8 ms·

It’s an interesting look at AWS pricing since the cost of the M1 Mac Mini ($699) and it’s power consumption (avg 26 watts) are known. Based on hardware costs (s

It’s an interesting look at AWS pricing since the cost of the M1 Mac Mini ($699) and it’s power consumption (avg 26 watts) are known. Based on hardware costs (significant) and power costs (insignificant) you’re looking at a hardware ROI at about 6 months from the $.65 per hour price. AWS has an estimated 60% gross profit margin, so from there it’s probably possible to estimate some other interesting things about their costs, utilization rate and depreciation schedule. Edit: Sorry, my napkin math assumed a unstated utilization rate of 40 hours per week, but that’s not a great assumption due to the 24 hour minimum. Still, some proportion of machines will be idle, though 75% idle seems like a bad guess.

Megatio 5y ago
Its probably much more custom than other hardware. I have never seen any business/professional mac hardware deployment which doesn't look custom build with some magic around it. That alone might be much more expensive and needs a dedicated team.
markonen 5y ago
The Mac mini itself is not the only hardware cost for AWS here, though: I wouldn't be surprised if their Thunderbolt Nitro hardware cost just as much each. It has to be a very low volume device (relative to other things AWS does).
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Considering Thunderbolt is just PCI-Express, I'd expect it to be standard Nitro hardware (whatever that is) plus an inexpensive PCIe to Thunderbolt board/adapter.
riknos314 5y ago
Maybe, there's still a lot of unknowns. The cost and power consumption of the nitro hardware to translate from the mac mini to everything else being the main one. They're also likely pricing in some form of opportunity cost since the density of physical macs per unit rack space is almost certainly lower than the density of typical server hardware.
- droopyEyelids 5y ago
  The space question is interesting. The most common Mac mini rack mount enclosure holds 2 minis in 1ru. I think at amazon's scale they could probably get 4 minis in 1ru with some custom cooling. how dense do you think instances are on average in the amazon datacenters?
  - sieabahlpark 5y ago
    Why would you not put them on their side and stack them like hard drives? You'd get way more density that way then trying to figure out how to make it fit in 1u for no reason. You could even stack multiple rows deep to get more density.
    - adolph 5y ago
      19 mod 1.4 = 0.8, 0.8 x 7.7 = 6.16 in^2 19 mod 7.7 = 3.6, 3.6 x 1.4 = 5.04 in^2 Presumably the greater waste of bottom side down is in higher number of shelves?
  - tyingq 5y ago
    >The most common Mac mini rack mount enclosure holds 2 minis in 1ru That sounds wasteful to me. Is that really the most common way for mac hosting companies to do it?
    - technobabbler 5y ago
      Do they have an alternative?
      - tyingq 5y ago
        I imagine you could get 4 in 1U if you used all the depth, and perhaps more dense by putting them onto their side in 4U (maybe 5U..not sure how tall a M1 Mini is). I don't know to what degree cooling is an issue, where you don't want the exhaust of one feeding the inlet of another.
      - 5y ago
mciancia 5y ago
W8 what >>> 699/(24*0.65) 44.80769230769231 days Nitro card obviously costs a bit, but for ROI on mac itself is closer to 6 weeks than 6 months ;)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- riazrizvi 5y ago
  > 699/(24*0.65) * proportion of hours the product is unused
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    Yup, sorry I was assuming 40 hours of utilization a week, forgot to state that.
    - luhn 5y ago
      Unfortunately Mac instances have a minimum billing duration of 24 hours, so even if you only use it 8am-5pm, you'd be billed for 8am-8am. (Not AWS's fault, it's part of the Apple EULA.)
      - konschubert 5y ago
        What is apple's motivation?
        988747 5y ago
        Probably they are deliberately trying to make M2 EC2 instances expensive to avoid all their Mac Minis being bought out by AWS, they get higher profit margins selling to retail customers.
        lucky_cloud 5y ago
        Money. Disabling a Mac for 24 hours after 10 minutes of use means you have to buy much more hardware than you'd have to if a single Mac could be utilized by many people for short periods of time. Some users would use a single Mac for days/weeks/months but others will want to boot, run a build, and be done. The actual work might take 5 minutes or 3 hours but you pay for a day no matter what. Days where you're doing the same short-lived task many times won't be as expensive per build, but if you just want to do a nightly build, you're paying for months or years and utilizing a fraction of the compute time you're buying.
monocasa 5y ago
There's a rumor going around that they're heavily discounting arm64 instances in order to put negotiating pressure on the x86 manufacturers. 'Nice arch you have there, would be a shame if people stopped caring.' I would be careful about estimating beyond how they view arm64 given that these are the highest perf/core arm64 devices they can put their hands on.
- Rafuino 5y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if they're pricing them below cost like they have done with Alexa products.
- hoffspot 5y ago
