enough number is real money!

Is there an alternative service that offers similar service? I am not sure if I have ever seen anything else come close to what these guys do. I recall them going into battle with apple and it looks like they had won. But it sucks that we do not have any open source solution for iOS or Android to emulate the OS for these devices.

I remember we paid Circle CI ungodly amounts to host a dozen trash can Mac Pros to run our iOS CI. Early Swift versions caused huge spikes in build times.

Certainly not paying anyones rent, but I've paid them a couple of bucks over the years to test software on their VMs, since they can come jailbroken out of the box.

You think that's a lot wait until you see what AWS charges for GPU instances...

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