Amazing article. It just goes to show how many problems they are solving just to work around bugs and limitations within Apple itself. I’d wager a guess that if Apple made a new Xserve with the same performance as a Mac mini but twice the price people would still buy them, because figuring out data center operations is expensive.
> A well-known limitation is that Apple only allows two macOS VMs per physical Mac. It can be a Mac Pro with 24 cores and 192 GB memory, yet it is limited to running only two guest VMs. This limitation leaks into our product offering: we can only slice Mac resources in two halves. So we run instances with 6 or 12 cores on 14-core Mac Minis and 8/16-core instances on 18-core MacBooks (we reserve a couple cores for management overhead).
I don't know about selling, but Apple permits up to 2 virtualized Macs to run on a Mac. If they are circumventing this limit that would be an issue, but it doesn't sound like they are.
Ah okay - and the 24 hour minimum rental time doesn't apply to VMs? Im just curious how they are getting around the limits that Mac Stadium and AWS have.
xtool [0] came up on here a while ago [1]. I think it still requires you get a big xcode app bundle off a macos machine and drop that into xtool, since there's no other way to get the iOS library header files from Apple. The other parts of xcode just aren't used as far as I know. Other than that caveat, you're running builds in xtool's own environment on whatever platform you choose. You can even do code signing.
I really wonder if Apple's logic to require a sale of a unit for 2 VMs is fiscally correct. Seems like it would be better to open it up to virtualization such that more devs can make iOS and macOS apps. Is the community of devs being forced to buy mac hw just do dev a iOS/macOs app so large that its worth putting us through all this HASSLE? Maybe they are worried about clone machine/farms that will eat into their sales. Idk. Because they are so VM unfriendly, I refuse to deal with Apple's bs.
The registry distribution subject "for another blog post" is the most interesting part of this to me. I'm very interested in the efficiency/locality metrics that went into designing that. I look forward to that future post.
I am lost, doing it in a Hackintosh is feasible but against EULA terms? I remember having a Hackintosh around the office two years ago (yes, it was x64 based). BTW I just found "ARM is not a universal architecture, there will be no more Hackintosh" [1].
The cost of cloud Mac hardware is quite frankly ludicrous across the board. Namespace's minimum for an M6 is, what, $0.06/minute for 6 vCPU? And that's on the cheap end - Semaphore wants $0.09/minute for 4 vCPU and GitHub Actions wants $0.062/minute for M1 hardware (forget AWS pricing even which is even more atrocious).
If I run just a UI test suite for an hour, that's $3.60/run, which is now higher than what I'm paying for AI inference that made the change that triggered the run. That's crazy! If I ran even just one run per night that would run me more than $100/month. A Mac Mini is $900 - I break even in nine months by buying the hardware outright. If I run multiple UI test suites per day, I break even much faster. These ARM chips are so power-light that the cost of electricity is practically irrelevant, and after all, these aren't rack-mounted monstrosities with 90 dB fans - they're meant to cool themselves sitting on your desk. Maybe it's different if you need like 60 of them?
Is anyone even running the numbers before they sign up? Or are companies really running that many Minis and are paying the premium to outsource the DCOps?
I have a test suite that needs to run on a Mac in a project that merges < 20 PRs a year. No point in provisioning our own Mac and maintaining it for that.
Amazing article. It just goes to show how many problems they are solving just to work around bugs and limitations within Apple itself. I’d wager a guess that if Apple made a new Xserve with the same performance as a Mac mini but twice the price people would still buy them, because figuring out data center operations is expensive.
This article is dated November 3rd yet I've read it months ago, it was already in my history.
Man, kudos to the person or AI who designed their website. Easy to read, easy to find any information, with eye catching branding.
Title should be edited to "Putting hundreds of MacBooks in a data center (because Apple is silly)" imo
Isnt it against the Apple EULA to sell VMs of Macos? Love the creative problem solving with the HW.
