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Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

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Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#51

Post by rektide »

zamadatix wrote: post #37
neilalexander wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't just firing up a virtual machine on over-provisioned hardware, they're dedicating an entire bare metal machine to you. It is in their interests to make that worthwhile commercially.

These are Apple's terms that Amazon is following, not the other way around. You are getting bare metal that you have to reserve for a minimum of 24 hours because that's how Apple allows it to be licensed not because that's what Amazon thought would make the most sense.

I have such a hard time imagining what sick twisting legal crap allows Apple to dictate terms like this. Another example is Nvidia explicitly dis-allowing their consumer GPUs to be used in data-centers. It's wild to me that company's can just make up whatever terms of use they feel like & we have to accept that.

Edit: oh hello, i'm at -4! Anyone care to defend your outrage at my outrage? What makes this seem at all ok? This seems so fundamentally screwy to me. Questions like how Apple is allowed to ban other browsers[1] show related type of confusion over the vast ecosystem control that seems to be spreading, but there at least there's some cloudy App Store Apple clearly retains some rights of control over.

First-sale rights in America is fairly narrow in what they permit, but in America at least, there's very much been an idea that consumers become owners of the things they buy. It feels like a modern regression that there have been so many asterisks added to this straightforward & obvious right.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29419825

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#53

Post by Rafuino »

monocasa wrote: post #48
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.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're pricing them below cost like they have done with Alexa products.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#54

Post by smoldesu »

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.

How else are they supposed to force you to buy more units?

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#57

Post by barkingcat »

DrBazza wrote: post #50
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.

Inside Apple no one knows (except for Apple employees and contractors, who are bound by employment contracts and nda's)

Outside of Apple, it's just whatever you see them selling on apple.com

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#58

Post by mbreese »

DrBazza wrote: post #50
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.

You can literally buy a rack count tray for Mac Minis on Amazon, so I’d assume AWS mounts them in racks. It’s not the cleanest model, but Mac mini’s are smaller than 1U (1.4” vs 1.75”). They are also much cleaner to rack than the old trash can Mac Pros.

(Non affiliate link to a randomly chosen example)

Mac Mini Rack Mount, UCTRONICS 19" 1U Rackmount Supports 2 Units of All Mac Mini M1 and The Previous Models

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B093GQ8TJC

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#59

Post by balls187 »

withinrafael wrote: post #56

GitHub Actions uses VMs. Not sure how they, and not Amazon, were able to pull this off. That subject is sensitive and reportedly under NDA. https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/2604#...

> Not sure how they, and not Amazon

Pure speculation, but Microsoft and Apple have long standing working relationship, in a way that Amazon just doesn't have.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#60

Post by ghaff »

jenny91 wrote: post #42
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.

And it's a standard service that any of their developers can access as needed without needing to either setup their own Macs as a service in a lab or distributing standardized Macs for testing/builds/etc.

For a small shop it probably makes more sense to just buy the Macs, especially if they do a lot of iOS/OSX development.

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