But the 24hr thing kills it for me. I will never get 24 hours use out of it. Maybe a few hours. Why am I paying for the other 21 hours?
Maybe someone can wrap this SaaS in a other Saas and sell timeshares in a virtual Mac.
Unsure if you've seen the comments elsewhere in the thread but in case you haven't and this is a genuine question - because Apple's EULA forces Amazon to do this.
Is the answer simply "Because they can and they like money?"
That's exactly it. If you could rent Macs by the minute, you wouldn't need to own Mac hardware anymore to build Mac apps, and the cloud provider wouldn't need to own as much.
It seems this is Apple's sole motivation when it comes to anything developer related, which seems odd considering their goal is to commodotize software to sell their hardware - you'd think they wouldn't keep making it harder to make software for their platforms
That's precisely what the EULA prevents, otherwise Amazon would happily sell you smaller slice of time.
Yes but I'm more likely to vierualize on my more powerful and better value PC. The EULA is rather hard to enforce and I don't have any moral qualms in this particular case.
People always do this on HN. "I can only think of two things, so those are the only two things that can possibly exist."
How about a render farm? If your company only produces three or four videos a year, why build a render farm that sits idle for half the year?
You mean have opinions and open discussion? "I can only think of two things" doesn't mean "there are only two things exactly and everyone else is wrong". Welcome to the Internet, I see you are new here.
No, dismiss the possibility that there may be things that they don't know about or understand.
"I can only think of two things" doesn't mean "there are only two things exactly and everyone else is wrong".
But that's precisely what he said: "exactly two usecases for this service" He didn't write "I can only think of..." You're making stuff up.
Welcome to the Internet
I shall say the same to you, since I've been online since before the internet, back when you had to manually route e-mail, and it took a week to get a message from New York to Paris, if you were lucky.
I see you are new here.
Welcome to HN. I see you're new here. Be sure to read the rules about unhelpful snarky responses.
1. You are a big company who needs Mac CI and your IT department has a strict "Cloud Only" restriction.
2. You are a developer for a cross-platform App who doesn't own a mac, but needs access to a real mac every few weeks or months for debugging/releasing.