  I think they are providing those discounts to promote their own silicon, the Graviton3 chip. You definitely get an execution discount in Lambda for selecting arm versus x86 on that basis.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    The rumor is that their own silicon isn't really that much better on perf/watt, but they're discounting it as a multi pronged effort to put pressure on the x86 vendors. If it turns out it's a lot of pressure and it kills x86, then they've commodified their complement. If it's just a threat, then they have a better seat at the negotiating table.
tyingq 5y ago
"EC2 M1 Mac instances are powered by...The Mac mini, featuring M1 SoC with 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, 16 GiB of memory" So not $699, but $899, since it's 16GB of memory.
- mciancia 5y ago
  For retail, true. I would be surprised if amazon actually pays that much
  - ksec 5y ago
    Normal whole sale price, at best would be something like $799.
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      Based on what?
      - sgjohnson 5y ago
        Based on Apple not giving a shit what volume you’re buying, the price is the price. Maybe the rules are a bit different for Amazon, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
        GhettoComputers 5y ago
        Based on what? https://www.apple.com/us-hed/store https://www.apple.com/us-hed/store https://images.apple.com/business-docs/VPP_Business_Guide.pdf https://images.apple.com/business-docs/VPP_Business_Guide.pd... https://www.apple.com/retail/business/ https://www.apple.com/retail/business/ > Our Small Business Experts are ready to help. They’ll advise you on the devices to fit your budget, including special pricing,* and find you the best financing option. All backed by ongoing support to give you much-needed peace of mind. > * Special pricing available to qualified customers. To learn more about how to start qualifying toward special pricing, talk to a Business Team member in a store or give us a call at 1-800-854–3680.
danielmarkbruce 5y ago
I'd guess they pay much more than this due to some licensing/t&c issue. I haven't read them but I speculate that they same something to the effect of you can't make it accessible to the public as a shared, paid for resource etc and that amazon has a separate agreement and they pay more.
- AyyWS 5y ago
  Thinking back to the VMware service provider licensing I saw, Apple probably charges a subscription model that would make your eyes bleed. I was shocked anyone could afford to sell a public cloud offering that used VMware technology after seeing their pricing.
davej 5y ago
Another datapoint is that Scaleway charges €.10 per hour ($.113) for their M1 instances, this is roughly one-sixth of what AWS is charging.
- tyingq 5y ago
  The Scaleway offering has 8GB versus the AWS 16GB. Not that it changes the math that much, but it's worth noting.
ineedasername 5y ago
That is a premium price if you're using it 40hr/week. Although, asumming they're available for custom AMI, maybe the value-add use case for this is to be able to have multiple custom AMIs for different dev environments and scenarios to rapidly spin up what you need. Specifically for testing with multiple versions of MacOS: you could develop the code and then test on a custom AMI to make sure it ran in the version of MacOS, no need to have multiple systems setup. (Although I don't know much about Mac dev-- does Apple provide tools to do such testing already without running multiple OS versions?) Otherwise, I guess it's all just about convenience.
JCM9 5y ago
This is really not looking at the math in the right way for those that are the target market. If you just want an M1 instance just because sure just go buy one and keep in plugged in all the time in your basement. That’s not the target market. Imagine you’re developing an app in regulated market and need to have Macs for CI/CD There’s a lot more to this than just keeping some Mac mini’s under your desk. How are you managing physical security in your environment? Do you have all the associated certifications in place? Can we see your last audit? Who’s fixing this when something breaks? What about your in house IT folks that done want to build out a whole new operation to manage Macs now? What if next week you need 5x as many instances but only for 2 days? That’s what your paying for in the price here, not just the cost of the instance itself and power. When faced with all those requirements and challenges the pricing looks inexpensive.
- nojito 5y ago
  Apple already offers this for Devs. https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/ https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/
  - oblio 5y ago
    If you're already using AWS it's a no-brainer to avoid a second vendor if you don't have to use them for other reasons.
  - mattferderer 5y ago
    So does MS with Azure Devops & GitHub: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/ecosystems/xcode?view=azure-devops https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/ecos... https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/pipelines-xcode/blob/master/azure-pipelines.yml https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/pipelines-xcode/blob/master... It's great that there are finally multiple ways to do this without needing to buy a bunch of Macs just for compiling.
    - xvilka 5y ago
      Still not on GitHub Actions though: https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/2187 https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/2187
odonnellryan 5y ago
There is other hardware in the stack. How much does that cost?

