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Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

khronokernel.com

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Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#71

Post by tempest_ »

morphle wrote: post #59
tempest_ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years? I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.

Apple had real Unix a decade before the Linux crap was made, a bad unix copy. Nextstep was much better than Linux crap. "A budget of bad ideas" is what Alan Kay said about Linux [1], he invented the personal computer. My 1987-1997 ISP was based on several different Unix running on Apple, probably long before you where born. Apple built several supercomputers. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmsIZUuBoQs [2] Founde…

Yeah, they were that, and for the last 20 years they have been the iphone company.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#72

Post by trueno »

tempest_ wrote: post #6
RestartKernel wrote: post #3

This is a really cool article, but the existence of such an arbitrary limit on any serious development platform is weird.

Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years? I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.

> Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?

i dont think anyone asks this question in good faith, so it may not even be worth answering. see:

> I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.

yea fwiw macs own for multi-target deployments. i spin up a gazillion containers in whatever i need. need a desktop? arm native linux or windows installations in utm/parallels/whatever run damn near native speed, and if im so inclined i can fully emulate x86/64 envs. dont run into needing to do that often, but the fact that i can without needing to bust out a different device owns. speed penalty barely even matter to me, because ive got untold resources to play around with in this backpack device that literally gets all day battery. spare cores, spare unified mem, worlds my oyster. i was just in win xp 32bit sp2 few weeks ago using 86box compiling something in a very legacy dependent visual studio .net 7 environment that needed the exact msvc-flavored float precision that was shipping 22 years ago, and i needed a fully emulated cpu running at frequencies that was going to make the compiler make the same decisions it did 22 years ago. never had to leave my mac, didnt have to buy some 22 year old thinkpad on ebay, this thing gave me a time machine into another era so i could get something compiled to spec. these techs arent heard of, but its just one of many scenarios where i dont have to leave my mac to get something done. to say its a swiss army knife is an understatement. its a swiss army knife that ships with underlying hardware specs to let you fan out into anything.

for development i have never been blocked on macos in the apple silicon era. i have been blocked on windows/linux developing for other targets. fwiw i use everything, im loyal to whoever puts forth the best thing i can throw my money at. for my professional life, that is unequivocally apple atm. when the day comes some other darkhorse brings forth better hardware ill abandon this env without a second thought. i have no tribalistic loyalties in this space, i just gravitate towards whoever presents me with the best economic win that has the things im after. we havent been talking about itunes for like a decade.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#75

Post by mysteria »

naikrovek wrote: post #17
benoau wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they impose a limit at all? Your hardware is a natural limit, you'll stop of your own accord when you reach its thresholds.

They are likely scared of people who would run MacOS virtual desktop farms, without also buying an appropriate number of Apple machines. That’s what I would be worried about if my primary source of income was hardware sales.

IMO they should sell appropriately priced licenses that allow the use of more VMs. Make the licenses expensive enough so that it doesn't eat into hardware sales, or explicitly prohibit VDI/virtual seats in the license agreement.

Currently services like Github Actions painfully and inefficiently rack thousands of Mac Minis and run 2 VMs on each to stay within the limits. They probably wouldn't mind paying a fee to run more VMs on Mac Studios instead.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#76

Post by smackeyacky »

morphle wrote: post #59
tempest_ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years? I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.

Apple had real Unix a decade before the Linux crap was made, a bad unix copy. Nextstep was much better than Linux crap. "A budget of bad ideas" is what Alan Kay said about Linux [1], he invented the personal computer. My 1987-1997 ISP was based on several different Unix running on Apple, probably long before you where born. Apple built several supercomputers. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmsIZUuBoQs [2] Founde…

Alan Kay invented a dead end (smalltalk). Meanwhile Linux became the future.

Apple had a terrible Unix until they bought NextStep.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#77

Post by matheusmoreira »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #68
matheusmoreira wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>TL;DR you sacrificed your freedom for convenience Yes I did, just like you did when you chose to live as a taxpaying member of society rather than a hermit scouring the bush for berries and fish. Enjoy your VMs.

Living as a taxpaying member of society is something that is imposed on us. If we refuse, violent men with guns show up at our doors to arrest us and seize our property. At least we get to try and vote out idiots imposing stupid quotas on the population.

The issue of computer freedom does not even come close to this. None of this is imposed on us. We have the power to choose differently at any time. We can choose not to accept the monopolistic corporation's terms.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#78

Post by BoorishBears »

amelius wrote: post #12
tempest_ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years? I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.

It is a weird situation. Apple products are consumer products but they make us use them as development hardware because there is no other way to make software for those products.

Making software for other Apple products pretty low on the reasons I use a MBP.

128GB of RAM and an M4 Max makes for a very solid development machine, and the build quality is a nice bonus.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#79

Post by array_key_first »

gambiting wrote: post #33
jaredklewis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac. Because this sample is from my experience, it’s skewed to startups and tech companies. For sure, lots of devs outside those areas, but tech companies are a big chunk of the world’s developers. So yea I would say Apple is a “serious development platform” just given how much it dominates software development in the tech sector in…

>>At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac I work in video games, you know, industry larger than films - 10 out of 10 devs I know are on Windows. I have a work issued Mac just to do some iOS dev and I honestly don't understand how anyone can use it day to day as their main dev machine, it's just so restrictive in what the OS allows you to do.

It makes sense that you use Windows in a video game company. We use windows as well at work and it's absolutely awful for development. I would really prefer a Linux desktop, especially since we exclusively deploy to Linux.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#80

Post by matheusmoreira »

benoau wrote: post #16
kylec wrote: post #2

This is a very silly restriction, at least to apply uniformly to all Macs. I think if you buy a more powerful Mac they should let you virtualize more Mac instances. Like an M5 maybe limit to 2, but maybe let an M5 Pro do 4 and an M5 Max do 8 or something.

Why should they impose a limit at all? Your hardware is a natural limit, you'll stop of your own accord when you reach its thresholds.

Rent seeking, of course. They want to charge you for every physical and logical machine you use. Virtualization gets around that.

They'd probably charge separately for every feature of the processor if they could.

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