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. <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/</a><p>They don't yet display any reservation pricing for mac1 instances, but they do offer a "savings plan." <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/pricing/</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>You can also buy the equivalent Mac Mini for $1,899.
An interesting offering from Amazon that is crippled by Apple and MacStadium, who deserve to be raked over the coals for their recent EULA changes. Just read the post on MacStadium's blog: <a href="https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vindication" rel="nofollow">https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...</a><p>Under the new agreement, you must:<p>* Rent to only one organization<p>* Rent for 24 hours at the minimum<p>* Use it for some set of "approved" development work<p>…among other restrictions. And Brian Stucki is <i>celebrating</i> these changes?! This is a sick joke. You're enjoying a significantly tightened EULA that benefits nobody but yourself, a EULA that means that a single CI build now costs $26 on AWS instead of 50 cents; one that means that more than half the comments here are confused why AWS is ripping people off.<p>Shame on you Brian Stucki, shame on you MacStadium, and shame on you Apple. Your EULA changes are absurdly hostile to developers, since now they're either going to have to buy Macs themselves or rent from MacStadium-like services. Shame on you both for colluding together for making this situation horrible and then having the guts to write that blog post.<p>I can't believe I'm saying this, but Amazon, I feel so sorry for you. You didn't deserve this.
"The instances are launched as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum tenancy of 24 hours"<p>These are just rentable Mac Minis, not VMs. This will have only one use case and that's for build servers. Unless anyone has scalable AppleScript jobs to run?
It seems like this directly ties back to Apple’s recent policy changes [0].<p>The details line up exactly, including:<p>- You must rent them for at least 24 hours at a time.
- You must rent out one machine per end user.<p>I just feel sorry for all the smaller providers who have done this for years.<p>I wonder if this was Apple’s update prompting AWS, or AWS pushing Apple to make the change — or both.<p>[0]: <a href="https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vindication" rel="nofollow">https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...</a>
I find it disgusting that Apple can force people to jump though these hoops while paying them a huge premium for sub-standard hardware[1] so that these people can develop for their platform.<p>Not only are they bleeding the developers at build, test and sale time. They are providing a shitty experience while doing it.<p>Of course from an economic point of view they are right! For businesses it still makes sense to do this most of the time (especially since webapps are crippled on iOS) due to the large user base. If they didn't have that user base I'd bet very few people would tolerate this crap.<p>This is one of the handful of reasons that I boycott Apple, I find their business practices morally unacceptable.<p>[1] Sub-standard for CI/server use cases.
GitHub has been doling out tiny macOS runners in virtual machines for a bit now [1] (seemingly in violation of macOS SLA), and these were hosted on MacStadium [2]! So for MacStadium to come out and pretend they were following the rules the entire time is disappointing.<p>[1] <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200511183317if_/https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/835#issuecomment-625619583" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20200511183317if_/https://github....</a><p>[2] <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20201108115438/https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/actions/reference/specifications-for-github-hosted-runners" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20201108115438/https://docs.githu...</a>
MacOS AMI images, EBS disks, VPC networking, 10gbps ENA. Bare metal only, Intel available now, M1 coming soon. This is another game changer.<p>The post says they’re based on Mac Minis, but also use AWS Nitro. Is this custom AWS specific hardware?
> As always, I asked the EC2 team for access to an instance in order to put it through its paces. The instances are available in Dedicated Host form, so I started by allocating a host.<p>Dedicated Hosts (<a href="https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/</a>) are more pricey than virtual instances (most EC2) and Dedicated Instances. Not sure if it's possible to containerize/sell as many virtual instances off a dedicated server without paying a separate high license fee to Apple.
No mention of pricing that I can see, and I don't see it on ec2instances, AWS's pricing page, or the spot-pricing widget on the console.<p>Am I missing something?<p>Edit: And the reserved instances widget (I was going to guess based off this cost) just flat out breaks when you pick mac. I guess we're still in the "If you have to ask, it's too expensive" stage, or something.
I’m working on <a href="https://screenplay.dev" rel="nofollow">https://screenplay.dev</a>, where test every change against a battery of open source iOS apps (Wikipedia, signal, etc). We started on GitHub actions, but found it much cheaper to buys ~4 Mac mini’s and run them in the office. It takes a little love to keep them up to date and stable (maybe an hour a week), but in return we get cheap, debuggable Mac computer. I like that more offerings are appearing, but at this price, we’ll stick to our furnace of Mac mini’s for now.
At a first glance this sounds exciting: We use a lot of different versions of macOS and Xcode for building our apps. We have one dedicated Mac, and about 5 VMs on a second Mac that we use for building our software. Keeping everything up to date is a pain.<p>So if we could just rent Mac VMs that would be nice. But this is pretty much useless. You get only a single machine for a really high price.<p>Theoretically I could run VMWare on the rented machine, to run multiple virtual copies of macOS, but then I'd be doing all the maintenance that I don't want to do.
Awesome.<p>I'll still keep a Mac mini since I like Logic, but this is very very good for say a Unity or Flutter developer who needs to deploy apps to iOS
Given how M1 is technically impressive (not only CPU but also for Neural Engine), one can dream Apple will resurrect XServe with multi-socket later versions of their silicon.<p>This kind of performance with this kind of power efficiency would be game changer in data center.<p>Looking forward to Graviton3 as well.
I can't seem to find pricing for this - anyone understand AWS better than me?<p>It's not listed on their dedicated host pricing page at <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/</a> , and if I go through the web console to create an instance, I'm prompted to create a Mac dedicated host without any indication of how much I'd be paying.