Megatio 5y ago

Its probably much more custom than other hardware. I have never seen any business/professional mac hardware deployment which doesn't look custom build with some magic around it. That alone might be much more expensive and needs a dedicated team.

markonen 5y ago

The Mac mini itself is not the only hardware cost for AWS here, though: I wouldn't be surprised if their Thunderbolt Nitro hardware cost just as much each. It has to be a very low volume device (relative to other things AWS does).

Nextgrid 5y ago
Considering Thunderbolt is just PCI-Express, I'd expect it to be standard Nitro hardware (whatever that is) plus an inexpensive PCIe to Thunderbolt board/adapter.

riknos314 5y ago

Maybe, there's still a lot of unknowns. The cost and power consumption of the nitro hardware to translate from the mac mini to everything else being the main one. They're also likely pricing in some form of opportunity cost since the density of physical macs per unit rack space is almost certainly lower than the density of typical server hardware.

droopyEyelids 5y ago
The space question is interesting. The most common Mac mini rack mount enclosure holds 2 minis in 1ru. I think at amazon's scale they could probably get 4 minis in 1ru with some custom cooling. how dense do you think instances are on average in the amazon datacenters?
- sieabahlpark 5y ago
  Why would you not put them on their side and stack them like hard drives? You'd get way more density that way then trying to figure out how to make it fit in 1u for no reason. You could even stack multiple rows deep to get more density.
  - adolph 5y ago
    19 mod 1.4 = 0.8, 0.8 x 7.7 = 6.16 in^2 19 mod 7.7 = 3.6, 3.6 x 1.4 = 5.04 in^2 Presumably the greater waste of bottom side down is in higher number of shelves?
- tyingq 5y ago
  >The most common Mac mini rack mount enclosure holds 2 minis in 1ru That sounds wasteful to me. Is that really the most common way for mac hosting companies to do it?
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    Do they have an alternative?
    - tyingq 5y ago
      I imagine you could get 4 in 1U if you used all the depth, and perhaps more dense by putting them onto their side in 4U (maybe 5U..not sure how tall a M1 Mini is). I don't know to what degree cooling is an issue, where you don't want the exhaust of one feeding the inlet of another.
    - 5y ago

mciancia 5y ago

W8 what >>> 699/(24*0.65) 44.80769230769231 days Nitro card obviously costs a bit, but for ROI on mac itself is closer to 6 weeks than 6 months ;)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
riazrizvi 5y ago
> 699/(24*0.65) * proportion of hours the product is unused
- dougmwne 5y ago
  Yup, sorry I was assuming 40 hours of utilization a week, forgot to state that.
  - luhn 5y ago
    Unfortunately Mac instances have a minimum billing duration of 24 hours, so even if you only use it 8am-5pm, you'd be billed for 8am-8am. (Not AWS's fault, it's part of the Apple EULA.)
    - konschubert 5y ago
      What is apple's motivation?
      - 988747 5y ago
        Probably they are deliberately trying to make M2 EC2 instances expensive to avoid all their Mac Minis being bought out by AWS, they get higher profit margins selling to retail customers.
      - lucky_cloud 5y ago
        Money. Disabling a Mac for 24 hours after 10 minutes of use means you have to buy much more hardware than you'd have to if a single Mac could be utilized by many people for short periods of time. Some users would use a single Mac for days/weeks/months but others will want to boot, run a build, and be done. The actual work might take 5 minutes or 3 hours but you pay for a day no matter what. Days where you're doing the same short-lived task many times won't be as expensive per build, but if you just want to do a nightly build, you're paying for months or years and utilizing a fraction of the compute time you're buying.

monocasa 5y ago

There's a rumor going around that they're heavily discounting arm64 instances in order to put negotiating pressure on the x86 manufacturers. 'Nice arch you have there, would be a shame if people stopped caring.' I would be careful about estimating beyond how they view arm64 given that these are the highest perf/core arm64 devices they can put their hands on.