> A well-known limitation is that Apple only allows two macOS VMs per physical Mac. It can be a Mac Pro with 24 cores and 192 GB memory, yet it is limited to running only two guest VMs. This limitation leaks into our product offering: we can only slice Mac resources in two halves. So we run instances with 6 or 12 cores on 14-core Mac Minis and 8/16-core instances on 18-core MacBooks (we reserve a couple cores for management overhead).
I don't know about selling, but Apple permits up to 2 virtualized Macs to run on a Mac. If they are circumventing this limit that would be an issue, but it doesn't sound like they are.
Ah okay - and the 24 hour minimum rental time doesn't apply to VMs? Im just curious how they are getting around the limits that Mac Stadium and AWS have.
> You can't build iOS apps without a Mac.
I'm not sure this is true anymore.
xtool [0] came up on here a while ago [1]. I think it still requires you get a big xcode app bundle off a macos machine and drop that into xtool, since there's no other way to get the iOS library header files from Apple. The other parts of xcode just aren't used as far as I know. Other than that caveat, you're running builds in xtool's own environment on whatever platform you choose. You can even do code signing.
[0] https://xtool.sh
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44011515
It is.
You can build iOS apps on Omarchy now
I really wonder if Apple's logic to require a sale of a unit for 2 VMs is fiscally correct. Seems like it would be better to open it up to virtualization such that more devs can make iOS and macOS apps. Is the community of devs being forced to buy mac hw just do dev a iOS/macOs app so large that its worth putting us through all this HASSLE? Maybe they are worried about clone machine/farms that will eat into their sales. Idk. Because they are so VM unfriendly, I refuse to deal with Apple's bs.
> Is the community of devs being forced to buy mac hw just do dev a iOS/macOs app so large
Yes.
Why else would you buy such an expensive machine with such a crappy operating system?
It's Unix and it can run any pro creative app you like.
Not crappy. Skill issue.
The registry distribution subject "for another blog post" is the most interesting part of this to me. I'm very interested in the efficiency/locality metrics that went into designing that. I look forward to that future post.
I am lost, doing it in a Hackintosh is feasible but against EULA terms? I remember having a Hackintosh around the office two years ago (yes, it was x64 based). BTW I just found "ARM is not a universal architecture, there will be no more Hackintosh" [1].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/1uboij0/arm_is_...
The cost of cloud Mac hardware is quite frankly ludicrous across the board. Namespace's minimum for an M6 is, what, $0.06/minute for 6 vCPU? And that's on the cheap end - Semaphore wants $0.09/minute for 4 vCPU and GitHub Actions wants $0.062/minute for M1 hardware (forget AWS pricing even which is even more atrocious).
If I run just a UI test suite for an hour, that's $3.60/run, which is now higher than what I'm paying for AI inference that made the change that triggered the run. That's crazy! If I ran even just one run per night that would run me more than $100/month. A Mac Mini is $900 - I break even in nine months by buying the hardware outright. If I run multiple UI test suites per day, I break even much faster. These ARM chips are so power-light that the cost of electricity is practically irrelevant, and after all, these aren't rack-mounted monstrosities with 90 dB fans - they're meant to cool themselves sitting on your desk. Maybe it's different if you need like 60 of them?
Is anyone even running the numbers before they sign up? Or are companies really running that many Minis and are paying the premium to outsource the DCOps?
I have a test suite that needs to run on a Mac in a project that merges < 20 PRs a year. No point in provisioning our own Mac and maintaining it for that.
> A Mac Mini is $900 - I break even in nine months by buying the hardware outright.
The clue to their decision may be right there, potentially going for an increase in sales.
But nowadays it seems they suffer from a lack of vision and drive; perhaps (hopefully) they’ll come around.
Wild to see them using MacBook Pros and not Mac Mini/Studio. Curious how that possible makes sense for economics and cooling.
They answer that in literally the first paragraph in the article.
TL:DR; They couldn't buy enough minis or studios.