No it's not. Do the math, it is a serious rip off, waaaaay over priced.

Statements like that need a TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) calculation to back them up.

Both sides need to be doing this. So many un-cited "AWS is cheaper overall" estimations, with hand-wavey "but you have to hire more IT staff" as their justification.

Plus, articles which do the TCO calcuations (there was one recently that pointed out a 200% premium for AWS) are still derided because people really prefer to argue with their feelings on this topic.

We get it, you don't want to run your own infrastructure. How much is that distaste worth to your company?

You realize you can install Parallels on a Mac and create multiple Mac VMs, right? So just run the base OS on the hardware and never screw with it and run test/build VMs on it.

Keenly. Now think about what happens as you go from being a one person show doing everything on your laptop to a larger operation. You have servers in the cloud, build in the cloud, and tests in the cloud. You can do everything for every other platform that way, nicely locked down on a secure network protected with firewalls, access controlled with ephemeral IAM credentials, nice CloudFormation/Terraform to manage everything — and someone says we need to have a build runner on one dude’s Mac because we can’t treat Apple platforms like Windows or Linux. Now you need a VPN or other network holes, you’re delayed & paying network egress pulling stuff down over the internet, the owner of that Mac has to be careful about installing system updates to avoid breaking the build, etc.

Unless everyone is working pro bono, the amount of time you spend on ops will pay for a lot of Mac mini hours and takes away time which could be going towards actual product improvements.