12 ms·

Here are some marketing videos: Scaleway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZJnrKjfA3s&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZJnrKjfA3s&feature=emb_

by throw14082020 6y ago

Here are some marketing videos: Scaleway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZJnrKjfA3s&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZJnrKjfA3s&feature=emb_titl... Amazon's Mac Mini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn3miC_tTH0&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn3miC_tTH0&feature=emb_titl... Pricing: Scaleway Mac Mini M1: ~$85/month (converted from 70Euro's) MacStadium Mac Mini M1: $109/month Amazon Intel Mac Mini (they don't have m1): ~$26 per day, ~$780/month. Therefore, at NO scale, does Amazon mac mini sense. Amazon's pitch is to help companies reduce their infrastructure problem. Except for every machine you use on Amazon for a month, you could buy a brand new M1 mac mini

christophilus 6y ago
AWS’s margin is Scaleway’s opportunity, you might say.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
  Normally yes, it should be, but I don't think it's going to happen. People have been (1) miscalculating the costs of AWS, (2) realizing they are relatively high but deciding to stick to them for various reasons for a long time now. And because Amazon managed to capture many companies with their marketing, in many cases it's practically impossible to get out.
  - christophilus 6y ago
    Yeah. It was just a snarky play on the famous Bezos quote, "Your margin is my opportunity."
tumblewit 6y ago
Given the ridiculously low power requirement of m1 chips if anyone wants to use these probably in small scale capacities they should just buy it. The power and maintenance won't be that much if a hassle (10 of these would use less than 300w) and you would get warranty too. I think the mac mini m1 was designed (lack of) by apple to replace current mac mini racks but ideally this thing can be as tiny as a 3rd gen apple tv and a rack of 10-20 could be as small as a mac pro ...
- throw14082020 6y ago
  Well thats what we need from Apple next. The Mac Rack of 10 M1 chips (aka. Mack). Not sure how useful that would be for me personally though. My reasoning being, if 1 chip takes 30W, why not double the number of chips or do something to the chip to get more from it.
  - dan1234 6y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if Mac Pro version of the M1 has everything turned up to 11.
    - wooger 6y ago
      Or maybe it's just a big I/O & power box, with a bunch of slots on top that accept a Mac mini. Like a more stylish SNES.
    - tumblewit 6y ago
      it's going to be interesting with the 16 inch macbook pro the imac and mac pro. of course apple has the full licence with ARM to do almost anything they want but based on my understanding the X ARM cores the 7 series and 5 series can be clustered. My guess would be apple moves to a cluster based design eventually like in m1 but with more cores for higher end machines but right now i'd say just a chiplet version of current m1 chips would still be a great option with higher frequency. A 4 or 8 chiplet design would still be only 150w or so with gpus disabled or somehow using all gpus as one. This is the strategy amd has gone with obviously with chiplet without gpus but I think this also makes sense for apple to reuse its designs.
  - moonbug 6y ago
    don't hold your breath. There are good reasons the X-Serve line doesn't exist any more.
    - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
      Do those reasons still exist in 2021? What are/were some of them? (Genuinely curious, not playing devil's advocate)
EveYoung 6y ago
I would assume that Amazon's offering is targeted at customers who already using other AWS services. So even if a Mac Mini costs $500 per month more, it's really not that big of a deal considering how much the bureaucracy of signing up with a new hosting provider would cost in a big company (e.g., legal, infosec, ...).
- carstenhag 6y ago
  Ohh yes. We had built a small tool that business people had to use, in form of a questionnaire, that went through about 20 topics. Depending on the question/answer it was an immediate "nope, must-have, don't sign a contract". Ironically this (nope-case) was always the case if the provider ran on AWS.
JoshTriplett 6y ago
If you have a giant pile of data already in AWS, that you need to use on a Mac for a short time, it may make more sense to rent a Mac next to all your existing data, rather than paying exorbitant transfer fees to get the data to a Mac elsewhere. AWS's transfer fees are a massive lock-in.
- tuananh 6y ago
  except this would not be the case. we just need M1 instance from Scaleway or whoever provide it as runner / job executor. not much data egress for those traffic.
  - rovr138 6y ago
    That's a big assumption on how EVERY company that needs an M1 and uses AWS uses it for
    - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
      The most common use case for a Mac in a business setting is for building iOS applications.
      - rovr138 6y ago
        You may have to define business. Account managers, web developers, python developers, Julia developers, sysadmin, netsec. All those areas are riddled with Mac.
        treis 6y ago
