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Amazon’s cloud Macs cost $25.99 a day. 77 days of usage would buy you your own
- oblio 6y agoIf it's too expensive for you, you are probably not the target audience ;-) Edit: This is downvoted, but it's the truth. Do they really think that a company known for long term support of its cloud services (AWS) contacted and worked with what is a competitor in many fields (Apple) to build a service in which they invested a ton of money, if they didn't think there was a market for it? There is, enterprise build, test and deployment services for companies using AWS. So I have to repeat, if you think that's expensive, you're not the target audience.
- nickthemagicman 6y agoIt's bare metal. I wonder if you run virtual box on it and have a VM in your VM
- rbanffy 6y agoAnd then run an emulated Acorn Archimedes. Emulating a BBC Master.
- toyg 6y agoYo dawg! But seriously, as a regular VB user on macos: it works, but it’s a bit shit and slow. Will probably work better with vmware, i’ve heard their equivalent Fusion might be free now.
- ShinTakuya 6y agoProbably not. Most virtualisation doesn't allow arbitrary levels of nesting. But I'm not sure how AWS's Macs are set up so who knows.
- nickthemagicman 6y agoI know AWS has certain bare metal instances that are expensive as all get out, that support virtualization.
- patwolfe 6y agoThis seems misleading. If you needed to use anywhere close to 24 hours of cpu computation per day, wouldn’t you not use a cloud provider? And most tenants will only use a fraction of that per day, so 77 days of CPU usage could take years to use.
- riknox 6y agoI thought the point is with the new announcement/EULA terms that a day was the minimum amount of time you could rent from Amazon for. I could have misunderstood of course.
- patwolfe 6y agoI believe you rent a day to buy in, but that’s a day of CPU usage measured by clock time. So it expires based on your usage, not 24 hours later.
- csunbird 6y agoI thought the EC2 pricing model is, even when the instance is shut down, you continue paying, since it is still reserved.
- signal11 6y agoAs far as I know, there's a minimum tenancy period of 24 hours, but after that it's like "standard" EC2 where you're billed per second.
- api 6y agoThis is true for just about any architecture. It's usually a lot cheaper to buy your own machine and put it in a closet if you need it doing work most or all of the time. The only time that doesn't make sense is if it's customer-facing and needs better than 99.9% uptime or needs a lot of bandwidth, as those things are better done from a data center.
- offtop5 6y agoOnly useful if you have AWS credits. Holy crap this is expensive though
- sneak 6y agoYeah, but then you gotta keep it somewhere, network it, keep it powered, provision users on it, fix it when it breaks, et c. Most of cloud computing's value is just not having to do that utterly mundane crap. Amazon can charge just a tiny sliver less than it costs in some mid-level admin's fully loaded cost in dealing with it, and then they and their customers make/save money: win-win. I'm the last person to defend AWS (they built a custom on-prem AWS datacenter for the CIA!) but this is a silly criticism of their new service.
- acdha 6y agoSeconding this. The value is especially obvious if you’re not running a single server: these are targeted for things like build & test infrastructure, where these would be one more node in a larger system. Not duplicating that or having to maintain a VPN, etc. is worth a lot more than the pricing differential.
- bsenftner 6y agoNo it's not. Do the math, it is a serious rip off, waaaaay over priced.
- dtech 6y agoStatements like that need a TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) calculation to back them up.
- falcolas 6y agoBoth sides need to be doing this. So many un-cited "AWS is cheaper overall" estimations, with hand-wavey "but you have to hire more IT staff" as their justification. Plus, articles which do the TCO calcuations (there was one recently that pointed out a 200% premium for AWS) are still derided because people really prefer to argue with their feelings on this topic. We get it, you don't want to run your own infrastructure. How much is that distaste worth to your company?
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- helsinkiandrew 6y agoThat's a deliberately bad headline. The vast majority of these will launch, build an iOS binary, save and quit within an hour. The other 5% will be people testing an app.
- juergbi 6y agoYou can't rent them for less than 24 hours.
- helsinkiandrew 6y agoYes, but my point is that they won't be used every day. I used to work in a dev shop that had to compile 20+ applications every month or so. Our automated mac/build box, would require poking and resurrecting every other time it was used. This would have saved us a fortune.
- eganist 6y ago> That's a deliberately bad headline. The vast majority of these will launch, build an iOS binary, save and quit within an hour. The other 5% will be people testing an app. Headline is spot-on. Minimum rent is a day per Apple's terms of use. Discussion of this can be found from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25262303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25262303
- nojito 6y agoYou have to pay for 24 hours on every start up.
- bsenftner 6y agoAnd, for the point, this markup is less than on a server. When evaluating AWS and other clouds versus direct ownership and the salary to devOp the servers - one month of AWS purchases the entire server stack, hardware firewall, more than enough storage, and has more than enough left over for salaries for a half dozen devOp techs. The cloud is a ripoff.
- oblio 6y agoIt depends on who you are/where you work. Have you ever had to interact with enterprise IT, especially purchases? Also, do you know how much things cost when using enterprise IT? I'm talking about many huge companies with a lot of money (something on the scale of hundreds or thousands of companies).
- gravypod 6y agoFor startups you cant beat used hardware from ebay and some IT experience in one of the cofounders. This is especially true for development machines (CI runners, compile caching, GPU servers, etc).
- oblio 6y agoYeah, if you're a startup you'd better have someone tech oriented and you'll be able to do a lot of things for cheap. If you're a tech startup, then I don't even know how you'll be able to do anything without someone technical :-)
- ccmcarey 6y agoIt's also extremely comparatively cheap to get powerful dedi servers from places like Hetzner. Price/performance absolutely dwarfs the cloud services.
