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.
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.