        But none of that code runs on Mac alone. Even if they're developing on a Max their python or Julia or whatever code that they want to run on the cloud will run on Linux. The only real use case out there is building/testing iOS/Mac applications. The only other one I can think of is a Mac only video editing or animation software that you'd prefer to render somewhere besides your laptop.
nix23 6y ago
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZJnrKjfA3s&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZJnrKjfA3s&feature=emb_titl... Start watching the video, thinking no baguette?? 1:03 here it is!! Thanks France, love your sense of humor!!
petercooper 6y ago
I think the scale where it makes sense is at companies where paying $780/month to an existing provider is easier than all the paperwork and internal regulations around allowing people to provision on prem equipment or use an untrusted provider. Consider the item from yesterday about AWS Outposts: https://ahl.medium.com/aws-outposts-2021-stories-for-folks-who-love-spreadsheets-72a2adcfb7b9 https://ahl.medium.com/aws-outposts-2021-stories-for-folks-w... .. the markup is absolutely mind boggling, but there are companies who pay it. AWS is the master of having a pricing model that feels nice to most indies and small/medium companies but that scales up extremely effectively to capture huge amounts of enterprise spend at the same time.
- ksec 6y ago
  >AWS is the master of having a pricing model that feels nice to most indies and small/medium companies but that scales up extremely effectively to capture huge amounts of enterprise spend at the same time. I wonder if there are any other industry that does the same. Most ( if not all ) of the time pricing dont scale to both ends. But AWS pricing seems to be the outliner here.
  - petercooper 6y ago
    Taschen is a publisher that has somehow pulled this off in what you'd think would be a highly commoditized space: books. They sell normal sized versions of most of their books for $20-$80, some slightly premium ones for up to a few hundred dollars, but then have these large coffee table sized books in limited editions selling for $10k+: https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/photography/all/02622/facts.sebastio_salgado_genesis_art_edition_no_1100_two_mursi_women_omo_valley_ethiopia.htm https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/photography/all/0...
- cryptoquick 6y ago
  I mean, you're not wrong. For example, I know many furry artists who open their commissions and within an hour get 20 solid offers to pay them. They can't possibly do all the work, so they just lose business. That's, uh, not how capitalism works! Companies like Amazon know, all you have to do is charge 10x more to capture all of that value. Sure, it sucks for 18 other potential customers, but these furry artists have tens of thousands of fans who will enjoy the work regardless.
allyant 6y ago
Although to me-and-you and to an extent SME's it may seem crazy to buy one over running it on-prem or at other companies to large organisations it makes perfect sense and the cost is just a drop in the ocean compared to their normal AWS monthly bill. Lets not forget AWS will only invest time if there are customers who will actually use it. A few points from the top of my head: * Large enterprises won't pay the costs listed publicly, they will each have their own contract written up with AWS. * Contracts - it can take YEARS for new companies to be added to the approved vendors list. * Frameworks will already be in place for how resources are managed and accessed securely. * Enterprise support agreements will already be in place. * Physical security that is regularly audited
random5634 6y ago
This comment is on most AWS stories. Bandwidth charges alone are usually significantly higher than you can get elsewhere. My own guess - a bit of a niche product not super easy to scale do they set a rediculous price. If the governance wins are there - they may still sell some - they rarely do stuff w out customer demand. At least in govt contracting - if you are willing to jump through all the hoops, some insane markups exist.
rk06 6y ago
Those are MRPs. Amazon will be giving heavy discount to large customers anyway
tgtweak 6y ago
Makes sense if you only need it for an hour every day to do a build and/or run a QA automation test. The billing on it is per-second. Worth noting that they require 1 day minimum to play ball, so kicking the tires is not a per-hour option. There is also no spot market for them, and no reserved instance pricing either. It seems like AWS has really replicated the Apple experience in more ways than hardware.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nathancahill 6y ago
  I understand that the 1 day requirement is from Apple and thus AWS requires that minimum too.
  - fuzzer37 6y ago
    Why did Apple require a 1 day minimum?
bserge 6y ago
Few things on AWS make sense financially. They're just leveraging the power of lock-in™. Why save money on AWS when you can save money on employee salaries?
eb0la 6y ago
But that would be an asset, not an expense. It depreciates over time and your accounting department must track it somehow in the books. Ok, maybe you could sign a leasing for the mini; and still be cheaper than AMZ but... your company would need some credit scoring and your finance department should talk with someone... But for $26/day it gets buried for free in a bill that needs a cloud architect to decipher.

christophilus 6y ago

AWS’s margin is Scaleway’s opportunity, you might say.

