I do not understand why Apple hates developers. There are many developers that need Mac machines for CI/CD, but Apple doesn't provide any reasonable solution.

That’s what XCode Cloud (now in beta for some users) is designed for.

Apple gives themselves and GitHub special deals, which I guess is what they feel to be a reasonable solution.

How else are they supposed to force you to buy more units?

Apple hates it's users. Why should devs be any different?

They aren't just firing up a virtual machine on over-provisioned hardware, they're dedicating an entire bare metal machine to you. It is in their interests to make that worthwhile commercially.

These are Apple's terms that Amazon is following, not the other way around. You are getting bare metal that you have to reserve for a minimum of 24 hours because that's how Apple allows it to be licensed not because that's what Amazon thought would make the most sense.

I have such a hard time imagining what sick twisting legal crap allows Apple to dictate terms like this. Another example is Nvidia explicitly dis-allowing their consumer GPUs to be used in data-centers. It's wild to me that company's can just make up whatever terms of use they feel like & we have to accept that.

Edit: oh hello, i'm at -4! Anyone care to defend your outrage at my outrage? What makes this seem at all ok? This seems so fundamentally screwy to me. Questions like how Apple is allowed to ban other browsers[1] show related type of confusion over the vast ecosystem control that seems to be spreading, but there at least there's some cloudy App Store Apple clearly retains some rights of control over.

First-sale rights in America is fairly narrow in what they permit, but in America at least, there's very much been an idea that consumers become owners of the things they buy. It feels like a modern regression that there have been so many asterisks added to this straightforward & obvious right.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29419825

> Edit: oh hello, i'm at -4! Anyone care to defend your outrage at my outrage?

The leadership sitting on a board with a mandatory retirement age at 65 who is 64 will lobby all involved to change that rule to keep going to 70. The terms are negotiable. You would have to think in our time of climate crisis that using 7 or 8 hours of a 24 hour slot and wasting all that energy for 16 hours is not something the law firm that negotiated the terms would be embarrassed by. To make it right, a regulator could force Apple to limit the rental minimum slot time according a labor board's idea of a programming work day at 7 to 16 hours and not 24. Write a letter and email your politician?

> I have such a hard time imagining what sick twisting legal crap allows Apple to dictate terms like this. Another example is Nvidia explicitly dis-allowing their consumer GPUs to be used in data-centers. It's wild to me that company's can just make up whatever terms of use they feel like & we have to accept that.

As far as I understand it, those EULA agreements aren't enforceable in the EU.

That being said, NVIDIA don't have any obligation to sell to you in bulk if they find out you're installing consumer GPUs in a datacenter, so there's obviously an incentive to follow them.

I don't think they're enforceable in the US either. Once you have it you have it. This is what a sale legally is, it terminates the rights of the former owner. They can refuse to sell to you if they think you'll do something with it, but if you get it from them by lying or from a second hand sale they can't do anything.

For software you can also have person A buy something, then give it to person B who didn't click a license agreement. But this isn't really necessary -- the case where Microsoft got slapped for motherboard locking Windows XP and had to undo it shows that if software is integral to the operation of a device rights to its use are transferred along with the sale of the item, much to the chagrin of CNC companies everywhere who have yet to be challenged on this.

It's relatively common for companies to use shell companies or employees to buy hardware off the record for investigative purposes. Place I used to work at would investigate buyers for this reason (difference being we really did give our customers free reign with the equipment, we just had to try to stop fraud and other things).

You run around this by designing your hardware to only work with your provided software and require the user accept the T&C. If they find out your violating it they can terminate your license and, effectively, make your chips bricks.

You are legally allowed to reverse engineer them and provide your own software but Nvidia pretty much buys whole departments at universities to have the bleeding edge of hardware obfuscation. The stuff they do to make the chips inscrutable is absolutely bonkers.

This is what the MS case was about with mobo locking. Refuse to run if they think you violated license. No, they can not do that. It just needs to be enforced.

Also they can easily claim that consumer cards aren't specced for 24/7 loads, thus installing in servers voids the warranty.

The term I would imagine applies to software not to the hardware

I run VMware esxi on my Mac mini with 64G of memory to create plenty of macos and Linux vms. Are you saying this is against the TOS?

AIUI there's no EULA problems virtualizing macOS on Mac hardware.

This is about a minimum 24-hour rental of Mac Minis tho.

It's entirely possible that the 24hr minimum is driven by the operational overhead, not just the licensing terms. Since this is bare metal, re-provisioning between customer sessions might require some level of human interaction, and this needs to be baked into the cost model of such a service.

Amazon openly admits it is because of licensing terms.

From https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/#Pricing:

"Billing for EC2 Mac instances is per second with a 24-hour minimum allocation period to comply with the Apple macOS Software License Agreement"

Thanks, I missed that. Looks like Apple added the section on leasing (3. Leasing for Permitted Developer Services) in the SLA for Big Sur in November 2020.

I bet a part is that apple genuinely doesn’t want to deal with MacOS being a server OS so they want a little bit of “are you sure?” Requirements in there.

A potentially bigger reason (for requiring 24hr) is to incentivize people who need a max for small bursts (eg build server, testing a website with safari etc) to just buy macs.

I imagine a reason to require bare-metal hosting because everyone is lauding apple on how snappy and lively the M1 is and if they’re split between N number of VMs then you may have a worse experience and apple is protecting that.

Because they want you to buy your own macs.

For now.. but they'll have their own cloud hosting (xcode cloud is a test). The AWS contract expires soon..

My guess is that its market research shows that for a profitable number of people, the 24-hour requirement isn't a big deal.

It's not like Amazon doesn't have the ability or experience to research business decisions before they're made.

It's an Apple requirement (it applies to all rent-a-mac type services), I doubt Amazon would mind splitting it shorter (like they do with everything else) if they could.

It probably helps selling a false narrative to shareholders. "Look at how many hours our hardware was rented for!" with no regard for how many hours were actually spent doing work.

That makes no sense. Apple doesn't rent hardware.