Even if you DO buy a lot of expensive hardware, it’s a giant pain in the ass. There are no good rackmount solutions and so we ended up with a room full of expensive “trashcan” macs and they were STILL the biggest drag on our build infra.

This has been an issue for decades. Twenty years ago I was doing grid/HPC computing at Sun and there were a lot of bioinformatics firms that used macs and wanted compute clusters of them. It was a huge problem even then.

It's possible to mount the trashcan mac pros with unofficial mounts, its just awkward and definitely not intended [0]. You can also mount iMac Pros [1].

[0] https://twitter.com/brianstucki/status/800778773998145536

[1] https://www.macstadium.com/imacpro

It's also possible to outright buy Mac Pro Rack, a $6500 full depth 4U server, that is 1CPU all the way up, that offer neither any redundancy nor any remote management, if that kind of trash matters at all.

The lack of dual power supplies and remote power on/off and good PXE support is crazy for a rack mount computer (won’t even dignify it by calling it a server).

The rack mounted Mac Pro isn’t targeted at the server market, it’s targeted at creative industries (i.e, film/tv production, audio recording, etc) where you’d have it rackmounted into a flight case as part of a mobile post-production unit.

That's a fat machine

What? I can use online CI services to compile for MacOS? TIL.

I think Unity does it (sort of). But yea...

I thought it just popped out an Xcode project for mac/ios builds.

Unity does sort of do it, but even then, the result is not the same as compiling on OSX - in particular, I've noticed differences in the shaders emitted, around HDR/bloom.

You could build a hackintosh instead. Pain to get software set up just right but when it is it works great.

It is not a technical problem, but a legal one. It is that they do not want to expose themselves by violating agreements with Apple.

Do you want to be the genius that saved a few dollars on hardware with a Hackintosh only to get the company sued?

Exactly. If you don't care about Apple ToS, you can cross-compile on GNU/Linux just fine without ever touching macOS.

I hadn’t considered this at all mainly because I haven’t heard of apple taking legal actions against people promoting hackintosh related things and methods. Though I guess it could become a problem for a company.

It's only because most hackintoshers don't make money by selling them.

It also takes a lot of time to setup so hackintoshing will never gain mainstream numbers.

It's too time consuming and risky for a company.

There is a large rate of failure and larger fix times for issues, as well.

I forget if there’s a better way to describe it but usually if there’s going to be a failure, it’ll be at the beginning (unless you’re constantly updating software which does have some risk)

If it’s too risky I’d assume the company would have enough money to not have to resort to building hackintoshes

Of you are thinking of a hackintosh just to compile, then it would probably be easier to just virtualize it.

https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

Sorry, since when is a few hundred dollars “extremely expensive”?

A few? I was just looking at getting MacOS hardware so I could do iPhone builds of a Flutter app. The bottom-end Mac Mini is $800 with 8 GB of RAM, and $1400 with 32 GB, which is what people on forums were recommending for running XCode properly. Is that what you'd call a few?

Looking at System76's equivalent mini, it's $555 for the low end, which has the same RAM and a faster, newer processor. Going to 32 GB takes it all the way to $700, or half what Apple's charging. So yes, "extremely expensive" is what it seems like to me.

Especially given that it should be entirely unnecessary. Just let me do a cross-platform build!

I came here to say more or less the same thing... but for people who aren't native english speakers: a "few hundred" means $300, perhaps $350. Apple doesnt sell anything this cheap, and if you're comparing used Apple hardware to new PC hardware, thats a bit unfair.

well, maybe $400, $500, and maybe you could stretch it to $600 but I agree $800 is well beyond the reach of "a few hundred"

For me $500 and up becomes 'several hundred'.

The Mac mini amazingly has user expandable RAM. Crucial sells kits for up to 64GB. It is still too expensive a machine got what you get.

Only the old Mac Minis from 2012 and before have user expandable RAM, the newer ones have the RAM and storage soldered on.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205041

uhm.. no... the 2018 went back to expandable RAM https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Mac+mini+Late+2018+Teardown/...

It is a bit of a pain and took me about 45 minutes, but I was going slow.

Compared to IBM computers, they are overpriced.

Of course, if you want to test your software on Macs, you'll have to buy their hardware sooner or later, but even then you have to set up the build on the system instead of keeping it as pure test system.

If you do it for your day job, it's probably justified, but if you are just a hobbyist, then even hundreds of dollars are expensive. Especially if you live in a poorer area or are still a student.

The insult is that the mac you "you have to buy" is just the same Intel CPU, AMD GPU, Micron RAM and Samsung SSD you already own which can build and virtualise the 10+ other platforms.

IBM computers!? Have not heard for quite awhile. Thought they quit the PC world to Lenovo for quite sometimes la.

The word PC existed long before IBM called one specific model "IBM PC" and since that specific model is no longer in widespread use it makes no sense to refer to regular non mac computers as IBM computers.

I've been part of the Apple cult for a while now. I've even started to bulk at the price / benefit ratio ever since 2017.

(Balk not bulk. Just FYI.)

Autospell on mobile

Maybe you should ask "where", not "when".