- gravypod 6y ago> If you're a tech startup, then I don't even know how you'll be able to do anything without someone technical :-) I've spoken to some YC founders. You can definitely raise funds without a (real) technical founder.
- Havoc 6y agoYou could spin it up on demand though. Don't think many envision this as a 24/7 workhorse in the cloud.
- mosselman 6y agoYou have to rent it for a minimum of 24 hours. I don't know if this is in 24 hour increments, but lets say you need 1 build a day then you are already paying for it every day. There must be some existing tooling to let you integrate a physical mac you have lying around into your build system, so comparing rental macs vs bought macs isn't so strange.
- otherjason 6y ago> There must be some existing tooling to let you integrate a physical mac you have lying around into your build system, so comparing rental macs vs bought macs isn't so strange. At work, we use GitLab CI for this and have one of the developers' old MBPs sitting on a rack shelf for this very purpose.
- texasbigdata 6y agoAh the old load bearing Mac Mini approach :)
- gambiting 6y agoIt was said on launch day - they bill for the 24 hours upfront, then in 1 second increments after.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- otherjason 6y agoThe issue with spinning it up "on demand" is that there is a minimum 24-hour billing period for each machine you start because of Apple's EULA. So, each time you want to spin up an AWS Mac, you're paying at least $25.99.
- bjarneh 6y agoI think many of these cloud offerings are shockingly expensive. The first time I heard what we paid for the Ubuntu images we have on Azure, I though my manager was joking...
- gruez 6y agoAren't ubuntu images free to use? Or are you talking about the ones with support entitlements?
- bjarneh 6y agoWe pay a monthly cost for every Ubuntu VM that we have. Perhaps there is some "get X free VM's" included with a certain Office365 license or something; but ours are certainly not free. You could probably make the exact same calculation as they have done here. How long can rent an Ubuntu VM in Azure for the price of buying actual hardware running Ubuntu etc.
- dtech 6y agoWhen you compare raw hardware costs vs VM costs it seems ludicrous. But it's more reasonable than you expect. First if you commit for 1 or 3 year (like you'd do with hardware) you can get 30-70% discounts already. Then you have to factor in costs of: replacement hardware, energy, cooling, networking. But the big one is people. Someone has to install all that hardware, fix it if it breaks etc. They provide everything like that for you. If you are tiny (<10 servers located in your business building) it can be worthwhile because it's just a side job of someone you need anyway. After that you need quite a large scale for it to become really attractive.
- visualphoenix 6y agoThank goodness for this offering. Do you know of any other cloud provider offering Mac instances that is HIPAA compliant and will sign a BAA?
- api 6y agoIf you need to run a Mac in some kind of server role in a secure DC that has a list of certifications, this AWS product may be for you. You are also very niche.
- thinkingemote 6y agoNote that you cannot use these macs "servers" to actually serve stuff. Its just for CI, development. That is in the ToS
- wil421 6y agoMacStadium claims their Atlanta and Las Vegas data centers are HIPAA compliant. Not sure about a BAA, you’d probably have to ask them.
- optimalsolver 6y agoThis is also why machine learning scientists should build their own GPU workstations and servers. Someone did the calculations: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/9iqcr3/d_why_building_your_own_deep_learning_computer_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/9iqcr3/d_w... This guy built a 4 x 2080 ti workhorse for 7,000 USD, and it would probably be even cheaper now: https://l7.curtisnorthcutt.com/the-best-4-gpu-deep-learning-rig https://l7.curtisnorthcutt.com/the-best-4-gpu-deep-learning-...
- zests 6y agoEven with that build it might still take several days to train some deep learning models. Much better would be multiple machine distributed model training. You can pay the true cost either by waiting for your one machine model to train, by setting up complicated infrastructure on your own (either in house or in the cloud) or by using a cloud/third party distributed computing option.
- delfinom 6y ago> by setting up complicated infrastructure on your own (either in house or in the cloud) or by using a cloud/third party distributed computing option. The argument is/would be, if your business is heavily based upon deep learning and is that compute heavy on a hourly basis, you may in fact save millions daily by having your own in-house infrastructure. It seriously isn't complicated to run as much as AWS and co want to say it is to push their own sales. But it does cost capital investment and maybe 1 or 2 IT guys. There's an inflection point where it makes sense.
- asow92 6y agoAren't we paying for the service of not having to buy and physically manage our own as well? Regardless, this seems high.
- dnhbt 6y agoImagine how much the desire for Macs would collapse if they let people compile iOS / macOS apps on Linux. The fact people tolerate or celebrate Apple's heavily restricted ecosystem is absurd. Apple is overly greedy and resting on their laurels.
- marcinzm 6y ago>Imagine how much the desire for Macs would collapse if they let people compile iOS / macOS apps on Linux. Probably not much after the latest M1 release.
- dnhbt 6y agoHm. Looked up the M1 because all I had seen was "low power consumption, lots of battery life" which I took as "Facebook machine". Looks cool. Apple might be turning the corner from "lol, here's the same phone from 2 years ago but now with three cameras, give me $1,100"
- growt 6y agoIsn't that true for most of AWS/EC2 ? A t2.2xlarge with 8 cores and 32 GB Ram costs $685 in 77 days. You can probably get an 8 core 32GB ram Intel/Amd machine for that price. Not a xeon, not "server-grade" but still the 77 days are not surprising to me. You pay a premium for the machine to be available on demand, being in a datacenter and being integrated in the AWS ecosystem.
- lostmsu 6y agoAzure DevOps actually includes quite a bit of Mac-based compute for free (no M1 yet). I use it to prepackage TensorFlow.