Presumably they have determined that lost hardware sales would offset any increased app or service sales from allowing VMs on non-Apple hardware.

Though I don't actually know what platform macOS and iOS VMs run on in GitHub Actions and Azure pipelines.

Edit: apparently Azure pipelines uses Mac pros. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/age...

Back in 2007-2009 Nividia shipped defective GPUs to everyone, including Apple.

Every MacBook Pro from that era was affected. Nvidia and Apple couldn't come to an agreement to who should pay for the bad GPUs. It cost Apple a lot of money and Nvidia din't seem to care.

After that, Apple slowly started removing Nvidia GPUs from their products. AMD also shipped bad GPU's around ~2011 and Apple went back to Nvidia for a generation or two until AMD sorted their issues out. From Then on it was AMD GPUs only until the M1.

I only found one article about this from back in 2008. It was definitely a thing back then, I just can't find it.... But indeed likely second fiddle to the gpu issues around the same time, I totally forgot about that.

Here you go: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

Chipset Model: Intel Iris Pro

Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M

This Macbook pro was a free upgrade from Apple after I'd had 3 mainboard replacements because they'd had faulty GPU's on my 2011 MBP ( see https://web.archive.org/web/20170119031155/https://people.ca... for background) - Basically after I found out what was going on I took my 'repaired' machine home and stress tested it until it failed. After the very quick repeated failures Apple decided to replace my machine completely.

Cos been almost 10 years since apple ditched Nvidia.

And it's not like Apple would need to verify anything. They can grant the license, but say that the only supported configuration is Mac, it's up to VMWare and such to provide the support if they want to say that you can run OS X on their platform.

I remember seeing an article [1] proclaiming that more than 50% of Azure's workloads are on Linux, so I'm guessing their hypervisors are running an optimised Linux kernel somewhat.

1: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23156222

No. Last time I poked into Xcode Cloud, it was running on Ice Lake server Xeons, which didn't ship on any Mac.

See previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29419610

I often see posted that using VMs violates the agreement, has someone been sued or something?

“Has an individual running a few VMs ever lost a lawsuit?” Is more what I mean.

Obviously fighting Apple would be terrible, but has an individual ever run into trouble?

Do you mean they allow VMs on iPads already?

From a current financial/business standpoint, Apple considers itself a hardware company that includes their custom OS with their hardware. From that angle it makes no sense to allow it to run on non-Apple hardware. Sort of like Sony being ok with the PS OS running on Xbox.

Apparently not, and because they subsidise the software using hardware sales, they don't want to decouple the two.

The Sony/PS situation is exactly the opposite: Sony subsidizes hardware using software (games) sales. Which is why they don't allow you to use different software on a PS.

2: Control over the platform.

They don’t charge for their OS because it is attached to their hardware.

Have a crack and you can probably get a macOS VM running on whatever hardware you have in short order.

Also you can run iMessage without mac if you really want to.

It's possible my data is out of date though because iMessage spam is real & I'm not sure how that's done if it needs a valid private key that Apple can ban.

It is true that Apple employs some efforts to prevent/discourage you from using those services illegitimately, but using iMessage and FaceTime from a Hackintosh has been possible for years, largely without jumping through any hoops.

I can be and it’s not hard to do. I assume your referring to breaking the licence agreement?

I’d bet on just not testing that use case because they don’t care enough about it. Thus not catching and never fixing any arising issue or regression.

I'm not locked in to the Apple ecosystem: I can use it on my Linux desktop, or switch to an Android phone at any time.

It's solving problems in my life. I have a calendar, it's synced across all my devices, I have no fear of lock-in, and I have full control over my data without fearing about my account getting locked (as I pay for Workspace). Same for email, same for contacts.

What's the poison there?

Do you think my data would be safer if I used UnknownCalMailCompany Inc, a company with zero track record in terms of privacy, safety, or long-term viability?

I value being able to ctrl+f my thousands of meetings across several years.

Fortunately, many of the rest of us live in the real world where there are more than just those two options.

And yes concretely, the two options if you want cloud are either the usual suspects (ms google apple), or unproven companies.

I’m sorry but yeah, if you want a concrete solution that is on par with what google offers in terms of privacy and security, you can’t go with a random company and everything I said before stands. And in this scenario, fastmail IS a random company no matter how long you’ve used them.

To the extent that they make their money from user data, their advantage is in keeping the underlying data for themselves, not in giving it to other people.

(I use a fair amount of Google tech, including paying for hardware and services, but I won't use their search engine or browser)

That’s not intentional though, it’s just that their hardware hasn’t been that successful.

I just used iCloud.com. Seems to work fine for adding reminders. Are you talking about an API, or the iCloud web UI?

It makes perfect sense that they'd be against anything that circumvents their walled garden, and a VM does just that by allowing users/developers to use their OS without buying their hardware.

I personally hate it, and it's why I'll never touch any Apple product.

It is simply unbeatable on the laptop market currently, imo.

It's true that now high end android phones are as expensive than high end iphones, so on this point of view it's not a criteria

The iPhone SE is better than any comparable Android phone and will receive updates for another 5 years.

So "You can't find a cheap new iPhone" is not true. If you're willing to take 1 extra step and get a month of prepaid service you can get a cheap iPhone.

Also, the macs are not at all locked down if we are talking about that. OSX is pretty much a general linux with a generally supported graphical environment on top.

MBP from 2017 is the oldest supported device.

Also, iphones are supported for almost 10 years.

I'm not asking about phones, we were talking about laptops.

Apple is primarily a hardware company. If people are using VMs then they're not buying hardware.