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
Normally yes, it should be, but I don't think it's going to happen. People have been (1) miscalculating the costs of AWS, (2) realizing they are relatively high but deciding to stick to them for various reasons for a long time now. And because Amazon managed to capture many companies with their marketing, in many cases it's practically impossible to get out.
- christophilus 6y ago
  Yeah. It was just a snarky play on the famous Bezos quote, "Your margin is my opportunity."

tumblewit 6y ago

Given the ridiculously low power requirement of m1 chips if anyone wants to use these probably in small scale capacities they should just buy it. The power and maintenance won't be that much if a hassle (10 of these would use less than 300w) and you would get warranty too. I think the mac mini m1 was designed (lack of) by apple to replace current mac mini racks but ideally this thing can be as tiny as a 3rd gen apple tv and a rack of 10-20 could be as small as a mac pro ...

throw14082020 6y ago
Well thats what we need from Apple next. The Mac Rack of 10 M1 chips (aka. Mack). Not sure how useful that would be for me personally though. My reasoning being, if 1 chip takes 30W, why not double the number of chips or do something to the chip to get more from it.
- dan1234 6y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if Mac Pro version of the M1 has everything turned up to 11.
  - wooger 6y ago
    Or maybe it's just a big I/O & power box, with a bunch of slots on top that accept a Mac mini. Like a more stylish SNES.
  - tumblewit 6y ago
    it's going to be interesting with the 16 inch macbook pro the imac and mac pro. of course apple has the full licence with ARM to do almost anything they want but based on my understanding the X ARM cores the 7 series and 5 series can be clustered. My guess would be apple moves to a cluster based design eventually like in m1 but with more cores for higher end machines but right now i'd say just a chiplet version of current m1 chips would still be a great option with higher frequency. A 4 or 8 chiplet design would still be only 150w or so with gpus disabled or somehow using all gpus as one. This is the strategy amd has gone with obviously with chiplet without gpus but I think this also makes sense for apple to reuse its designs.
- moonbug 6y ago
  don't hold your breath. There are good reasons the X-Serve line doesn't exist any more.
  - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
    Do those reasons still exist in 2021? What are/were some of them? (Genuinely curious, not playing devil's advocate)

EveYoung 6y ago

I would assume that Amazon's offering is targeted at customers who already using other AWS services. So even if a Mac Mini costs $500 per month more, it's really not that big of a deal considering how much the bureaucracy of signing up with a new hosting provider would cost in a big company (e.g., legal, infosec, ...).

carstenhag 6y ago
Ohh yes. We had built a small tool that business people had to use, in form of a questionnaire, that went through about 20 topics. Depending on the question/answer it was an immediate "nope, must-have, don't sign a contract". Ironically this (nope-case) was always the case if the provider ran on AWS.

JoshTriplett 6y ago

If you have a giant pile of data already in AWS, that you need to use on a Mac for a short time, it may make more sense to rent a Mac next to all your existing data, rather than paying exorbitant transfer fees to get the data to a Mac elsewhere. AWS's transfer fees are a massive lock-in.

tuananh 6y ago
except this would not be the case. we just need M1 instance from Scaleway or whoever provide it as runner / job executor. not much data egress for those traffic.
- rovr138 6y ago
  That's a big assumption on how EVERY company that needs an M1 and uses AWS uses it for
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    The most common use case for a Mac in a business setting is for building iOS applications.
    - rovr138 6y ago
      You may have to define business. Account managers, web developers, python developers, Julia developers, sysadmin, netsec. All those areas are riddled with Mac.
      - treis 6y ago
        But none of that code runs on Mac alone. Even if they're developing on a Max their python or Julia or whatever code that they want to run on the cloud will run on Linux. The only real use case out there is building/testing iOS/Mac applications. The only other one I can think of is a Mac only video editing or animation software that you'd prefer to render somewhere besides your laptop.