Rafuino 5y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if they're pricing them below cost like they have done with Alexa products.
hoffspot 5y ago
I think they are providing those discounts to promote their own silicon, the Graviton3 chip. You definitely get an execution discount in Lambda for selecting arm versus x86 on that basis.
- monocasa 5y ago
  The rumor is that their own silicon isn't really that much better on perf/watt, but they're discounting it as a multi pronged effort to put pressure on the x86 vendors. If it turns out it's a lot of pressure and it kills x86, then they've commodified their complement. If it's just a threat, then they have a better seat at the negotiating table.

tyingq 5y ago

"EC2 M1 Mac instances are powered by...The Mac mini, featuring M1 SoC with 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, 16 GiB of memory" So not $699, but $899, since it's 16GB of memory.

mciancia 5y ago
For retail, true. I would be surprised if amazon actually pays that much
- ksec 5y ago
  Normal whole sale price, at best would be something like $799.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Based on what?
    - sgjohnson 5y ago
      Based on Apple not giving a shit what volume you’re buying, the price is the price. Maybe the rules are a bit different for Amazon, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
      - GhettoComputers 5y ago
        Based on what? https://www.apple.com/us-hed/store https://www.apple.com/us-hed/store https://images.apple.com/business-docs/VPP_Business_Guide.pdf https://images.apple.com/business-docs/VPP_Business_Guide.pd... https://www.apple.com/retail/business/ https://www.apple.com/retail/business/ > Our Small Business Experts are ready to help. They’ll advise you on the devices to fit your budget, including special pricing,* and find you the best financing option. All backed by ongoing support to give you much-needed peace of mind. > * Special pricing available to qualified customers. To learn more about how to start qualifying toward special pricing, talk to a Business Team member in a store or give us a call at 1-800-854–3680.

danielmarkbruce 5y ago

I'd guess they pay much more than this due to some licensing/t&c issue. I haven't read them but I speculate that they same something to the effect of you can't make it accessible to the public as a shared, paid for resource etc and that amazon has a separate agreement and they pay more.

AyyWS 5y ago
Thinking back to the VMware service provider licensing I saw, Apple probably charges a subscription model that would make your eyes bleed. I was shocked anyone could afford to sell a public cloud offering that used VMware technology after seeing their pricing.

davej 5y ago

Another datapoint is that Scaleway charges €.10 per hour ($.113) for their M1 instances, this is roughly one-sixth of what AWS is charging.

tyingq 5y ago
The Scaleway offering has 8GB versus the AWS 16GB. Not that it changes the math that much, but it's worth noting.

ineedasername 5y ago

That is a premium price if you're using it 40hr/week. Although, asumming they're available for custom AMI, maybe the value-add use case for this is to be able to have multiple custom AMIs for different dev environments and scenarios to rapidly spin up what you need. Specifically for testing with multiple versions of MacOS: you could develop the code and then test on a custom AMI to make sure it ran in the version of MacOS, no need to have multiple systems setup. (Although I don't know much about Mac dev-- does Apple provide tools to do such testing already without running multiple OS versions?) Otherwise, I guess it's all just about convenience.

JCM9 5y ago

This is really not looking at the math in the right way for those that are the target market. If you just want an M1 instance just because sure just go buy one and keep in plugged in all the time in your basement. That’s not the target market. Imagine you’re developing an app in regulated market and need to have Macs for CI/CD There’s a lot more to this than just keeping some Mac mini’s under your desk. How are you managing physical security in your environment? Do you have all the associated certifications in place? Can we see your last audit? Who’s fixing this when something breaks? What about your in house IT folks that done want to build out a whole new operation to manage Macs now? What if next week you need 5x as many instances but only for 2 days? That’s what your paying for in the price here, not just the cost of the instance itself and power. When faced with all those requirements and challenges the pricing looks inexpensive.

nojito 5y ago
Apple already offers this for Devs. https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/ https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/
- oblio 5y ago
  If you're already using AWS it's a no-brainer to avoid a second vendor if you don't have to use them for other reasons.
- mattferderer 5y ago
  So does MS with Azure Devops & GitHub: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/ecosystems/xcode?view=azure-devops https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/ecos... https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/pipelines-xcode/blob/master/azure-pipelines.yml https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/pipelines-xcode/blob/master... It's great that there are finally multiple ways to do this without needing to buy a bunch of Macs just for compiling.
  - xvilka 5y ago
    Still not on GitHub Actions though: https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/2187 https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/2187

odonnellryan 5y ago

There is other hardware in the stack. How much does that cost?