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Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

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Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#281

Post by shaicoleman »

saagarjha wrote: post #172

An interesting offering from Amazon that is crippled by Apple and MacStadium, who deserve to be raked over the coals for their recent EULA changes. Just read the post on MacStadium's blog: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind... Under the new agreement, you must: * Rent to only one organization * Rent for 24 hours at the minimum * Use it for some set of "approved" development work …among other…

Link to Apple's EULA:

https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSBigSur.pdf

Under: "Leasing for Permitted Developer Services"

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#282

Post by floatboth »

easton wrote: post #95

Interesting that they’ve mentioned M1 support. That makes me wonder if VMWare is going to get together with Apple and make a ESXi port to Apple Silicon, as the Mac Mini and Mac Pro were long standing on the HWL since they were the only rackable devices on the market legally allowed to virtualize macOS. I’m fairly certain that Apple used it internally for testing. (AWS will probably at least attempt a port of their Ni…

AWS does not use netboot, EBS volumes appear as local NVMe drives because their custom Nitro PCIe cards handle that. In the Mac case, they connect the cards using Thunderbolt.

The Mac instances will NOT use an AWS provided hypervisor until Apple's terms change. Currently the hosting provider is only allowed to lease the whole machine, only the end user can do virtualization.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#283

Post by stephenr »

oxfordmale wrote: post #271
nix23 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>at larger companies where maintaining a MacBook Mini build server is relatively expensive. That makes no sense, sorry.

If you are a startup, you can have your MacBook Mini in the office. As a larger organisation, you will need a dedicated server room for it limiting access to authorised staff members. You are likely going to need more than one, as you don't want your developers sitting around doing nothing if your MacBook Mini fails. You also need to allocate IT budget to maintain your devices and to replace them on a regular instanc…

what the hell is a "MacBook Mini"? You keep repeating the same phrase over and over so it can't be a typo.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#285

Post by syshum »

dannyw wrote: post #259
em500 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a lawyer, I do wonder if such terms would hold up in court. I can see the case for EULA around virtualization when you're running multiple instances of macOS. But say I just buy a bunch of Mini's and rent (full access to) them out (bare metal, full system) per hour, rather than 24hr. Or for non-"development" work, whatever that means. Could Apple really put up a good case in court? It seems unlikely that they cou…

You’re describing the first sale doctrine. Unfortunately, it doesn’t apply to digital licenses; at least not today.

Depends on if the courts look at this as a hardware issue or "digital" software one. I have a feeling they would look at like renting physical hardware in which the first sale doctrine would absoltely apply.

of course like with anything in the legal system it will take a company like Amazon that has their own team of $1,000/hr lawyers to face up against Apple's team of $1,000/hr lawyers in order to get a precedent setting case

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#286

Post by em500 »

ivanhoe wrote: post #269
em500 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a lawyer, I do wonder if such terms would hold up in court. I can see the case for EULA around virtualization when you're running multiple instances of macOS. But say I just buy a bunch of Mini's and rent (full access to) them out (bare metal, full system) per hour, rather than 24hr. Or for non-"development" work, whatever that means. Could Apple really put up a good case in court? It seems unlikely that they cou…

To use MacOS you have to first agree on their Terms, and through this they can legally block you from using it in certain ways. Like the famous "It is only legal to run OS X in a virtual machine if the host computer is a Mac." rule.

One thing is, they could write anything in the EULA, I was just wondering how much it is actually enforceable (even with a click-through "consent".

Second, I wonder on what legal basis they can actually impose usage restrictions of a whole Mac (hardware+software) via an EULA as long as I don't breach any copyright (which I don't think I do if I rent out usage of the entire system for a few hours).

AFAICT (again, not a lawyer), everything rests on section 1.J.[1] "Except as expressly permitted in Section 3, you may not rent, lease, lend, sell, redistribute or sublicense the Apple Software." being enforceable. (Section 3. contains the infamous terms for Leasing for Permitted Developer Services with the 24hr restriction). I don't know if such terms would hold up in court. If I read the thing correctly, the the EULA forbids people from lending their MacBook to a friend, or even resell it, which strikes me as quite absurd.

[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSBigSur.pdf

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#287

Post by nix23 »

oxfordmale wrote: post #271
nix23 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>at larger companies where maintaining a MacBook Mini build server is relatively expensive. That makes no sense, sorry.

If you are a startup, you can have your MacBook Mini in the office. As a larger organisation, you will need a dedicated server room for it limiting access to authorised staff members. You are likely going to need more than one, as you don't want your developers sitting around doing nothing if your MacBook Mini fails. You also need to allocate IT budget to maintain your devices and to replace them on a regular instanc…

But if i already have a dedicated server room for sure i dont pay Amazon to use theirs, that just makes sense if your full on AWS already.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#288

Post by SSLy »

dannyw wrote: post #259
em500 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a lawyer, I do wonder if such terms would hold up in court. I can see the case for EULA around virtualization when you're running multiple instances of macOS. But say I just buy a bunch of Mini's and rent (full access to) them out (bare metal, full system) per hour, rather than 24hr. Or for non-"development" work, whatever that means. Could Apple really put up a good case in court? It seems unlikely that they cou…

You’re describing the first sale doctrine. Unfortunately, it doesn’t apply to digital licenses; at least not today.

Time for a European startup to shine!

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#289

Post by speedgoose »

tomc1985 wrote: post #169
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

Jeff is not the richest man on earth for no reasons. Us humans are lazy. Who wants to manage hardware or walk to the store when you can click on the cloud ?

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#290

Post by lukeramsden »

andybak wrote: post #273
phire wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the pricing, 24h minimum and "only developers" restriction. it seems like there are exactly two usecases for this service. 1. You are a big company who needs Mac CI and your IT department has a strict "Cloud Only" restriction. 2. You are a developer for a cross-platform App who doesn't own a mac, but needs access to a real mac every few weeks or months for debugging/releasing.

My use case is that I need to build for a recent iOS device but I don't want to upgrade my Macbook to an os version that doesn't support 32bit apps. But the 24hr thing kills it for me. I will never get 24 hours use out of it. Maybe a few hours. Why am I paying for the other 21 hours? Maybe someone can wrap this SaaS in a other Saas and sell timeshares in a virtual Mac.

> Why am I paying for the other 21 hours?

Unsure if you've seen the comments elsewhere in the thread but in case you haven't and this is a genuine question - because Apple's EULA forces Amazon to do this.

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