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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, a

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/ 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/ https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/pricing/ If you pay for three years up front, you can pay $0.764 per hour, $6,692 per year, 29% off. I believe that's the lowest price Amazon will offer you. 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.

gogopuppygogo 6y ago
Don’t forget the bandwidth premium you pay at Amazon AWS. Paying these premiums is all in the furtherance of a good cause called “Bezos getting another hundy billion to his name”.
- zelly 6y ago
  Build your own AWS
  - rualca 6y ago
    Plenty of cloud providers don't charge for bandwidth until you hit an anti-abuse ceiling. For example, Hetzner offers a 20TB bandwidth cap per node. You don't need to buy AWS to get same prices on network.
    - chx 6y ago
      Hetzner dedicated servers (which start below 30 EUR mind you) do not have bandwidth caps for two years now. https://www.hetzner.com/news/traffic-limit/ https://www.hetzner.com/news/traffic-limit/
      - freemint 6y ago
        The person above is clearly talking about Hetzner cloud which a 20TB cap per instance. A no frills, SSD or network storage backed VPS which has price/perfomance than other offers i have seen which offer fine grained billing.
- absolutelyrad 6y ago
  Yup, the bandwidth at the big clouds is far too expensive. It makes more sense to host somewhere else if you're a consumer company.
  - tpetry 6y ago
    Funnily bandwidth pricing at Oracle Cloud is the cheapest of all major clouds. Its kind of ironic as every product oracle sells costs your „first born son“.
    - draugadrotten 6y ago
      The good ol' bait 'n' switch
gigatexal 6y ago
Yeah the pricing means macstadium is the better choice for this unless you’re all in on AWS and have no choice.
JoshTriplett 6y ago
You wouldn't necessarily use this if you expect to keep all the systems running 24/7; for that, another provider would indeed be better. You'd use this if you want to scale up or down and boot different images on the host. Yes, you have a 24 hour minimum, but that's better than a 1 month minimum. I'd have loved to have seen mac pros, and virtual instances (subdivided, even if you had to maintain a dedicated host to run them on), but this is still a major quality of life improvement for heterogeneous environments.
tomc1985 6y ago
Yeah for that bullshit price you might as well buy the hardware if you need any serious use of it
- speedgoose 6y ago
  Jeff is not the richest man on earth for no reasons. Us humans are lazy. Who wants to manage hardware or walk to the store when you can click on the cloud ?
  - tomc1985 6y ago
    Some of us like working with hardware
QuinnyPig 6y ago
44% off if you go for the instance savings plan. “Only” $450 a month that way.
phire 6y ago
With the pricing, 24h minimum and "only developers" restriction. it seems like there are exactly two usecases for this service. 1. You are a big company who needs Mac CI and your IT department has a strict "Cloud Only" restriction. 2. You are a developer for a cross-platform App who doesn't own a mac, but needs access to a real mac every few weeks or months for debugging/releasing.
- andybak 6y ago
  My use case is that I need to build for a recent iOS device but I don't want to upgrade my Macbook to an os version that doesn't support 32bit apps. But the 24hr thing kills it for me. I will never get 24 hours use out of it. Maybe a few hours. Why am I paying for the other 21 hours? Maybe someone can wrap this SaaS in a other Saas and sell timeshares in a virtual Mac.
  - lukeramsden 6y ago
    > 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.
    - andybak 6y ago
      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?"
      - Spivak 6y ago
        But only as a second-order effect. This will lead to needing to buy more Apple hardware to support such a service but it's the service provider that rakes in the cash (or doesn't because people don't need 24h) as a result of this EULA.
        6y ago
inopinatus 6y ago