nix23 6y ago

>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZJnrKjfA3s&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZJnrKjfA3s&feature=emb_titl... Start watching the video, thinking no baguette?? 1:03 here it is!! Thanks France, love your sense of humor!!

petercooper 6y ago

I think the scale where it makes sense is at companies where paying $780/month to an existing provider is easier than all the paperwork and internal regulations around allowing people to provision on prem equipment or use an untrusted provider. Consider the item from yesterday about AWS Outposts: https://ahl.medium.com/aws-outposts-2021-stories-for-folks-who-love-spreadsheets-72a2adcfb7b9 https://ahl.medium.com/aws-outposts-2021-stories-for-folks-w... .. the markup is absolutely mind boggling, but there are companies who pay it. AWS is the master of having a pricing model that feels nice to most indies and small/medium companies but that scales up extremely effectively to capture huge amounts of enterprise spend at the same time.

ksec 6y ago
>AWS is the master of having a pricing model that feels nice to most indies and small/medium companies but that scales up extremely effectively to capture huge amounts of enterprise spend at the same time. I wonder if there are any other industry that does the same. Most ( if not all ) of the time pricing dont scale to both ends. But AWS pricing seems to be the outliner here.
- petercooper 6y ago
  Taschen is a publisher that has somehow pulled this off in what you'd think would be a highly commoditized space: books. They sell normal sized versions of most of their books for $20-$80, some slightly premium ones for up to a few hundred dollars, but then have these large coffee table sized books in limited editions selling for $10k+: https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/photography/all/02622/facts.sebastio_salgado_genesis_art_edition_no_1100_two_mursi_women_omo_valley_ethiopia.htm https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/photography/all/0...
cryptoquick 6y ago
I mean, you're not wrong. For example, I know many furry artists who open their commissions and within an hour get 20 solid offers to pay them. They can't possibly do all the work, so they just lose business. That's, uh, not how capitalism works! Companies like Amazon know, all you have to do is charge 10x more to capture all of that value. Sure, it sucks for 18 other potential customers, but these furry artists have tens of thousands of fans who will enjoy the work regardless.

allyant 6y ago

Although to me-and-you and to an extent SME's it may seem crazy to buy one over running it on-prem or at other companies to large organisations it makes perfect sense and the cost is just a drop in the ocean compared to their normal AWS monthly bill. Lets not forget AWS will only invest time if there are customers who will actually use it. A few points from the top of my head: * Large enterprises won't pay the costs listed publicly, they will each have their own contract written up with AWS. * Contracts - it can take YEARS for new companies to be added to the approved vendors list. * Frameworks will already be in place for how resources are managed and accessed securely. * Enterprise support agreements will already be in place. * Physical security that is regularly audited

random5634 6y ago

This comment is on most AWS stories. Bandwidth charges alone are usually significantly higher than you can get elsewhere. My own guess - a bit of a niche product not super easy to scale do they set a rediculous price. If the governance wins are there - they may still sell some - they rarely do stuff w out customer demand. At least in govt contracting - if you are willing to jump through all the hoops, some insane markups exist.

rk06 6y ago

Those are MRPs. Amazon will be giving heavy discount to large customers anyway

tgtweak 6y ago

Makes sense if you only need it for an hour every day to do a build and/or run a QA automation test. The billing on it is per-second. Worth noting that they require 1 day minimum to play ball, so kicking the tires is not a per-hour option. There is also no spot market for them, and no reserved instance pricing either. It seems like AWS has really replicated the Apple experience in more ways than hardware.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nathancahill 6y ago
I understand that the 1 day requirement is from Apple and thus AWS requires that minimum too.
- fuzzer37 6y ago
  Why did Apple require a 1 day minimum?

bserge 6y ago

Few things on AWS make sense financially. They're just leveraging the power of lock-in™. Why save money on AWS when you can save money on employee salaries?

eb0la 6y ago

But that would be an asset, not an expense. It depreciates over time and your accounting department must track it somehow in the books. Ok, maybe you could sign a leasing for the mini; and still be cheaper than AMZ but... your company would need some credit scoring and your finance department should talk with someone... But for $26/day it gets buried for free in a bill that needs a cloud architect to decipher.