Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#41

Post by droopyEyelids » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:25 PM UTC

riknos314 wrote: post #32

dougmwne wrote: post #20

It’s an interesting look at AWS pricing since the cost of the M1 Mac Mini ($699) and it’s power consumption (avg 26 watts) are known. Based on hardware costs (significant) and power costs (insignificant) you’re looking at a hardware ROI at about 6 months from the $.65 per hour price. AWS has an estimated 60% gross profit margin, so from there it’s probably possible to estimate some other interesting things about thei…

Maybe, there's still a lot of unknowns. The cost and power consumption of the nitro hardware to translate from the mac mini to everything else being the main one. They're also likely pricing in some form of opportunity cost since the density of physical macs per unit rack space is almost certainly lower than the density of typical server hardware.

The space question is interesting.

The most common Mac mini rack mount enclosure holds 2 minis in 1ru. I think at amazon's scale they could probably get 4 minis in 1ru with some custom cooling.

how dense do you think instances are on average in the amazon datacenters?

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#42

Post by jenny91 » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

cehrlich wrote: post #26

Genuinely curious, who is the audience for this? Large iOS dev shops who want hardware to run builds on and don't mind that you need to reserve them for at least 24 hours at a time?

Large shops that already run on AWS and where iOS/mac is a small part so they'd rather dish out a few $100k for someone else to manage and have it homogeneous through their other systems.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#43

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC

mcraiha wrote: post #13

nicoburns wrote: post #2

The 24 hour minimum pricing model for these really sucks. My understanding is that this is a condition of Apple's license to Amazon to run macOS on these machines, and I can't work out why they'd do it.

I do not understand why Apple hates developers. There are many developers that need Mac machines for CI/CD, but Apple doesn't provide any reasonable solution.

Apple gives themselves and GitHub special deals, which I guess is what they feel to be a reasonable solution.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#44

Post by sieabahlpark » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

droopyEyelids wrote: post #41

riknos314 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, there's still a lot of unknowns. The cost and power consumption of the nitro hardware to translate from the mac mini to everything else being the main one. They're also likely pricing in some form of opportunity cost since the density of physical macs per unit rack space is almost certainly lower than the density of typical server hardware.

The space question is interesting. The most common Mac mini rack mount enclosure holds 2 minis in 1ru. I think at amazon's scale they could probably get 4 minis in 1ru with some custom cooling. how dense do you think instances are on average in the amazon datacenters?

Why would you not put them on their side and stack them like hard drives? You'd get way more density that way then trying to figure out how to make it fit in 1u for no reason. You could even stack multiple rows deep to get more density.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#45

Post by jffry » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

mcphage wrote: post #23

eminence32 wrote: post #21

I have an slightly-off-topic question: If I want to test that my opensource project builds and runs on MacOS, what's the cheapest way for me to do this? AWS seems like a fairly expensive way do this at $15 USD per day

You don't need to leave the machine running (and billing) 24/7/365—turning it on for a few hours a day when you're building for it, or testing builds, should be enough.

From https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/#Pricing:

"Amazon EC2 Mac instances are available for purchase as Dedicated Hosts through On Demand and Savings Plans pricing models. Billing for EC2 Mac instances is per second with a 24-hour minimum allocation period to comply with the Apple macOS Software License Agreement"

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#46

Post by mciancia » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

dougmwne wrote: post #20

It’s an interesting look at AWS pricing since the cost of the M1 Mac Mini ($699) and it’s power consumption (avg 26 watts) are known. Based on hardware costs (significant) and power costs (insignificant) you’re looking at a hardware ROI at about 6 months from the $.65 per hour price. AWS has an estimated 60% gross profit margin, so from there it’s probably possible to estimate some other interesting things about thei…

W8 what

>>> 699/(24*0.65)

44.80769230769231 days

Nitro card obviously costs a bit, but for ROI on mac itself is closer to 6 weeks than 6 months ;)

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#47

Post by mherdeg » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

eminence32 wrote: post #21

I have an slightly-off-topic question: If I want to test that my opensource project builds and runs on MacOS, what's the cheapest way for me to do this? AWS seems like a fairly expensive way do this at $15 USD per day

I guess you could buy a refurbished Mac Mini on apple.com for $589?

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#48

Post by monocasa » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

dougmwne wrote: post #20

It’s an interesting look at AWS pricing since the cost of the M1 Mac Mini ($699) and it’s power consumption (avg 26 watts) are known. Based on hardware costs (significant) and power costs (insignificant) you’re looking at a hardware ROI at about 6 months from the $.65 per hour price. AWS has an estimated 60% gross profit margin, so from there it’s probably possible to estimate some other interesting things about thei…

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.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#49

Post by samcrawford » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

speedgoose wrote: post #8

Many months later and more than 5 times more expensive than Scaleway though. https://www.scaleway.com/en/hello-m1/

Hetzner's offering is competitive too. 58 EUR/mo at https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-apple

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#50

Post by DrBazza » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

SavantIdiot wrote: post #3

Naive question: are these literally closets full of Macs? Or giant m1 MP servers?

I came here to ask the same thing. So if Apple don't make a rackable M1 server, what do they themselves use? It seems a bit unlikely Apple would have racks of minis as well.