121–130 of 511 posts
Interesting. I guess it's not the first but does the MacOS EULA really allow for this? Or does AWS have a special license? Which would beg the question as for the need of real hardware. (Sure you can break a EULA but at some point it would violate ToS and Apple could easily block updates). > The instances are launched as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum tenancy of 24 hours. This almost sounds like they are using fi…
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The 24 hours is dictated by new Big Sur EULA. https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macos-big-sur-adds-leasing-te... From the new EULA (not just for Amazon, paraphrased by 9to5mac): * Apple software and hardware must be leased “in its entirety to and individual or organization” * A lease period must be “for a minimum period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours” * Customers must now accept software agreements for all instal…
Weird limitation. Hopefully Apple updates this.
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The 24 hours is dictated by new Big Sur EULA. https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macos-big-sur-adds-leasing-te... From the new EULA (not just for Amazon, paraphrased by 9to5mac): * Apple software and hardware must be leased “in its entirety to and individual or organization” * A lease period must be “for a minimum period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours” * Customers must now accept software agreements for all instal…
Weird limitation. Hopefully Apple updates this.
AWS is playing the long game and betting that M1 based servers start to take off. It's very risky (and expensive) but it would pay off if they are correct. They would be first in the market and be years ahead of their competition.
I doubt this is a play at M1 servers. M1 servers on Apple hardware is not what AWS wants people to use when the alternative is other AWS servers. Only for running macOS there isn't an alternative.
"The instances are launched as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum tenancy of 24 hours" These are just rentable Mac Minis, not VMs. This will have only one use case and that's for build servers. Unless anyone has scalable AppleScript jobs to run?
Only one usecase for now. They said M1 is coming soon, which could tip the cost equation (think about what the energy savings mean at AWS scale). Even more interestingly, I wonder if this could be an exploratory step for an Apple that's thinking about designing dedicated cloud chips.
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I’m pretty sure if Amazon wanted to negotiate custom terms, they’d have the clout to do so. This is an alliance between two giants.
I doubt Apple supports this in any way. It means that if you want to develop Mac/iPhone apps, you no longer have to buy Mac hardware. I'm surprised they aren't making this harder .
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But the original post says they're not using Big Sur. The available OSes are Mojave and Catalina. Unless that term exists in those licenses too?
But they will have to update to Big Sur in the feature. So if they don‘t set the limitation now they will have to „worsen“ the service later, it‘s best to the set the limitation now even if not required.
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In terms of "other people's computers" it seems to fit well. Nice to be able to build/CI test against macOS without having to provision and maintain apple hardware.
Travis CI offers MacOS runners out of the box.
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CI/CD for iOS, MacOS, and React Native builds. Right now the pricing for Mac instances for builds via Github, Gitlab, Circle, etc are ludicrous. For a certain developer velocity, these instances will probably be much, much cheaper than running builds through the CI/CD SaaS providers.
Sorry, but dedicated hosts are expensive AF, it is not a virtual machine, you pay for the hardware.