This seems 100% about building in XCode, which leaves me wondering why it's being offered as an EC2 instance instead of some higher order build tool. Is there a use case I'm missing?
Interesting. I guess it's not the first but does the MacOS EULA really allow for this? Or does AWS have a special license? Which would beg the question as for the need of real hardware. (Sure you can break a EULA but at some point it would violate ToS and Apple could easily block updates).<p>> The instances are launched as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum tenancy of 24 hours.<p>This almost sounds like they are using first sale doctrine to just lend it for a day. Like I can lend a movie but I can't make my own movie theater (right?).<p>Also I'm very curious of these are in-tack macs or shucked and put in a frankenstein case of dozens.
Boycott Apple completely. How did we go from open development to some overpriced, only half decent and walled mess that's now worth $2 trillion? Shame.
This seems a bit half-baked and niche at the moment. You have to rent a whole machine for 24 hours, which is expensive and prevents on-demand scaling. I wonder if Apple and Amazon are just dipping their toes in to prepare for a deeper collaboration in future.
The thing I still don't understand with Mac, even if you were to virtualize it, is that VNC is abysmal compared to RDP from Microsoft. How are people actually /using/ this hardware (short of command line x-code builds)?
You cannot use these as servers.<p>You can only use this for: "Permitted Developer services."<p>This is defined as "continuous integration services, including but not limited to software development, building software from source, automated testing during software development, and running necessary developer tools to support such activities."<p>(from: <a href="https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vindication" rel="nofollow">https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...</a> )<p>So, no servers and no hosting stuff, and no personal use of desktop applications like Photoshop etc
Interesting that they’ve mentioned M1 support. That makes me wonder if VMWare is going to get together with Apple and make a ESXi port to Apple Silicon, as the Mac Mini and Mac Pro were long standing on the HWL since they were the only rackable devices on the market legally allowed to virtualize macOS. I’m fairly certain that Apple used it internally for testing.<p>(AWS will probably at least attempt a port of their Nitro hypervisor to M1 as well, since it’d make the machines infinitely easier to manage at scale since Macs no longer have a NetBoot or Internet Recovery option).
Interesting. The deciding factor for our family when buying a Mac or Windows 10 device for my wife’s small business was actually my need to upload iOS apps for review by apple.<p>I’m an after hours hobby developer, and use a windows desktop. It’s powerful and has all the tooling I require. And it supports all the games I want to play from the steam store.<p>So - I think apple will lose a <i>little</i> bit of business from people like me with this announcement, as I’m sure we would not have purchased a Mac when we did only a few months ago.
I wonder if these can easily run linux AMIs. Since OSX doesn't have native containerization, our CI system for mac builds runs linux on mac minis and runs osx VMs inside of linux since you're allowed to run osx vms on linux if linux is running on mac hardware. So in an ideal world, we'd run our own linux AMI on the baremetal mac instances and run OSX in VMs.<p>I'm sure it's possible of course, but I wonder how painful it would be to setup. Fighting EFI/secureboot? Some other bootloader?
I bought a Mac mini for iOS development and gee am I regretting it.<p>Especially this these devices cannot be booted unattended - if it ever powers off, I need to: take it out of the closet, plug it in my desktop, turn off file encryption, put it back in the closet, boot it, VNC in, and finally turn on file encryption again
How can this be viable cost wise. With their minimum billing of $1.083 an hour, and a minimum of 24 hour billing, unless you want this for a short time only, these costs are way too high. macstasium.com has much lower costs for this.
Lots of folks in this thread seem to be unaware that other companies offer Mac mini hosting, at less than one tenth the cost. If you don’t need the full AWS ecosystem for your workload it’s worth doing some research.
Seems like a major new growth vertical for AWS and gives Apple the ability to vet this [if its successful] for potentially launching their own offering one day.
Someone commented on a previous thread that the M1 Mac mini hadn't changed form factors despite a reduction in component size, lamenting that it had retained the same size and shape as its on-Intel predecessors.<p>This is the reason.<p>Datacenter customers (really, any customers racking minis) likely represent a meaningful share of Mac mini sales. Changing the form factor would mean these high-value customers would need to re-tool their racks to support a new design. Even Apple is not immune to the pressure of large customers.
This could be huge for the ecosystem. For example, there are ways to use third-party iMessage clients (e.g. through Matrix) that require you to keep a server running on your local macOS machine signed in to your AppleID - this could let developers create hosted versions of those services
how does this affect companies like buddybuild that offer CI/CD for ios? has it commoditized them, or does it give them a lower cost way to run their cluster?
<a href="https://www.techotn.com/top-5-hdmi-2-1-monitors/" rel="nofollow">https://www.techotn.com/top-5-hdmi-2-1-monitors/</a>
the next level monitors for gaming
AWS is playing the long game and betting that M1 based servers start to take off. It's very risky (and expensive) but it would pay off if they are correct.<p>They would be first in the market and be years ahead of their competition.
Now when will macOS support native containerization?<p>note: see <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21333408" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21333408</a>
AWS have pretty heavily modified "pc"s they use to fit all their requirements for most of their servers.<p>I dont see Amazon going out and buying 50.000 Mac minis and racking them.<p>Do you think Apple is delivering heavily customised and rackable "Mac mini" servers to AWS?<p>Or is there a 3rd party converting Mac mini suitable for AWS.<p>Or is AWS actually rack Mac mini computers?<p>I wonder if this will be an AWS exclusive for N amount of time?
I am sure other cloud providers will want their own Mac "servers" now.