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Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

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Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#161

Post by JoshTriplett »

dfabulich wrote: post #149

Amazon lists the price of mac1 instances (running on rack-mounted Intel Mac Minis) at $1.083 per hour, $9,487 per year. You have to pay for 24 hours up front, after which they bill by the second. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ They don't yet display any reservation pricing for mac1 instances, but they do offer a "savings plan." https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/pricing/ If you pay for three yea…

You wouldn't necessarily use this if you expect to keep all the systems running 24/7; for that, another provider would indeed be better. You'd use this if you want to scale up or down and boot different images on the host. Yes, you have a 24 hour minimum, but that's better than a 1 month minimum.

I'd have loved to have seen mac pros, and virtual instances (subdivided, even if you had to maintain a dedicated host to run them on), but this is still a major quality of life improvement for heterogeneous environments.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#162

Post by zelly »

dheera wrote: post #76
wyldfire wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can also run a MacOS VM in VirtualBox on Ubuntu. No Apple hardware needed. https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox

You will get your Apple Developer account terminated if they ever find out.

Live by the walled garden die by the walled garden

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#163

Post by zelly »

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #154
dfabulich wrote: post #149

Amazon lists the price of mac1 instances (running on rack-mounted Intel Mac Minis) at $1.083 per hour, $9,487 per year. You have to pay for 24 hours up front, after which they bill by the second. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ They don't yet display any reservation pricing for mac1 instances, but they do offer a "savings plan." https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/pricing/ If you pay for three yea…

Don’t forget the bandwidth premium you pay at Amazon AWS. Paying these premiums is all in the furtherance of a good cause called “Bezos getting another hundy billion to his name”.

Build your own AWS

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#164

Post by _underfl0w_ »

dheera wrote: post #100
untog wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's against Apple's T&Cs, though. If you're doing it at home by yourself, who cares. But a company that's interested in automated testing etc. isn't going to see it as an answer.

Get an old old old Mac pro from ages ago. Upgrade its motherboard. Then upgrade its RAM. Then upgrade its hard drive. Then upgrade its power supply. It will still be an "Apple-branded computer" because of its case. It will just have received a bunch of upgrades. Big "haha" to them. (Or if you're actually a corporation just buy a Mac.)

Shortcut: Build a hackintosh, then stick it in an Apple case. Profit.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#165

Post by absolutelyrad »

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #154
dfabulich wrote: post #149

Amazon lists the price of mac1 instances (running on rack-mounted Intel Mac Minis) at $1.083 per hour, $9,487 per year. You have to pay for 24 hours up front, after which they bill by the second. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ They don't yet display any reservation pricing for mac1 instances, but they do offer a "savings plan." https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/pricing/ If you pay for three yea…

Don’t forget the bandwidth premium you pay at Amazon AWS. Paying these premiums is all in the furtherance of a good cause called “Bezos getting another hundy billion to his name”.

Yup, the bandwidth at the big clouds is far too expensive. It makes more sense to host somewhere else if you're a consumer company.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#166

Post by kalleboo »

apapli wrote: post #19

Interesting. The deciding factor for our family when buying a Mac or Windows 10 device for my wife’s small business was actually my need to upload iOS apps for review by apple. I’m an after hours hobby developer, and use a windows desktop. It’s powerful and has all the tooling I require. And it supports all the games I want to play from the steam store. So - I think apple will lose a little bit of business from peopl…

The pricing makes this pointless for small businesses. $1/hour and minimum tenancy of 24 hours means each time you're updating your app you're spending $26. After 25 app updates you could own a brand new Mac Mini (assuming you never need to spend an extra day testing). Buying a used Mac makes even more sense.

MacStadium also already rents out Mac Minis starting at $59/mo.

I think the Amazon offering only makes sense for big corporations where (1) IT doesn't want to support macOS/exotic hardware on their network (2) it's easier to just charge to your your existing AWS billing than get a hardware purchase approved by your boss

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#167

Post by shp0ngle »

dash2 wrote: post #127
jedberg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

See below. They changed their EULA terms to allow it just now. Macstadium’s blog has the details.

These are the new EULA terms.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#168

Post by saagarjha »

fomine3 wrote: post #119
tekacs wrote: post #91

It seems like this directly ties back to Apple’s recent policy changes [0]. The details line up exactly, including: - You must rent them for at least 24 hours at a time. - You must rent out one machine per end user. I just feel sorry for all the smaller providers who have done this for years. I wonder if this was Apple’s update prompting AWS, or AWS pushing Apple to make the change — or both. [0]: https://blog.macsta…

The author defends Apple's decision to clarify EURA but it looks like get worse for developers.

The author defends it because it helps them and hurts everyone else.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#169

Post by tomc1985 »

dfabulich wrote: post #149

Amazon lists the price of mac1 instances (running on rack-mounted Intel Mac Minis) at $1.083 per hour, $9,487 per year. You have to pay for 24 hours up front, after which they bill by the second. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ They don't yet display any reservation pricing for mac1 instances, but they do offer a "savings plan." https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/pricing/ If you pay for three yea…

Yeah for that bullshit price you might as well buy the hardware if you need any serious use of it

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#170

Post by apapli »

usmannk wrote: post #22
apapli wrote: post #19

Interesting. The deciding factor for our family when buying a Mac or Windows 10 device for my wife’s small business was actually my need to upload iOS apps for review by apple. I’m an after hours hobby developer, and use a windows desktop. It’s powerful and has all the tooling I require. And it supports all the games I want to play from the steam store. So - I think apple will lose a little bit of business from peopl…

How are you developing iOS apps without xcode?

I’m always developing without xcode. Using expo I can write apps in react native on my desktop and vscode. Mac only required for the upload to the App Store.
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