Lots of folks in this thread seem to be unaware that other companies offer Mac mini hosting, at less than one tenth the cost. If you don’t need the full AWS ecosystem for your workload it’s worth doing some research.
Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
381–390 of 511 posts
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#382I find it disgusting that Apple can force people to jump though these hoops while paying them a huge premium for sub-standard hardware[1] so that these people can develop for their platform. Not only are they bleeding the developers at build, test and sale time. They are providing a shitty experience while doing it. Of course from an economic point of view they are right! For businesses it still makes sense to do thi…
How are web apps crippled on iOS?
You need a native app to do the most invasive types of spying, so developers say that web apps are crippled.
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#383Amazon 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…
Those numbers actually make the AWS instances a shoo-in for my current development purposes. The cost of housing and managing a unit of hardware is nonzero. Actuals vary wildly by location, purposes, and sector; but if everyone can get their heads out of the hobbyist-tinkerer mindset for a moment and consider that lifetime TCO is a real and meaningful consideration for businesses, then the component that isn't buying…
I'm fascinated by this thing where people tacitly assume that employee time is free. Even people who like to actually receive their paychecks.
The money spent paying someone to set up a Mac server somewhere else, getting that somewhere else connected to your AWS networks, and ensuring that connection is secure, and generally integrating it into your existing cloud devops infrastructure (or, perhaps more expensively, not integrating it into your existing devops infrastructure), would, I'm guessing, be horrendously expensive compared to the premium Amazon charges on a relatively turnkey solution for use cases such as, "We need to run the occasional Darwin build."
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#384If you only need CI Azure DevOps has hosted MacOS build agents
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like you and I think your posts are generally high quality, so I am going to say that an elitist "screw people who cant afford an overpriced mac" is not a good thing imo. Will we get some lower quality apps, sure, do those already exist? yeah. It just sounds like gatekeeping for not much benefit.
It's important developers (or their QA people) be able to use the device they're publishing to.
Is that why web developers have their hands on every iteration of every device on the planet? Or do they have some sort of tooling that emulates that experience for them?
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because there's money to be made by not "ditching the entire Apple ecosystem." That's very shortsighted. You can make money without Apple. And by doing so, you show that you value open, generic compute systems. Also, the prosperity of your business won't be at the whim of Apple.
You could also make money by selling paperclips or by creating satellite constellations. Which path you choose comes down to interest, expertise, and luck/chance. All businesses have constraints. In this business, you're subject to the Apple EULA. In others, you're subject to government regulation or pricing pressure due to commoditization. That's not short-sighted — no industry is forever, and there's money to be ma…
If you're ok with saying "shame on you Apple" every time they pull a trick like this, then I don't know how to convince you.
I'm just saying that as Apple gets more power this may get worse, hence the shortsightedness remark.
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#387Amazon 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…
Those numbers actually make the AWS instances a shoo-in for my current development purposes. The cost of housing and managing a unit of hardware is nonzero. Actuals vary wildly by location, purposes, and sector; but if everyone can get their heads out of the hobbyist-tinkerer mindset for a moment and consider that lifetime TCO is a real and meaningful consideration for businesses, then the component that isn't buying…
I'm no expert, but I'm stunned that it costs more than $10,000 a year to connect a single computer to a corporate network such that AWS Macs become cost competitive. I've never worked in a big enterprise organization but I just can't wrap my head around the inefficiency required to make that math work.
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
A little dramatic, eh? Apple obviously doesn't want companies like AWS to be renting Mac Minis as some sort of VDI solution. That's consistent with the (shitty) practices of Microsoft with respect to Windows, which confines Windows 10 hosting to Azure services. Given the nature of Mac, an AWS MacOS service is unique in that it's very clear who the manufacturer of the underlying hardware is. Apple, given it's control-…
Microsoft simply doesn't do what you are saying. Windows 10 hosting is not confined to azure services, you can even bring your own license to AWS, or host your own terminal services, or run your own virtual apps, or literally anything.
I was imprecise in my wording. You cannot bring a shared Windows 10 virtual desktop to any provider that is not Microsoft Azure. Azure uses a delivery model based on tech for education customers that allowed 4-5 K-12 students to work from 1 PC via thin clients, and that model is only available on Azure. (And it's really cheap.)
If you do BYOL of Windows 10 on a non-Azure cloud service, you need to meet specific Microsoft EA requirements, and you must run on dedicated hardware. If you look at the AWS BYOL model for Workspaces, it very similar in cost to the Apple on AWS model. (https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing)
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those numbers actually make the AWS instances a shoo-in for my current development purposes. The cost of housing and managing a unit of hardware is nonzero. Actuals vary wildly by location, purposes, and sector; but if everyone can get their heads out of the hobbyist-tinkerer mindset for a moment and consider that lifetime TCO is a real and meaningful consideration for businesses, then the component that isn't buying…
I'm fascinated by this thing where people tacitly assume that employee time is free. Even people who like to actually receive their paychecks. The money spent paying someone to set up a Mac server somewhere else, getting that somewhere else connected to your AWS networks, and ensuring that connection is secure, and generally integrating it into your existing cloud devops infrastructure (or, perhaps more expensively,…
I've maintained mac mini farms and it is both time consuming and expensive. If it were reasonable to setup and maintain Macs for devops, these offerings probably wouldn't exist.
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#390Amazon 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…
> For comparison, you can rent an equivalent Mac Mini from MacStadium for $139/month, $1,668/year. Or you can rent their cheapest model for $59/month, $708/year.
> You can also buy the equivalent Mac Mini for $1,899.
Not only that, but MacStadium lets you run multiple VMs on a single Mac at no extra cost. Amazon's offering is seriously underwhelming.
The more I use or learn about MacStadium, the less impressed I am with it (3 layers of virtualisation is overkill in my opinion!), but it beats the hell out of what Amazon has just announced.
The big problem with CI/CD on Mac is that Xcode does not allow you to run builds in parallel, so you need one Mac per build unless you use virtualisation.
To be honest I'm surprised that no one has added namespace/jail support to macOS yet. The XNU kernel is open source so this should be possible. In fact, can someone explain to me why there doesn't seem to be any sort of XNU hacking community?