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Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

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Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#41

Post by moondev »

ralph84 wrote: post #26
Khalid_nowaf wrote: post #7

I’m very curious, why did Apple put such a limitation?

Because their business model is to sell tightly integrated hardware and software as a package. The hardware sales fund the software development. They don't want people who haven't bought the hardware using the software.

The VM limit only applies to the number of macOS VMs launched from macOS itself.

My 2018 mac mini officially supports VMware ESXi to be installed directly on the hardware and virtualize any number of macOS machines

Funny enough I can even launch more than 2 macOS vms on my framework chromebook with qemu + KVM from the integrated Linux terminal.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#42

Post by matheusmoreira »

ab_testing wrote: post #21

Very funny to see HN hate on Microsoft and Google but then love a company where they cannot even run an app on their mobile platform without Apple's permission or only a certain number of VMs on the hardware they own .

HN is not one person. I'm very happy to hate on all of them. I see what you mean though. I've given up on getting normal people to care, but seeing programmers who are absolutely smart enough to run their own Linux system on computers they actually own actively choose not to do so is very disconcerting.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#43

Post by moondev »

naikrovek wrote: post #17
benoau wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are likely scared of people who would run MacOS virtual desktop farms, without also buying an appropriate number of Apple machines. That’s what I would be worried about if my primary source of income was hardware sales.

Imagine buying a mac studio with 500+ GB of memory and being limited to 2 vms.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#45

Post by pcdoodle »

hparadiz wrote: post #35
ab_testing wrote: post #21

Very funny to see HN hate on Microsoft and Google but then love a company where they cannot even run an app on their mobile platform without Apple's permission or only a certain number of VMs on the hardware they own .

What love? I think this is bullshit.

[dead]

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#46

Post by monocularvision »

ab_testing wrote: post #21

Very funny to see HN hate on Microsoft and Google but then love a company where they cannot even run an app on their mobile platform without Apple's permission or only a certain number of VMs on the hardware they own .

Someday I may be able to retire this link, but today is not that day: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#47

Post by 10000truths »

gambiting wrote: post #40
st3fan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird .. macOS is still completely open is my experience. Can you give an example?

I compile a tool we use, send it to another developer, they can't open it without going through system settings because the OS thinks it's unsafe. There is no blanket easy way to disable this behaviour. We also inject custom dlibs into clang during compilation and starting with Tahoe that started to fail - we discovered that it's because of SIP(system integrity protection). We reached out to apple, got the answer tha…

If SIP is kicking in, it sounds like you're using the clang that comes with Apple's developer tools. Does this same issue occur with clang sourced from homebrew, or from LLVM's own binary releases?

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#48

Post by bdcravens »

kylec wrote: post #2

This is a very silly restriction, at least to apply uniformly to all Macs. I think if you buy a more powerful Mac they should let you virtualize more Mac instances. Like an M5 maybe limit to 2, but maybe let an M5 Pro do 4 and an M5 Max do 8 or something.

The limit isn't really a resource issue, since you can run pretty much an "unlimited" number of non-Mac VMs. I suspect it's more of a business decision, such as preventing people from setting up shop as a low-cost Mac VPS provider.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#49

Post by manithree »

OptionOfT wrote: post #31
jaredklewis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac. Because this sample is from my experience, it’s skewed to startups and tech companies. For sure, lots of devs outside those areas, but tech companies are a big chunk of the world’s developers. So yea I would say Apple is a “serious development platform” just given how much it dominates software development in the tech sector in…

I have the feeling a lot of people take Macs because the other option is a locked down Windows, and Linux is not offered.

This. I ran Linux at work until last year, when it was finally disallowed. I went with locked-down Mac over locked-down Windows.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#50

Post by gaythread »

monocularvision wrote: post #46
ab_testing wrote: post #21

Very funny to see HN hate on Microsoft and Google but then love a company where they cannot even run an app on their mobile platform without Apple's permission or only a certain number of VMs on the hardware they own .

Someday I may be able to retire this link, but today is not that day: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

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