Those numbers actually make the AWS instances a shoo-in for my current development purposes. The cost of housing and managing a unit of hardware is nonzero. Actuals vary wildly by location, purposes, and sector; but if everyone can get their heads out of the hobbyist-tinkerer mindset for a moment and consider that lifetime TCO is a real and meaningful consideration for businesses, then the component that isn't buying/leasing the server itself is typically several hundred dollars, per physical unit, per annum. Public clouds don't nullify all of it, but they swing the needle dramatically. Since my duty cycle for a Mac Mini is rather less than 20%, the economics even of on-demand instances immediately make sense, and having it inside the VPC boundary without hybridising is gravy on the meat since I'm consuming several other AWS services besides. These two factors (lifetime TCO and scale-down) are the economic foundation of the value proposition of utility computing. The "I can build that in my garage for cheaper" crew aren't wrong, but they're missing the point. Putting on my sometime cloud infrastructure product manager's hat, long-term observers of service pricing may also observe the common enough pattern of starting a new product with a relatively high price, one that selects for early adopters and other price-insensitive (and, you hope, glitch/MVP-tolerant) customer segments, then gradually ratcheting prices down in order to estimate (amongst other things) the price elasticity of demand. It's naturally easier to get cheaper over time, than go the other way. In this AWS's position on compute is congruent to any other commodity merchant⁽¹⁾ with the luxury of being able to withstand potential losses on a single product line. For most EC2 instance types I'd expect they have a very good model of the price sensitivities, but mac1 is undoubtedly a unique platform with elevated uncertainty in the price parameters. Which is my long-winded way of saying, it'll likely be cheaper in a few months. ----------------------- ⁽¹⁾ yes, yes, just like a fruit shop, very droll.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
  > Since my duty cycle for a Mac Mini is rather less than 20%, the economics even of on-demand instances immediately make sense, Are you factoring in the 24 hour minimum AWS charges for a Mac Mini?
  - pbalau 6y ago
    If you are comparing buying the device + the other costs of running the device vs renting from aws, then the 24h upfront is not an issue. You could even consider renting for a year or more.
amq 6y ago
Not directly relevant, but also for comparison: GitHub Actions with a Mac runner are $0.08 per minute, $4.8 per hour and $42,048 per year.
wicket 6y ago
> 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 with it (3 layers of virtualisation is overkill in my opinion!), but it beats the hell out of what Amazon has just announced. The big problem with CI/CD on Mac is that Xcode does not allow you to run builds in parallel, so you need one Mac per build unless you use virtualisation. To be honest I'm surprised that no one has added namespace/jail support to macOS yet. The XNU kernel is open source so this should be possible. In fact, can someone explain to me why there doesn't seem to be any sort of XNU hacking community?
- Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 6y ago
  > 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
  - wicket 6y ago
    > 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!
    - comex 6y ago
      That’s not true. You can run macOS with a custom-built kernel and it should work fine, although it won’t be exactly the same as the stock one (the released source is missing some bits).
      - wicket 6y ago
        Okay, so it should be possible then. That brings me back to me original question of why isn't there a XNU hacking community?
api 6y ago
Is there any reason you wouldn't just run a Mini in a closet? Is it magic just because it's in "the cloud?" A Mini on-prem is far more cost-effective. The only reason this would make sense is if you needed to actually host something with >99.9% uptime or high bandwidth needs on a Mac.
- danenania 6y ago
  If you need it for CI/CD of some kind, then APIs, networking, access control, and security (including, possibly, physical security) are all important too, and not trivial to do with a machine in your closet. Paying by the second is also ideal for these use cases. You run a build occasionally, but it mostly sits idle.
  - api 6y ago
    Just run ZeroTier on the Mini and join it to your network. That's what we do. Of course we are ZeroTier so this is how we roll. Anything with an Internet connection is in "the cloud." We just donate all its spare cycles to Boinc. :) Pay by the second would perhaps be preferable but unless I am reading this wrong you have to pay by the hour and it's relatively expensive.
    - danenania 6y ago
      It's too early in the morning for me to try to parse an AWS pricing page, but according to another comment: "You have to pay for 24 hours up front, after which they bill by the second."
melq 6y ago
So no on-demand instances? I could see this being useful for CI/builds/testing but not if I have to buy 24 hours at a time.
johnvega 6y ago
Maybe good option to test out a small iOS dev side project. Average 10 hours per week will cost around $500 per year.
0xsnowcrash 6y ago
Where does Amazon document that 24 hour minimum? I've just encountered this problem but been unable to find anything on that. It makes the On Demand cloud concept completely useless.
tamiral 6y ago
thank you for introducing me to MacStadium!

