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Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

macincloud.com

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Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

#141

Post by drewcrawford »

vtail wrote: 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…

Yes, you're missing something. I run a small iOS contracting shop that does continuous integration. When the contracting market is good, we never have enough build servers, which can only be Macs. Virtualization only gets us so far.

There IS NO aws / EC2 service for macs. I can't just spin up some instances to handle the load and spin down after the engineers go home. The options are literally run to the Apple store and blow a few grand on a couple of boxes, which are hopefully in stock, which we then upkeep indefinitely in a physical closet. To handle a big spike, we really need like 10, but that's a big cash outlay for machines that will be idle in 6 weeks.

I am a developer, and hunting and installing Mac Minis, dealing with RMAs and AppleCare, etc., is not being productive for me. We're small enough that getting a network guy to handle that (assuming you can even find Apple network guys) is not economical. This looks like an easy solution.

Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

#142

Post by droz »

vtail wrote: post #131
gardentheory wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good devil's advocate summary, except feasibility of remote development with a GUI. I don't agree with a few of these points though. "Someone who has either invested or going to invested 100's of hours to properly learn the iOS/Mac frameworks" I think a lot of people will just want to experiment with something, or see some app, in my case I need to fix a bug in a desktop app I use. The kind of bug that I th…

You're right - I missed the "feasibility of remote development with GUI" part. Re: your other comments - sure, I totally see who the service will appeal to some customers. The market is certainly there. What I'm concerned about is the market _size_: I still believe that any current/future iOS/Mac developers will buy a Mac eventually, and there may be not many people like who only need a Mac to fix an occasional bug i…

Not every company has to be huge or insanely profitable.

Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

#145

Post by pullo »

The customer base seems to be people who do not own a mac , but would like to spend some time on one. this is truly a fleeting and shrinking population. Think about this...on a macro scale, if mac's marketshare goes up, your user base goes down. if the share goes down, then your service is irrelevant. there are plenty of virtualization/remote solutions out there. some as a resource addendum ( aws) and some for variable platforms ( deviceanywhere-for phones). aws - cause an individual developer cannot own such resources ;deviceanywhere-cause the phones and their os platforms change at a rapid pace. where does your service fit in this landscape? i can see your product being used by offshore dev teams , but still paid for by US companies. that again is an even smaller market.

Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

#146

Post by ctdonath »

vtail wrote: 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), but for that price we could be online with this service for 10 months! we also get the chance, for just two digits, to try out iOS development without getting a POS used box for hundreds of dollars which will go unused if maybe iOS isn't our thing after all.

I'm literally selling blood to buy a MacBook Air just for iOS development. It's taking a while...yet for 2% of that cost I can start tonight. I teach beginning programming. I've hesitated suggesting an iOS class because the hardware isn't there and won't be considering both school and student wallet contents...but with this service, any PC or iP* becomes an iOS development tool.

Awesome that now the entry point for iOS is a $200 iPod, $99 annual deloper fee (when you've got something ready to sell), and ~$20/mo bootstrap fee. Nothing else needed.

Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

#148

Post by rguzman »

you should fix the free trial flow. i just signed up to try it out. the first obvious thing is that you ask for my email but the login form asks for a "username", which is my email, but it is confusing.

the important bit, though: after signing up i have to open a support ticket to get started? that's where you lost me.

Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development

#149

Post by ctdonath »

vtail wrote: post #133
dxbydt wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are trying to count your chickens before they hatch.Before Netflix came along, the thinking was - if you like a movie you will just buy the DVD so you can watch it any number of times. Its just $10, why not just buy it ? Guess what, I watch tons of movies, don't buy a single DVD. If I like the movie I put it on my netflix queue & then watch it right there. If its not available, no skin off my back - there's plent…

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 be a big deal to most developers. "Most" isn't "all".

Buy an iPod Touch, start writing iOS software. You can be in the black on this within days.

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