Hacker News Reader

I tried to launch a MacOS instance on EC2 recently (on my work account), and was blocked.

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.

You should be happy that you have such a financially aware IT dept. The machines are truly expensive and after managing a farm of 150 Mac minis at work I can tell why.

It is like 3 days running the EC2 buys you a Mac mini? And you can only rent the machine in day increments

(where "abuse" means using the hardware to run software)

Well yeah and Apple wouldn’t be able to abuse its pseudo-monopolistic market position. That would be so sad…

And thus they need a massive datacenter full of systems, rather than a pile of paid licenses.

And macOS remains a toy for use only by individuals that is a massive pain for developers to support.