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Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

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Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#351

Post by reaperducer »

kgantchev wrote: post #313
addicted wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true at all. Anti monopoly regulations, for example, exist for the sole purpose of privileging new entrants over incumbents. The actions against Microsoft, or the breaking up of AT&T certainly did not help the incumbents. An example closer to home is that entrepreneurial activity in Silicon Valley is often attributed to California law forbidding non competes in employment contracts. This is regulation, wi…

> This is not true at all. Anti monopoly regulations, for example, exist for the sole purpose of privileging new entrants over incumbents. The actions against Microsoft, or the breaking up of AT&T certainly did not help the incumbents. The intended purpose is to help the new entrants, but I don't see Microsoft or AT&T losing anything or their smaller competitors gaining anything after the regulatory action against th…

I don't see ... AT&T losing anything

AT&T lost big. It ended up going bankrupt.

The "AT&T" you know today is not the same company. It is Southwestern Bell, which bought the AT&T brand in the bankruptcy fire sale and renamed itself.

It did so because AT&T was a more valuable brand than Southwestern Bell. Looks like it worked.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#352

Post by imtringued »

saagarjha wrote: post #244
nl wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What Apple did here is create a monopoly for MacStadium, at least in the near future" I don't see what the bit I left off ("at least in the near future") changes. There's nothing structural that favors MacStadium over other businesses with the same model.

Other than MacStadium already having that business model and their competitors that are hurt not having that model. They'd need to put in effort to transition at the very least.

Aren't you misrepresenting this situation quite a bit? When it comes to business you are always on the hook for your own mistakes. If your company engaged in a risky business model then as the owner you are personally bearing that risk.

There is nothing dishonest about asking Apple about its future business plans and following Apple's rules. If you base your entire business on skirting rules then don't come crying when they are suddenly being enforced. It's on you to make your business work.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#353

Post by indymike »

somethingwitty1 wrote: post #347
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…

If you are in the US, it doesn't necessarily matter whether the terms would hold up in court. The question comes down to how deep your pockets are and how much money you are willing to spend to fight Apple. Apple certainly has deep pockets. There aren't a lot of companies that can take the financial hit to fight against a behemoth in court.

There's a limit to the power of deep pockets in court, especially if the remedy is not $billions. Many civil cases spend more time on damages than they do the actual dispute at hand.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#354

Post by coldtea »

Alex3917 wrote: post #311
kgantchev wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would I be correct saying that you're happy because in one stroke Apple has moved you from grey area to explicitly permitted, and part of your competition from grey area to explicitly forbidden? I don't know how any competition would be negatively impacted by Apple implementing these terms, unless the competition was already selling services that were on a short-term basis (below 24 hours). And to circle back aroun…

Why wouldn't Apple just let people rent out computers for any amount of time, as long as they don't contain music or movies? I can understand why Apple would wan't someone to pay $3.99 to rent a movie for 48 hours, and then sub-rent that movie a couple dozen times. But why do they care about someone running CI?

Because tens of thousands of devs working on other platforms would be able to rent a Mac for half an hour, build their cross-platform framework code as an XCode project, and then submit to the App Store, without ever touching a Mac, testing on a Mac, and so on.

At least this puts a barrier to entry.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#355

Post by coldtea »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #330
BGStucki wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brian Stucki here. If I had the power over Apple that you think I do, I definitely would have pushed for iPhone Socks first. Joking aside, the software license agreement was certainly a cause for personal celebration. It might be helpful for you to compare macOS 11 to previous versions. (Linked in my post.) If I/MacStadium did anything, we showed that there was a need for this sort of service and that both Apple and…

Maybe a case can be made to eliminate the 24 hour minimum by focusing on reducing carbon emissions Why force someone to rent for a day when they need it for an hour? “This 23 hours of global warming is proudly sponsored by the Appleverse.”

Let's start by killing crypto-coin, which is basically global-warming-as-money...

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#356

Post by imtringued »

saagarjha wrote: post #337
nl wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nothing like a monopoly in anyway though. It's just a business that had the correct business model.

…that Apple randomly selected, so now they’re the only thing that handled this right now. It’s a monopoly in that they are the one that exists and other things cannot, legally, since they had a business model that they must now change.

What makes you think that Apple selected this business? Don't you think it's more likely that this business simply reduced it's risk exposure by asking Apple what it's plans for Macs in data centers are? Apple is making the rules, not some third party company that is following them.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#357

Post by eric_cc »

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…

wow man. Get a life. This is such a dramatic reaction. Is this hurting you somehow?

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#358

Post by em500 »

Blahah wrote: post #349
skohan wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also 100% in line with Apple's recent trends of being hostile to developers. It's absolutely absurd to have to rent an server for 24 hours to do a single build. It's incredibly wasteful to have this much hardware sitting around and doing nothing.

Is there anything to stop someone renting the servers and running a build service on them, thus subdividing the use of the resource?

Just the EULA. Whether that holds any weight with you is up to yourself to decide. But AWS and MacStadium are going to make you click-agree to Apple's EULA before granting access.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#359

Post by imtringued »

saagarjha wrote: post #193
markonen wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's angle here is that everybody who needs a Mac has to buy or rent one. That seems super obvious. It also happens to align them with people who are in the business of selling or renting Macs, sure. But the point is not to screw AWS or MacStadium's competitors. The point is to sell Macs.

The obvious side effect of selling more Macs is that it hurts AWS and MacStadium's competitors. Developers don't want to buy more Macs from Apple that they don't need. Apple knows this and has known this for decades and so their actions are essentially the same as telling developers to suck it up and buy new Macs.

If your complaint boils down to not liking what Apple is doing then why are you still using their platform? If you are using it privately then it's on you. If you are using it professionally and your company is paying for it then it's your job and responsibility to put up with it but it also means you're not on the hook for the extra expense of renting a Mac.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#360

Post by hosh »

em500 wrote: post #226
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…

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…

Taking a particular perspective and not really talking about the legalities, I can see some not so savory “non-development” work particularly when no one is seriously going to try putting macOS as a production machine for running SAAS apps, except perhaps using some of those specialized, bespoke chips:

- running apps in the cloud, not for q/a, but as a farm for adclicks and fraud. People already do that - farm for generating and submitting low quality games primarily to sell ads. People already do this. - Use backup images on systems with Secure Enclave in order to crack the encryption. Someone security company whose clients are state level actors, and increasingly, law enforcement, are doing this with iphones. I don’t know if a mac cloud makes this possible for other hardware - The M1 is an Apple exclusive SoC with a lot of bespoke, specialized chips, and unified memory, and is only going to get faster for future Macs. I can see people trying to access a cloud for that, while ignoring the branding that links consumer, end-user experience with “Apple”. (Esp since Nvidia has bought ARM, and that RISC-in-cloud is becoming a big deal)

I am not saying those are a good enough reason to set the ELUA the way Apple did, but that I get why Apple might do this.

The flip side from my perspective. A monthly dedicated host on MacStadium is much cheaper than running an AWS Windows 2019 Server ondemand, or even with Reserved Instance pricing.

Why does that matter to me and the company I work for? Because Unity is behind on their Linux version, so CI builds are going to run on either Mac or Windows. I don’t really care that much about elastic compute for this, though being able to use AMIs matters more. The main reason we have not moved to using Macstadium dedicated hosts is that I would need to set up something like Chef as configuration management for what would be essentially a fleet of pet servers.

But if our team wants to deploy to either Mac or Windows as production systems ... I would be discouraging them from doing so.

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