Hacker News Reader

Comment by conradfr | Hacker News Reader

Not the most practical but you can rent a macOS VM.

Browserling has a usable free trial. They have a finite number of VMs dedicated to the trial, so sometimes it takes a while to get to the front of the queue, but it's been good enough when I've needed it. https://www.browserling.com/

A hobby dev will not do such thing.

It costs 10 cents an hour though.

@javcasas for sure it's not practical if you want to develop with it, I was more thinking of testing on preprod/prod.

But maybe ngrok can be sufficient to test your local dev from the VM?

Plus moving stuff into the VM, opening a vnc connection, testing that it doesn't show properly, uploading a tweak to see if it improves, testing again, and so on.

10 cents is the smallest of the associated expenses. You are ignoring all the other expenses.

You’ll only get rates like that if you’re reserving at least a month’s usage.

For small amounts of usage, the cheapest I’ve ever seen is $1 per hour, with a minimum spend past $30, with various further strings attached. And most are much more than that.

Apple has a 24h minimum mandate so I guess I stand corrected.

But it's not $1 per hour.

https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/apple-silicon/

OK, that does look like it actually is only €2.64 per day. Having looked carefully a few years ago and briefly skimmed now, the absolute cheapest other provider I’ve seen in small quantities was over 8× that price.

I don’t think hobby developers are the cause for concern here. To me, these steps should be taken for professionally developed services where there is a reasonable expectation of accessibility (in my mind this would roughly speaking be those that are either publicly funded or where the revenue is at least a million euros).

For smaller businesses and hobbyists it feels like expecting support for all major browsers would be discouraging in a negative way. I appreciate digital art even if it doesn’t work in my favorite browser and a shitty online menu for a food truck is better than none.

I'm a very broke hobby dev, but I still do this as a final check.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com