> Why stipulate this unless they want to ... inflate usage arbitrarily

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.

> Why stipulate this unless they want to hobble reasonable use-cases or inflate usage arbitrarily.

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

But only as a second-order effect. This will lead to needing to buy more Apple hardware to support such a service but it's the service provider that rakes in the cash (or doesn't because people don't need 24h) as a result of this EULA.

Surely this just means that more people won't bother and we're back to hackintoshes or upgrading old Apple hardware. Making something uneconomical isn't a great strategy to drive growth.