In a very substantial number of enterprises; the cost of procuring, validating, installing, powering, cooling, fire-rating, commissioning, maintaining, writing up, handing over, revising, reporting, auditing, approving, and very occasionally actually executing those hot<>cold standby procedures, exceeds the entire purchase cost of the cold standby unit.

Hell, the company will spend more money on agonizing over the question of whether we should buy a $1500 Mac in the first place.

Besides, if your cloud spend is already a fuckton, $24 per day extra is not going to make you blink.

for real. I used to work at a large company in highly regulated industry with lots of scrutiny on our books. The number of meetings and program proposals it would take just to get finance to agree to the capex of standing up a dozen mac minis would easily dwarf the hardware cost. That's before you get to the actual work. From my experience, saying "we're just going to increase our EC2 spend" is a no-brainer