The rest of us is still running on racks of Mac Minis
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/cloud-hosted-mac-agent...
> Please be aware that during this preview, our Mac hardware is hosted in third party datacenters in the United States and your build and release data could cross geopolitical lines. After each build completes, its macOS VM is reimaged, leaving no trace of your data on the agent. For more information, see where VSTS data is stored. Our Mac datacenters will expand to other geographies soon
>Agents that run macOS images are provisioned on Mac pros with a 3 core CPU, 14 GB of RAM, and 14 GB of SSD disk space. These agents always run in the US irrespective of the location of your Azure DevOps organization.
And Apple's EULA makes them basically unusable as short term rented servers, there's a minimum of 24h which is ridiculous.
But a lot of projects have tests they want to run on their target platforms.
If you build your Linux release on Windows, you might accidentally release a .zip where your binaries aren't executable. If you set up cross-compiling to Mac 5 years ago and tested it then, perhaps in the meantime code signing has become mandatory. If you build and test on Linux and release to Windows, perhaps you'll get tripped up by filenames becoming case-insensitive.
Some projects are keen on testing on all target platforms to flush out issues like that.
”(ii) each lease period must be for a minimum period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours;
(iii) during the lease period, the End User Lessee must have sole and exclusive use and control of the Apple Software and the Apple-branded hardware ”
https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSMonterey.pdf (Section 3.)