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

Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 511 posts

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#391

Post by skohan »

Spivak wrote: post #369
skohan wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple created a fair competition by clearly spelling out the legal rules for everyone I think it could be argued that it shouldn't be Apple's place to set the rules of the competition. If MacStadium is correct, that the best experience is one-user-one-machine, then their business model should win out. It's not fair competition to rule out all other business models.

Sure, but that's copyright for ya. Apple gets to dictate the ToU for macOS. You can say that it shouldn't be Apple's place, and I agree, but macOS isn't free software.

I'm not arguing this isn't legal. I'm arguing against the previous commenter's assertion that this is justifiable.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#392

Post by niklasrde »

floatingatoll wrote: post #88
mhxion wrote: post #6

> As always, I asked the EC2 team for access to an instance in order to put it through its paces. The instances are available in Dedicated Host form, so I started by allocating a host. Dedicated Hosts ( https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/ ) are more pricey than virtual instances (most EC2) and Dedicated Instances. Not sure if it's possible to containerize/sell as many virtual instances off a dedicated server…

Apple’s licensing terms for macOS permit only the licensing of one unit of Apple macOS running on one unit of Apple hardware to one customer for a minimum term of one day. There is no option to purchase a virtual-machine or other shared-instance license when macOS is involved. (Nitpicky points: I believe the customer can do whatever they want with their licensed cloud Mac hardware, such as dual-boot different release…

More days or less customers is also ok.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#393

Post by Lt_Riza_Hawkeye »

wicket wrote: post #390
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…

> 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 w…

> there doesn't seem to be any sort of XNU hacking community

Probably because (from what I've heard), even using xnu is extremely painful, let alone hacking on it.

And it's not like you can re-compile your changes to xnu back into a working MacOS machine

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#394

Post by skohan »

saagarjha wrote: post #196
fxtentacle wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I'm pretty sure that MacStadium didn't limit their rental to one customer per hardware box out of spite for their customers, but because that's what Apple expected of them. So their were being held to a higher standard than some of their competitors, who had much higher profit margins by putting multiple customers on one machine. So I think he is justifiably happy that Apple created a fair competition by…

I have no problem with MacStadium's business model; in fact, I have seriously considered renting Macs from them in the past specifically because of their service of providing a dedicated machine for an extended period of time. In that case we were looking at running extended builds and the cost of downloading Xcode, then our source tree, then running a build for hours on a per-hour service was fairly competitive with…

> Brian's claims that they were simply offering their services in a way that "felt right with what Apple would have wanted" is marketing drivel.

It's not only marketing drivel, it's a downright strange statement. I mean with which other product would you consider the wishes of the anthropomorphized business which created the product in terms of how you use it? Normally the product is meant to serve the consumer, not the other way around.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#395

Post by wicket »

Lt_Riza_Hawkeye wrote: post #393
wicket wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

> there doesn't seem to be any sort of XNU hacking community Probably because (from what I've heard), even using xnu is extremely painful, let alone hacking on it. And it's not like you can re-compile your changes to xnu back into a working MacOS machine

> And it's not like you can re-compile your changes to xnu back into a working MacOS machine

Wow, that's just awful, but it would it explain it. Thanks!

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#396

Post by jedberg »

andybak wrote: post #296
lukeramsden wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes - I did know that. I guess my question is directed more at Apple. Why stipulate this unless they want to hobble reasonable use-cases or inflate usage arbitrarily. Is the answer simply "Because they can and they like money?"

> Why stipulate this unless they want to ... inflate usage arbitrarily

That's exactly it. If you could rent Macs by the minute, you wouldn't need to own Mac hardware anymore to build Mac apps, and the cloud provider wouldn't need to own as much.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#397

Post by kingnothing »

hugey010 wrote: post #389
mumblemumble wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They would still exist. When a company's entire shop is set up in AWS they want to keep it that way, not buy physical hardware to install in their office, create a VPN to make build pipelines, worry about physical security, etc.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#399

Post by coldtea »

hobs wrote: post #361
coldtea wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> aside from being a developer for Apple's platforms who occasionally looks around for CI services So, you give him all this shit and you're not even using his service? > There's still a huge hole for a service that lets you rent a Mac for the a couple minutes so you can build your Xcode project. It's not your fault that doesn't exist, it's Apple's. If we're talking for CI of builds, sure. But in that case, one would…

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.

>I like you and I think your posts are generally high quality

Thanks! I try to add the ocassional low quality comment for balance :-)

>so I am going to say that an elitist "screw people who cant afford an overpriced mac" is not a good thing imo.

Well, my intented meaning was more like "Don't create/sell apps for a platform you dont even own to test in".

The main reason to go for "by the minute" builds on the Cloud for a machine you don't own is to either help with porting to an architecture you don't use, or to churn apps with some cross platform framework to a platform you don't use/care about.

I think the latter would be more frequent.

If they were mere poor hobbyists guys legitimately coding for the platform, they'd own a machine, either new, or second hand, or whatever. It's when you don't code in the platform, but only want to target it for selling that you have an issue...

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#400

Post by coldtea »

hobs wrote: post #385
shiftpgdn wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, but that's why the web is a subpar experience to native...
Post reply on HN