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Is there some licensing issue with Apple that requires this minimum monthly usage? It appears aws is charging $1/hr with a 24 hr minimum which is similar to ev
by jjeaff 6y ago
Is there some licensing issue with Apple that requires this minimum monthly usage?
It appears aws is charging $1/hr with a 24 hr minimum which is similar to every other provider out there that is offering MacOS instances.
I was excited to see that AWS was offering these as I assumed it would be priced just like everything else - hourly with no minimums.
I literally need access a few hrs a month for submitting binary updates to the app store. And I suspect there are a lot of other users with this same use case which may explain the consistent policy of minimum monthly usage.
- wmf 6y agoYes, Apple requires a 24-hour minimum.
- whoknew1122 6y agoYes. It's licensing.
- jjeaff 6y agoSo when I buy a mac mini at Best Buy, am I somehow agreeing to that policy?
- Macha 6y agoWhen you click accept in the initial setup that has a link to T&Cs that informs you can return it for a refund if you don't agree. How legally enforceable clickwrap such as that is varies from country to country.
- epmaybe 6y agoHow do you test the updates without a Mac? Sorry I’m sure I’m missing something
- seanwilson 6y ago> It appears aws is charging $1/hr with a 24 hr minimum which is similar to every other provider out there that is offering MacOS instances. How much per month? Around $720?
- GordonS 6y agoYou obviously expect to pay over the odds for cloud VMs, but that's really expensive. I would have thought someone as big as AWS would have been able to negotiate more favourable terms, but it seems not. Given I'd expect a lot of these to be used as iOS build servers, it's worth noting that Azure DevOps gives you 1,800 build minutes on the free tier, which AFAIK you can use with their MacOS agents.
- est31 6y agoAWS might as well have negotiated good terms, but why give those to customers? People use AWS even if cheaper alternatives exist.
- alisonkisk 6y agoMac Stadium charges $720/year.
- est31 6y agoYou'd probably have less TCO if you just buy a mac mini and sell it when a new generation comes out. If you take good care of it you can sell it for 30% of the original purchase price.
- jethro_tell 6y agoFor one device sure. If you need a small fleet then you have to pay someone to manage them and that gets more expensive for quite a while.
- Macha 6y agoYes, this is directly from the macOS T&Cs: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vindication https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...
- davidjfelix 6y agoBig Sur's licensing states: 3. Leasing for Permitted Developer Services. A. Leasing. You may lease or sublease a validly licensed version of the Apple Software in its entirety to an individual or organization (each, a “Lessee”) provided that all of the following conditions are met: (i) the leased Apple Software must be used for the sole purpose of providing Permitted Developer Services and each Lessee must review and agree to be bound by the terms of this License; (ii) each lease period must be for a minimum period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours;
- sieabahlpark 6y agoWhat an absolutely stupid restriction
- kevincox 6y agoIt seems that if you could still buy macOS separately you could buy more copies than computers and lease these out for 24h while sharing the hardware with much higher granularity which would lower the cost significantly. However it seems that no version of macOS since Lion (2011) is available to be purchased standalone anymore. It is a shame that Apple forces such a wasteful and inconvenient process but it is more profitable for them and apparently they are legally allowed to do so.
- jjeaff 6y agoI suppose you could purchase older, broken machines that come with a license.
- bifrost 6y agoThat seems... expensive.... Wouldn't it be cheaper just to buy a mini? Just checked - yes it is after about 2 months.
- eli 6y agoIsn’t that true for all EC2 instances? That’s not why one buys EC2
- penagwin 6y agoThis, although I think the 24 hour minimum set by apple kinda undermines the scalability asset. Obviously the 24 hour minimum means you’d be better buying one for most CI uses, which I think is what most people want them for. However I think I remember a image can that also manipulated used apple hardware for the metal api? They would still benefit from the ability to scale on at least a daily level.
- bradfitz 6y agoFrom an AWS employee: https://twitter.com/WindexCowboy/status/1333876188385841158 https://twitter.com/WindexCowboy/status/1333876188385841158 > The use of the Dedicated Hosts concept keeps the license requirement decoupled from the instance life cycle. While you do need to allocate the Mac for a minimum of 24 hours, you can launch and terminate a fresh mac1.metal instance on that box as many times as you like.
- macintux 6y agoYes...ish. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562532 for a huge caveat: scrubbing the old instance takes anywhere from 30 minutes to 4 hours. So there are time constraints that make this far from ideal.
- est31 6y agoAmazon's cloud offerings are generally quite expensive compared to owning yourself. That's why such a small part of Amazon's revenues can be such a large part of their earnings.
- oefrha 6y agoWell, Apple is a hardware company first and foremost, their business model is to sell you a Mac regardless of how little you use it. Letting a third-party rent a single hardware unit to hundreds or thousands of people per month and capture most of the profit while doing so is against their business model, so not surprisingly they try to prevent that from happening.
- mikepurvis 6y agoCI services like Travis and Circle do Mac/iOS builds and give each job a minute or two at a time — I guess this is different because it’s a service rather than “leasing” the machine?
- gregmac 6y agoIt's also per-instance, so if you use one to run a build or automated test suite and tear it down afterwards, it costs you 24 hours each time. Some simple napkin math: if you average running two builds/test runs per day, not including weekends, you'll pay somewhere over $12k/yr. Crazy. We test some cross-platform software with an installer, and there's automated tests for every Windows version since 7, dozens of various Linux distros/versions (including x86 and ARM), but we never got around to automating Mac largely because of the complexity with getting back to a "clean" environment (eg: what you get with a fresh EC2 image). Having relatively few users compared to all other platforms plus the cost being a couple of orders of magnitude higher, I doubt we'll take advantage of this. Too bad.
- simlevesque 6y agoCouldn't you keep the instance the first time every day ? I don't know Macs that much but I assume that AWS could offer a way to wipe it without breaking the instance.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ManishR 6y agoDisclosure: I work for AWS and am part of the team that built EC2 Mac instances The 24 hours minimum is applicable to the allocation duration a Mac1 Dedicated Host, and not to the instances running on that host. Put differently - once allocated, a Mac1 Dedicated Host can only be released from your account after 24 hours. You can however can launch, stop, start, and terminate as many mac1.metal instances with fresh macOS AMIs on that host as you need while that host remains allocated to you. Additionally, Savings Plan (https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/ https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/) on Mac1 instances can provide up to 44% savings over On-demand prices for longer term commitments.
- gregmac 6y agoOk that sounds promising. I haven't really used dedicated instances so I'll have a closer look at this. Thanks!