Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 269 posts

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#171

Post by avidphantasm »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #164
kovek wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just learned that I need to pay aws 400$ for last month. I was thinking it would be 50$.

It's a very special kind of evil. They can always argue it's your fault, because you haven't read something, you misunderstood something. There are even stories circulating of people who lost their life savings by mistake but the AWS team charitably decided they will forgive them just this time, how nice of them! Everybody knows it's complex to their advantage, they are not stupid - but they can always defend themsel…

Yes, the “let’s hook up your credit card to the Internet” part of cloud computing still makes me nervous.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#173

Post by mattferderer »

nojito wrote: post #152
JCM9 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really not looking at the math in the right way for those that are the target market. If you just want an M1 instance just because sure just go buy one and keep in plugged in all the time in your basement. That’s not the target market. Imagine you’re developing an app in regulated market and need to have Macs for CI/CD There’s a lot more to this than just keeping some Mac mini’s under your desk. How are you m…

Apple already offers this for Devs. https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/

So does MS with Azure Devops & GitHub: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/ecos... https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/pipelines-xcode/blob/master...

It's great that there are finally multiple ways to do this without needing to buy a bunch of Macs just for compiling.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#174

Post by handrous »

jedberg wrote: post #150
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #138

Every time I look at the AWS prices page or at its control panel, I feel like I need to get a special advanced degree to understand a thing.

There are entire consulting businesses based on the idea of helping people understand their AWS bill. But I'm not sure what the tradeoff is. They have a lot of services with a lot of options. The pricing is designed to meet everyone's needs.

> There are entire consulting businesses based on the idea of helping people understand their AWS bill.

More broadly, there's a whole cottage industry of businesses that exist only because the UI for the major cloud providers is terrible. Stuff like security auditing or even telling exactly WTF is going on (let alone over time) is so painful that it's worth paying someone else to provide a better UI. Same for billing.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#175

Post by luhn »

garaetjjte wrote: post #159
luhn wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Hypothetically, if AWS instead installed Linux on these, could they disregard Apple's EULA?

I would think so, but IANAL.

But what would be the point of running Linux on a Mac Mini on AWS?

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#176

Post by handrous »

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.

My friend group solved some people using Android phones by moving entirely to WhatsApp, years ago.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#177

Post by nix23 »

bstar77 wrote: post #158
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #138

Every time I look at the AWS prices page or at its control panel, I feel like I need to get a special advanced degree to understand a thing.

After my experience 3 years ago, I will never use them again. I priced out an instance that estimated around $30/month via their calculator. Instance is indeed around $30 for the first 2 months, then I get a $200 bill. I don't know what the hell happened, but it was over 6x what I had budgeted. I tried to get someone to review my account, but I didn't get a response and just had to suck it up. I paid the $200 and mov…

Just try Oracle Cloud believe me...it's so much better.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#178

Post by mhitza »

detaro wrote: post #153
zamadatix wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+ a €49 setup fee. I've never really understood Hetzner's offering, I can get paying €2.4 for a quick one off or a once a month build but I don't get how €98 + €49 per additional month is better than buying a Mac Mini on a payment plan.

If in a business context the alternative is "the CI macs, that sit in some corner of some office under a desk and hopefully don't get unplugged", maybe with a side of "and IT hates unapproved servers and also won't put our macs in their DC", I can see it making some sense.

IMHO unplugged once or twice a month, or GitHub Actions being unavailable it's pretty much the same thing.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#179

Post by monocasa »

hoffspot wrote: post #166
monocasa wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a rumor going around that they're heavily discounting arm64 instances in order to put negotiating pressure on the x86 manufacturers. 'Nice arch you have there, would be a shame if people stopped caring.' I would be careful about estimating beyond how they view arm64 given that these are the highest perf/core arm64 devices they can put their hands on.

I think they are providing those discounts to promote their own silicon, the Graviton3 chip. You definitely get an execution discount in Lambda for selecting arm versus x86 on that basis.

The rumor is that their own silicon isn't really that much better on perf/watt, but they're discounting it as a multi pronged effort to put pressure on the x86 vendors. If it turns out it's a lot of pressure and it kills x86, then they've commodified their complement. If it's just a threat, then they have a better seat at the negotiating table.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#180

Post by johnthuss »

morganvachon wrote: post #93
johnthuss wrote: post #19

This is great, but since x86 Macs were already available this is mostly just a price reduction. But it's great to have these available at Amazon.

M1/AArch64 is the future of Mac hardware, this is AWS following the path. Devs targeting the macOS desktop should be focused on M1 native exclusively unless long term support of X86_64 Macs is part of their product's support options.

I have to assume the primary use for these VMs is to build iOS applications not Mac apps. For that use case the CPU architecture used to run the build doesn't really matter since the end product is an arm64 iOS app regardless.

Sure, you can use it for testing and building Mac apps, but the number of people doing that is minuscule compared to the number of iOS developers (unfortunately).

Post reply on HN