Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#111

Post by Nextgrid » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

markonen wrote: post #24

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…

The Mac mini itself is not the only hardware cost for AWS here, though: I wouldn't be surprised if their Thunderbolt Nitro hardware cost just as much each. It has to be a very low volume device (relative to other things AWS does).

Considering Thunderbolt is just PCI-Express, I'd expect it to be standard Nitro hardware (whatever that is) plus an inexpensive PCIe to Thunderbolt board/adapter.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#112

Post by AyyWS » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 7:31 PM UTC

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #101

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.

Thinking back to the VMware service provider licensing I saw, Apple probably charges a subscription model that would make your eyes bleed. I was shocked anyone could afford to sell a public cloud offering that used VMware technology after seeing their pricing.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#113

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 7:31 PM UTC

meatmanek wrote: post #86

DrBazza wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to ask the same thing. So if Apple don't make a rackable M1 server, what do they themselves use? It seems a bit unlikely Apple would have racks of minis as well.

According to a sysadmin I interviewed several years ago, they use standard x86 server hardware from other vendors like Dell. If I recall correctly (there's a good chance I'm misremembering), they ran something like VMware, and ran Linux and OS X in VMs.

Oh right: Apple isn't constrained by their own license terms, so there's no reason they couldn't run Mac OS virtual machines at any scale on any hardware they wanted. Up to and including things that you would otherwise probably call "perfect Hackintosh" builds, since they can build actual Mac OS images with the hardware checks disabled, paravirtualization drivers, whatever.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#114

Post by GhettoComputers » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 7:32 PM UTC

tcbawo wrote: post #110

GhettoComputers wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Beeper does offer this service, but you can self host it for much less.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#115

Post by Nextgrid » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 7:32 PM UTC

GhettoComputers wrote: post #95

xeromal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I can do everything I need in one system with AWS.

If you’re testing software on an M1, what is the benefit of AWS?

I'm assuming there are no data transfer fees. If your M1 workload needs significant data, that alone could make it cheaper than having a cheaper external M1 and then paying every time you move data out of AWS into it.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#116

Post by michaeljgerace » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 7:33 PM UTC

tcbawo wrote: post #110

GhettoComputers wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Look into BlueBubbles or AirMessage.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#117

Post by Nextgrid » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 7:35 PM UTC

eminence32 wrote: post #21

I have an slightly-off-topic question: If I want to test that my opensource project builds and runs on MacOS, what's the cheapest way for me to do this? AWS seems like a fairly expensive way do this at $15 USD per day

It is straightforward to run an x86 macOS VM on Linux with QEMU & KVM. It's against the EULA to do so on non-Mac hardware, but technically it is possible.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#118

Post by AyyWS » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

ecshafer wrote: post #69

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#...

It's obviously under NDA. I don't even understand why someone would open up this issue. How is Github complying with Mac os license? The obvious answer is that Github worked something out with Apple, that would then be secret. Github (Microsoft) has many lawyers under their employ that would have looked at this, said if their implementation breaks the license, or they came up with an alternative license with Apple. I…

Makes me think of Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple. I wish I knew the details, but it was apparently unsupported by VMware.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#119

Post by konschubert » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

luhn wrote: post #102

dougmwne wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

What is apple's motivation?

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#120

Post by vineyardmike » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #2

The 24 hour minimum pricing model for these really sucks. My understanding is that this is a condition of Apple's license to Amazon to run macOS on these machines, and I can't work out why they'd do it.

I bet a part is that apple genuinely doesn’t want to deal with MacOS being a server OS so they want a little bit of “are you sure?” Requirements in there.

A potentially bigger reason (for requiring 24hr) is to incentivize people who need a max for small bursts (eg build server, testing a website with safari etc) to just buy macs.

I imagine a reason to require bare-metal hosting because everyone is lauding apple on how snappy and lively the M1 is and if they’re split between N number of VMs then you may have a worse experience and apple is protecting that.