gogopuppygogo 6y ago

Don’t forget the bandwidth premium you pay at Amazon AWS. Paying these premiums is all in the furtherance of a good cause called “Bezos getting another hundy billion to his name”.

zelly 6y ago
Build your own AWS
- rualca 6y ago
  Plenty of cloud providers don't charge for bandwidth until you hit an anti-abuse ceiling. For example, Hetzner offers a 20TB bandwidth cap per node. You don't need to buy AWS to get same prices on network.
  - chx 6y ago
    Hetzner dedicated servers (which start below 30 EUR mind you) do not have bandwidth caps for two years now. https://www.hetzner.com/news/traffic-limit/ https://www.hetzner.com/news/traffic-limit/
    - freemint 6y ago
      The person above is clearly talking about Hetzner cloud which a 20TB cap per instance. A no frills, SSD or network storage backed VPS which has price/perfomance than other offers i have seen which offer fine grained billing.
absolutelyrad 6y ago
Yup, the bandwidth at the big clouds is far too expensive. It makes more sense to host somewhere else if you're a consumer company.
- tpetry 6y ago
  Funnily bandwidth pricing at Oracle Cloud is the cheapest of all major clouds. Its kind of ironic as every product oracle sells costs your „first born son“.
  - draugadrotten 6y ago
    The good ol' bait 'n' switch

gigatexal 6y ago

Yeah the pricing means macstadium is the better choice for this unless you’re all in on AWS and have no choice.

JoshTriplett 6y ago

You wouldn't necessarily use this if you expect to keep all the systems running 24/7; for that, another provider would indeed be better. You'd use this if you want to scale up or down and boot different images on the host. Yes, you have a 24 hour minimum, but that's better than a 1 month minimum. I'd have loved to have seen mac pros, and virtual instances (subdivided, even if you had to maintain a dedicated host to run them on), but this is still a major quality of life improvement for heterogeneous environments.

tomc1985 6y ago

Yeah for that bullshit price you might as well buy the hardware if you need any serious use of it

speedgoose 6y ago
Jeff is not the richest man on earth for no reasons. Us humans are lazy. Who wants to manage hardware or walk to the store when you can click on the cloud ?
- tomc1985 6y ago
  Some of us like working with hardware

QuinnyPig 6y ago

44% off if you go for the instance savings plan. “Only” $450 a month that way.

phire 6y ago

With the pricing, 24h minimum and "only developers" restriction. it seems like there are exactly two usecases for this service. 1. You are a big company who needs Mac CI and your IT department has a strict "Cloud Only" restriction. 2. You are a developer for a cross-platform App who doesn't own a mac, but needs access to a real mac every few weeks or months for debugging/releasing.

andybak 6y ago
My use case is that I need to build for a recent iOS device but I don't want to upgrade my Macbook to an os version that doesn't support 32bit apps. But the 24hr thing kills it for me. I will never get 24 hours use out of it. Maybe a few hours. Why am I paying for the other 21 hours? Maybe someone can wrap this SaaS in a other Saas and sell timeshares in a virtual Mac.
- lukeramsden 6y ago
  > 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.
  - andybak 6y ago
    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?"
    - Spivak 6y ago
      But only as a second-order effect. This will lead to needing to buy more Apple hardware to support such a service but it's the service provider that rakes in the cash (or doesn't because people don't need 24h) as a result of this EULA.
      - 6y ago

