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Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

macincloud.com

161–170 of 177 posts

Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

#161
post #16

Gonna be brutally honest here, those pricing plans are shit. Allow me to log in for an unlimited amount of time and lower the price a bit, and we'll talk.

While you are at it, get me a cup of coffee... Aren't you asking for a bit too much (specially on the "lower the price" bit.

Paying $30 a month for 5 hours of use is really stupid.

Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

#162
post #87

So let's see who your potential customer is: - Someone who owns a computer, with a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse (of course) - Someone with a decent internet access - Someone who has either invested or going to invested 100's of hours to properly learn the iOS/Mac frameworks - Someone who is hoping to either make a living off his Mac development or threats this as in important hobby - Someone who will be able to af…

So your customer is a student, or anyone who sees iOS development as a moneymaking opportunity but does not have the money to jumpstart the activity. Fact is, there are some of us who just don't have the extra cash to jump in (having spent it on an iPad, now irritated we can't do development for an otherwise awesome platform). Sure we could buy an old Mac Mini for a couple hundred bucks (monitor, keyboard, etc aside)…

> I'm literally selling blood to buy a MacBook Air just for iOS development

I admire your determination. Look, I've bought an iMac to learn IOS in my spare time. Why don't we trade - time on my iMac, and you answer my iOS questions? PM me.

Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

#163
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Netflix, their value proposition is: - Simplicity - it's very simple to select a movie on their website, and you can spare a walk to a DVD rental shop/supermarket. It's even easier to stream a movie. - Price. $10/month is much cheaper than $15/DVD, if I watch several movies a month and don't plan to re-watch same movies very often I don't see how that's applicable to the remove development - price argument doesn…

An old Mac will still take you 6-12 months to price-match this service...and they're running on modern equipment, keeping it updated (hardware and software) for you, and giving you instant access from anywhere, even your iOS device. If you want to use current hardware, you'll have to save money even longer (18-24 months), and you'll have to spend time managing the system & tools configuration. Sure this all may not b…

Also, you can directly bill this as a cost to a project/client. It is (for some people) harder to justify charging a client for use of hardware you have on hand than for an external service you're using specifically for their job...

I suspect it might be a sneaky way to work around corporate IT department policies too "I'm not buying unsupported or non-preferred-vendor Apple hardware, I'm just using an external service, just like AWS or Akamai".

Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

#165
As an iOS Developer, what I could see the value in was getting access to older development version of Xcode/iOS SDK for short periods of time. 30-60 minutes at most. I'd pay a small amount for that.

Another opportunity is for academic classes to teach iOS Development. It's cost prohibitive right now, but it's something to look into to.

The problem is that I don't see the business being one that has long term clients. If anyone is developing for more than 4 months, they'd probably have obtained a machine by then.

Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

#166
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your customer is a student, or anyone who sees iOS development as a moneymaking opportunity but does not have the money to jumpstart the activity. Fact is, there are some of us who just don't have the extra cash to jump in (having spent it on an iPad, now irritated we can't do development for an otherwise awesome platform). Sure we could buy an old Mac Mini for a couple hundred bucks (monitor, keyboard, etc aside)…

> I'm literally selling blood to buy a MacBook Air just for iOS development I admire your determination. Look, I've bought an iMac to learn IOS in my spare time. Why don't we trade - time on my iMac, and you answer my iOS questions? PM me.

:-) would like to, but as I don't have a Mac I haven't done enough iOS work to answer any questions yet. Sounds we're at about the same level now.

Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

#167
post #87

So let's see who your potential customer is: - Someone who owns a computer, with a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse (of course) - Someone with a decent internet access - Someone who has either invested or going to invested 100's of hours to properly learn the iOS/Mac frameworks - Someone who is hoping to either make a living off his Mac development or threats this as in important hobby - Someone who will be able to af…

I'm working on a productivity software startup which is currently working on the flagship product. In the interests of starting small, I'm targeting the platforms I have easy access to: x86 Linux, AMD64 Linux, and Win32. My dev machine allows me to test x86 Linux and AMD64 Linux builds, and I have been building binaries for Win32 and doing basic testing under Wine, with plans to test on a real Windows system using AWS or similar.

A service like this would make it easier for me to support Mac OS X; to build for OS X, I would most likely try to set up a build VM on something like PureDarwin, and test on something a real Mac using a service like this.

That said, I don't think there is a good reason to hold back my release for Mac, so it would probably be worth waiting, and if sales go well on other platforms, I would probably be better off investing in Mac hardware.

Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

#168
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This conflation is happening all over the place .. people don't understand that iOS and OSX are different, it seems. I wonder if this is going to, at some point, work in Apples favour .. ?

> I wonder if this is going to, at some point, work in Apples favour .. ? Many people have speculated about the changes in 10.7 that made it much more like iOS, with the exact idea that one day iOS and OSX will be essentially the same thing (at least from the user perspective anyway). I certainly see them heading in this direction...

Me too. I imagine the next iteration of Macbooks will basically be an iPad-formfactor device, albeit with Macbook-scale screen sizes, and a removable/attachable keyboard/trackpad combination, with some variation in the onboard OS that allows either 'iOS'-style touch interaction, or traditional OSX WIMP-style interaction for those that need it. I'd certainly buy an iMacBook-thingy that was a 17" iPad'ish thing, that could work in both modes.

Going to be interesting times .. I suppose I have to hold onto my aging 2007 MBP another year or two and then upgrade on the next generational bump.

Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

#169
Is there a similar WinInCloud, where you're able to easily rent a windows pc in the cloud? Needs backup, automatic upgrades and web interface. I know WMWare and others do this for enterprise customers all the time, but I am a private customers.

Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

#170
post #87

So let's see who your potential customer is: - Someone who owns a computer, with a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse (of course) - Someone with a decent internet access - Someone who has either invested or going to invested 100's of hours to properly learn the iOS/Mac frameworks - Someone who is hoping to either make a living off his Mac development or threats this as in important hobby - Someone who will be able to af…

You're missing that $240/year isn't your only option. Let's say I'm writing a cross platform library/server/non-gui app. I'm developing it in Linux, and regularly testing it on FreeBSD and Windows, all of which I can boot into from my main computer. Being a able to pay a few bucks every release to make sure it compiles and runs on OS X as well would be well worth it, and depending on your release schedule would probably end up costing less $50/year.
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