Why not set up the servers in EU where likely this is non enforceable? If you bought a Mac mini you bought it, apple cannot tell you if you can/cannot lease it out. Imagine if Mercedes was trying to tell you that you can only rent your car(which you paid for) for a minimum of 7 days or something equally stupid. It's insane.

That might be entirely unenforceable in the U.S. as well, but I doubt most companies are clamoring to go up against Apple's lawyers to prove it, and those that might (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) so they could include it in their offerings might have to worry about Apple throwing even more resources at the case to make it extremely unprofitable to do so, and also that Apple might specifically do stuff to make it harder afterwards for that company. That applies equally as well to companies in the EU.

I'm not sure if it's accurate, but I and many others see Apple as a fairly vindictive company, from stories about how Jobs operated to how they treat developers that speak out. My impression is that it's part of their DNA now.

The reason why it’s enforceable was because of psystar.

I don't know about relevant EU law here, but even if Apple's terms are not enforceable in the EU, when you sell to e.g. US customers you would be subject to US law anyway, and Apple could go after you in the US. It doesn't matter that the servers are located in the EU.

In addition to legal barriers there are also technical ones. You have to run a scrub job to delete all data by prior tenants on a change of tenants. That job neccessarily has to overwrite the entire SSD and thus adds both wear to the device as well as takes time (around 30-60 minutes according to [0]). The SSD is soldered onto the PCB so it would be hard to replace it with something virtualized (or smaller that'd take less time to overwrite).

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562532

So you won't be able to rent out one device to dozens of tenants per day who each use it for ten minutes or so while ensuring inter-tenant isolation.

Last, those Apple rules might as well be non-enforceable legally, but Apple might still retaliate by e.g. removing apps from their store that were uploaded by tenants of those EU companies.

Theoretically you don't need scrub entire disk but just drop FDE encryption key in < 1s

Setting up servers in the EU and using them in the US would introduce a ton of latency.

Besides that, I forgot where it came out about the amount of money Amazon retail makes on it’s dedicated Apple store. Also, Apple and Amazon Video have special deals where you can do in app purchases of video within the app on iOS devices and the purchases are charged directly to your Prime account. No one else can do that for physical goods.

Apple and Amazon have been chummy since Jobs licensed the “one click patent” when the iTunes Music Store opened in 2003.