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Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

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Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#101

Post by danielmarkbruce »

dougmwne wrote: post #20

It’s an interesting look at AWS pricing since the cost of the M1 Mac Mini ($699) and it’s power consumption (avg 26 watts) are known. Based on hardware costs (significant) and power costs (insignificant) you’re looking at a hardware ROI at about 6 months from the $.65 per hour price. AWS has an estimated 60% gross profit margin, so from there it’s probably possible to estimate some other interesting things about thei…

I'd guess they pay much more than this due to some licensing/t&c issue. I haven't read them but I speculate that they same something to the effect of you can't make it accessible to the public as a shared, paid for resource etc and that amazon has a separate agreement and they pay more.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#102

Post by luhn »

dougmwne wrote: post #76
riazrizvi wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 699/(24*0.65) * proportion of hours the product is unused

Yup, sorry I was assuming 40 hours of utilization a week, forgot to state that.

Unfortunately Mac instances have a minimum billing duration of 24 hours, so even if you only use it 8am-5pm, you'd be billed for 8am-8am. (Not AWS's fault, it's part of the Apple EULA.)

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#103

Post by messe »

rektide wrote: post #51
zamadatix wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are Apple's terms that Amazon is following, not the other way around. You are getting bare metal that you have to reserve for a minimum of 24 hours because that's how Apple allows it to be licensed not because that's what Amazon thought would make the most sense.

I have such a hard time imagining what sick twisting legal crap allows Apple to dictate terms like this. Another example is Nvidia explicitly dis-allowing their consumer GPUs to be used in data-centers. It's wild to me that company's can just make up whatever terms of use they feel like & we have to accept that. Edit: oh hello, i'm at -4! Anyone care to defend your outrage at my outrage? What makes this seem at all o…

> I have such a hard time imagining what sick twisting legal crap allows Apple to dictate terms like this. Another example is Nvidia explicitly dis-allowing their consumer GPUs to be used in data-centers. It's wild to me that company's can just make up whatever terms of use they feel like & we have to accept that.

As far as I understand it, those EULA agreements aren't enforceable in the EU.

That being said, NVIDIA don't have any obligation to sell to you in bulk if they find out you're installing consumer GPUs in a datacenter, so there's obviously an incentive to follow them.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#104

Post by mike_d »

yakkomajuri wrote: post #61
withinrafael wrote: post #56

GitHub Actions uses VMs. Not sure how they, and not Amazon, were able to pull this off. That subject is sensitive and reportedly under NDA. https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/2604#...

Hope the NDA they referred to didn't have a clause about "not acknowledging the existence of the NDA" that many do. :D

I believe you are thinking of a NSL (National Security Letter). I've never seen an NDA that compelled secrecy regarding the agreement itself.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#105

Post by pantalaimon »

technobabbler wrote: post #79
tyingq wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The most common Mac mini rack mount enclosure holds 2 minis in 1ru That sounds wasteful to me. Is that really the most common way for mac hosting companies to do it?

Do they have an alternative?

They could simply ditch the case, the board alone is pretty small.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#106

Post by JacobCarlborg »

eminence32 wrote: post #71
X-Istence wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github Actions has macOS available as a builder.

If you need to interactively test something, can you do that with Github Actions?

You can use this GitHub action [1] to get SSH access to a GitHub runner. If you need access to the GUI you should be able to use ngrok, perhaps with this GitHub action [2]. I've tried tmate both with Linux and macOS runners. I've only tried ngrok with Linux runners.

CircleCI supports macOS runners and has native support for rerunning failed builds with SSH access. So just setup a job that always fails.

[1] https://github.com/marketplace/actions/debugging-with-tmate [2] https://github.com/marketplace/actions/ngrok-tunnel

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#107

Post by davej »

dougmwne wrote: post #20

It’s an interesting look at AWS pricing since the cost of the M1 Mac Mini ($699) and it’s power consumption (avg 26 watts) are known. Based on hardware costs (significant) and power costs (insignificant) you’re looking at a hardware ROI at about 6 months from the $.65 per hour price. AWS has an estimated 60% gross profit margin, so from there it’s probably possible to estimate some other interesting things about thei…

Another datapoint is that Scaleway charges €.10 per hour ($.113) for their M1 instances, this is roughly one-sixth of what AWS is charging.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#108

Post by tyingq »

davej wrote: post #107
dougmwne wrote: post #20

It’s an interesting look at AWS pricing since the cost of the M1 Mac Mini ($699) and it’s power consumption (avg 26 watts) are known. Based on hardware costs (significant) and power costs (insignificant) you’re looking at a hardware ROI at about 6 months from the $.65 per hour price. AWS has an estimated 60% gross profit margin, so from there it’s probably possible to estimate some other interesting things about thei…

Another datapoint is that Scaleway charges €.10 per hour ($.113) for their M1 instances, this is roughly one-sixth of what AWS is charging.

The Scaleway offering has 8GB versus the AWS 16GB. Not that it changes the math that much, but it's worth noting.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#109

Post by ineedasername »

dougmwne wrote: post #20

It’s an interesting look at AWS pricing since the cost of the M1 Mac Mini ($699) and it’s power consumption (avg 26 watts) are known. Based on hardware costs (significant) and power costs (insignificant) you’re looking at a hardware ROI at about 6 months from the $.65 per hour price. AWS has an estimated 60% gross profit margin, so from there it’s probably possible to estimate some other interesting things about thei…

That is a premium price if you're using it 40hr/week. Although, asumming they're available for custom AMI, maybe the value-add use case for this is to be able to have multiple custom AMIs for different dev environments and scenarios to rapidly spin up what you need.

Specifically for testing with multiple versions of MacOS: you could develop the code and then test on a custom AMI to make sure it ran in the version of MacOS, no need to have multiple systems setup. (Although I don't know much about Mac dev-- does Apple provide tools to do such testing already without running multiple OS versions?)

Otherwise, I guess it's all just about convenience.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#110

Post by tcbawo »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #94
speedgoose wrote: post #8

Many months later and more than 5 times more expensive than Scaleway though. https://www.scaleway.com/en/hello-m1/

Looks great, can I use it as an instance to send and receive iMessage? I could do it with my computer at home but if I can set it as a trigger able instance every few minutes to send and receive iMessage it would be pretty cool for serving iMessage to Android.

If someone could offer this as a service, I would pay for it. I get a lot of social pressure from family and certain friend groups due to being one of the few non-iPhone users.
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