inopinatus 6y ago

Those numbers actually make the AWS instances a shoo-in for my current development purposes. The cost of housing and managing a unit of hardware is nonzero. Actuals vary wildly by location, purposes, and sector; but if everyone can get their heads out of the hobbyist-tinkerer mindset for a moment and consider that lifetime TCO is a real and meaningful consideration for businesses, then the component that isn't buying/leasing the server itself is typically several hundred dollars, per physical unit, per annum. Public clouds don't nullify all of it, but they swing the needle dramatically. Since my duty cycle for a Mac Mini is rather less than 20%, the economics even of on-demand instances immediately make sense, and having it inside the VPC boundary without hybridising is gravy on the meat since I'm consuming several other AWS services besides. These two factors (lifetime TCO and scale-down) are the economic foundation of the value proposition of utility computing. The "I can build that in my garage for cheaper" crew aren't wrong, but they're missing the point. Putting on my sometime cloud infrastructure product manager's hat, long-term observers of service pricing may also observe the common enough pattern of starting a new product with a relatively high price, one that selects for early adopters and other price-insensitive (and, you hope, glitch/MVP-tolerant) customer segments, then gradually ratcheting prices down in order to estimate (amongst other things) the price elasticity of demand. It's naturally easier to get cheaper over time, than go the other way. In this AWS's position on compute is congruent to any other commodity merchant⁽¹⁾ with the luxury of being able to withstand potential losses on a single product line. For most EC2 instance types I'd expect they have a very good model of the price sensitivities, but mac1 is undoubtedly a unique platform with elevated uncertainty in the price parameters. Which is my long-winded way of saying, it'll likely be cheaper in a few months. ----------------------- ⁽¹⁾ yes, yes, just like a fruit shop, very droll.

Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
> Since my duty cycle for a Mac Mini is rather less than 20%, the economics even of on-demand instances immediately make sense, Are you factoring in the 24 hour minimum AWS charges for a Mac Mini?
- pbalau 6y ago
  If you are comparing buying the device + the other costs of running the device vs renting from aws, then the 24h upfront is not an issue. You could even consider renting for a year or more.

amq 6y ago

Not directly relevant, but also for comparison: GitHub Actions with a Mac runner are $0.08 per minute, $4.8 per hour and $42,048 per year.

wicket 6y ago

> 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 with it (3 layers of virtualisation is overkill in my opinion!), but it beats the hell out of what Amazon has just announced. The big problem with CI/CD on Mac is that Xcode does not allow you to run builds in parallel, so you need one Mac per build unless you use virtualisation. To be honest I'm surprised that no one has added namespace/jail support to macOS yet. The XNU kernel is open source so this should be possible. In fact, can someone explain to me why there doesn't seem to be any sort of XNU hacking community?

Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 6y ago
> 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
- wicket 6y ago
  > 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!
  - comex 6y ago
    That’s not true. You can run macOS with a custom-built kernel and it should work fine, although it won’t be exactly the same as the stock one (the released source is missing some bits).
    - wicket 6y ago
      Okay, so it should be possible then. That brings me back to me original question of why isn't there a XNU hacking community?

api 6y ago

Is there any reason you wouldn't just run a Mini in a closet? Is it magic just because it's in "the cloud?" A Mini on-prem is far more cost-effective. The only reason this would make sense is if you needed to actually host something with >99.9% uptime or high bandwidth needs on a Mac.

danenania 6y ago
If you need it for CI/CD of some kind, then APIs, networking, access control, and security (including, possibly, physical security) are all important too, and not trivial to do with a machine in your closet. Paying by the second is also ideal for these use cases. You run a build occasionally, but it mostly sits idle.
- api 6y ago
  Just run ZeroTier on the Mini and join it to your network. That's what we do. Of course we are ZeroTier so this is how we roll. Anything with an Internet connection is in "the cloud." We just donate all its spare cycles to Boinc. :) Pay by the second would perhaps be preferable but unless I am reading this wrong you have to pay by the hour and it's relatively expensive.
  - danenania 6y ago
    It's too early in the morning for me to try to parse an AWS pricing page, but according to another comment: "You have to pay for 24 hours up front, after which they bill by the second."

melq 6y ago

So no on-demand instances? I could see this being useful for CI/builds/testing but not if I have to buy 24 hours at a time.

johnvega 6y ago

Maybe good option to test out a small iOS dev side project. Average 10 hours per week will cost around $500 per year.

0xsnowcrash 6y ago

Where does Amazon document that 24 hour minimum? I've just encountered this problem but been unable to find anything on that. It makes the On Demand cloud concept completely useless.

tamiral 6y ago

thank you for introducing me to MacStadium!