Amazing article. It just goes to show how many problems they are solving just to work around bugs and limitations within Apple itself. I’d wager a guess that if Apple made a new Xserve with the same performance as a Mac mini but twice the price people would still buy them, because figuring out data center operations is expensive.

This article is dated November 3rd yet I've read it months ago, it was already in my history.

Title should be edited to "Putting hundreds of MacBooks in a data center (because Apple is silly)" imo

Man, kudos to the person or AI who designed their website. Easy to read, easy to find any information, with eye catching branding.

Isnt it against the Apple EULA to sell VMs of Macos? Love the creative problem solving with the HW.

> You can't build iOS apps without a Mac.

I'm not sure this is true anymore.

I really wonder if Apple's logic to require a sale of a unit for 2 VMs is fiscally correct. Seems like it would be better to open it up to virtualization such that more devs can make iOS and macOS apps. Is the community of devs being forced to buy mac hw just do dev a iOS/macOs app so large that its worth putting us through all this HASSLE? Maybe they are worried about clone machine/farms that will eat into their sales. Idk. Because they are so VM unfriendly, I refuse to deal with Apple's bs.

The registry distribution subject "for another blog post" is the most interesting part of this to me. I'm very interested in the efficiency/locality metrics that went into designing that. I look forward to that future post.

The cost of cloud Mac hardware is quite frankly ludicrous across the board. Namespace's minimum for an M6 is, what, $0.06/minute for 6 vCPU? And that's on the cheap end - Semaphore wants $0.09/minute for 4 vCPU and GitHub Actions wants $0.062/minute for M1 hardware (forget AWS pricing even which is even more atrocious).

If I run just a UI test suite for an hour, that's $3.60/run, which is now higher than what I'm paying for AI inference that made the change that triggered the run. That's crazy! If I ran even just one run per night that would run me more than $100/month. A Mac Mini is $900 - I break even in nine months by buying the hardware outright. If I run multiple UI test suites per day, I break even much faster. These ARM chips are so power-light that the cost of electricity is practically irrelevant, and after all, these aren't rack-mounted monstrosities with 90 dB fans - they're meant to cool themselves sitting on your desk. Maybe it's different if you need like 60 of them?

Is anyone even running the numbers before they sign up? Or are companies really running that many Minis and are paying the premium to outsource the DCOps?

I am lost, doing it in a Hackintosh is feasible but against EULA terms? I remember having a Hackintosh around the office two years ago (yes, it was x64 based). BTW I just found "ARM is not a universal architecture, there will be no more Hackintosh" [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/1uboij0/arm_is_...