Why should they impose a limit at all? Your hardware is a natural limit, you'll stop of your own accord when you reach its thresholds.
As appropriate a model this still is in the development VM scenario, you still need a valid license for each operating system copy you run.
Microsoft will sell you these individually; Apple apparently implicitly grants you up to three per Mac that you buy, and won’t let you pay for any more even if you want to.
In other words, what’s limited here is not really the hypervisor itself, but rather the “license granting component” that passes through the implicit permission to run macOS, but only up to some limit.
They'd probably charge separately for every feature of the processor if they could.
And macOS remains a toy for use only by individuals that is a massive pain for developers to support.
So I asked the IT dept and they said it's stupidly expensive to run a MacOS instance on EC2, and that they would just send me a Macbook Pro instead.
I wish I were kidding.
It is like 3 days running the EC2 buys you a Mac mini? And you can only rent the machine in day increments
It’s extremely frustrating.
I'm not sure why people keep giving Apple their money, especially tech-savvy people that would want to run VMs.
I've never hit the referenced limit because it isn't a limit on running VMs it's a limit on running macOS, and I hardly ever run macOS VMs.
I'm not sure why people don't use Mac's are so obsessed with telling people who do use Macs that they're wrong, and yet here we are.
Most developers build web- and server-based systems that use Linux VMs as back-ends.
Most containers used for development are Linux containers, which also run in a Linux VM.
It definitely caused us to buy macs we would have rented and shared.
My biggest problem is the lack of a good CI/CD flow when you can’t work with images and virtual machines. We’re using ansible now to manage the fleet and I’m not a fan.
If they would more than 2 VMs, we’d still buy the hardware, we’d just buy larger ones and have more virtual machines on them. Very likely also use Linux as the host.
I hope one day Apple sees the light like Microsoft also did, but I’m not hopeful.
That’s what I would be worried about if my primary source of income was hardware sales.
Even a 256GB model would run a load of 16GB VMs
They don't care what you want to do with the hardware you own.
It’s MacOS VMs that we want to run.
Imagine thinking everyone who buys a Mac and runs VMs wants to run heaps of macOS VMs.
arm64 hardware is cheap, x64 hardware is cheap and both of those can run as many Linux or Windows VMs as you have RAM to run.
Why buy a second extra machine to do testing of multi machine infrastructure configurations when my workstation can run the VMs locally?
For others? I don't know that's why I think it's ridiculous to assume everyone else's use case is the same as your own.
Currently services like Github Actions painfully and inefficiently rack thousands of Mac Minis and run 2 VMs on each to stay within the limits. They probably wouldn't mind paying a fee to run more VMs on Mac Studios instead.
They don't want to be in the server business, they don't want there to be third party VM providers running Mac farms selling oversubscribed giving underpowered disappointing VM experiences to users who will complain.
A bunch of folks want Apple to enter a market Apple doesn't want to enter into. They have tools available which would enable that market which they are kneecapping on purpose so that nobody unwillingly enters them into it. The "two VMs per unit hardware" has been in their license for at least a decade.
I'd be pretty surprised if there isn't a workaround or hack for this.
Microsoft has had limits on some things like RDP on some versions of Windows, but there have always been ways to get around it.
You can run x86 macOS VMs in Windows or Linux too with a little bit of technical trickery, but again, you end up with a license issue, so no-one reputable does it.
Ah but when you buy an iPhone or a Mac, Apple sees it as their hardware graciously made available to you for a limited time and under ToS.
Whenever I see apple silliness, I have to remember:
"You're not the target market."They see it a bit differently.
because imposing an artificial limit keeps them from exposing how low the natural limits turn out to be? Apple Silicon need always to be spoken with reverence, ye brother of the faith, do not fuel the faithless lest they rend and threadrip that which we've made of wholecloth.