[HN Gopher] How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2
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How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2
Author : tambourine_man
Score : 162 points
Date : 2020-12-28 17:35 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.servethehome.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.servethehome.com)
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Considering how much Apple has been helping MacStadium and the
| volume of Mac minis going to rack based installs, I'm surprised
| Apple hasn't made them a little more rack mount friendly.
|
| Seems like they could just make a special case-less sled with
| only minor tweaks to the existing mini design. Obviously they
| would need to build a sled/ server chassis too with networking
| and power delivery.
| wil421 wrote:
| It sounds like upper management said no to the server market
| years ago and doesn't want to sell a "server". But they'll
| happily sell you a Mac mini to build a server farm.
| shagie wrote:
| The Mac mini isn't intended for that type of use... they do
| make a rack mount Mac Pro ( https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-
| mac/mac-pro/rack ). Give it a generation to get to the M
| series chips.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > The Mac mini isn't intended for that type of use
|
| The mini absolutely is intended for use as a server. It's
| what Apple provided to Mac Stadium for OSS projects to
| build on. Very few Mac Pros are used for CI servers, they
| are mostly used for video and audio processing.
| rualca wrote:
| Arguably, mac minis are servers that can be repurposed as
| desktops. Even in their marketing blurbs Apple advertises mac
| minis as build and render farms.
| EE84M3i wrote:
| you've said it like, 4 times in this thread that apple is
| "helping mac stadium". What do you mean?
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Different things at different times. In this case just that
| Apple knows Mac Stadium is one of their bigger Mac mini
| customers and works with them.
| ftio wrote:
| All the big players who rack Mac Minis already have custom rack
| equipment that fits Mac Minis of this form factor. I suspect
| the design hasn't changed at all primarily for this reason.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Yes, but putting the minis in a case in a rack is wasteful.
| Both in terms of raw materials used, and energy efficiency.
| Considering how much of a deal Apple makes out of saving a
| few power bricks from the landfill, manufacturing thousands
| of enclosures which end up in server racks wasting power
| seems out of place.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| The official intro video shows four, yes four, Mac Minis sitting
| in a closet soon to be replaced by EC2 instances.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn3miC_tTH0&t=1m10s
|
| "We have to maintain each individual device." There's an effete
| millennial joke in there somewhere.
| geofft wrote:
| HN's policy of automated title mangling strikes again - the
| original title is " _How_ AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2.
| " That is, this article isn't a discussion of the mere fact that
| it was added (we discussed that a few weeks ago), but it has
| pictures of rackmounted Mac Minis with their custom hardware.
|
| As of this writing, only 1-2 of the comment threads are related
| to the actual subject of the article (why Apple doesn't produce a
| rackmount form-factor machine, why you can't virtualize macOS on
| commodity x86 hardware) and the rest are just about the fact of
| Macs on EC2 (why Apple doesn't run their own cloud, whether the
| pricing is cost-effective, etc.).
| jasoneckert wrote:
| Given that these are x86_64 Mac Minis, I'm surprised that Apple
| and Amazon couldn't work out a virtualization agreement that
| would allow Amazon to run macOS on their existing hypervisors.
| Higher education has been trying to do that with Apple for a
| decade now, but they don't have Amazon's clout.
| bhawks wrote:
| Apple is adamantly opposed to allowing this use case. It
| doesn't matter who is asking them.
| lloeki wrote:
| Ever since Lion(? IIRC when the license terms changed) there
| was nothing preventing a hypervisor to run on bare Apple
| metal and host macOS in VMs; in fact a frequently used one is
| VMware ESXi/Vsphere.
|
| It just seems that the market isn't there and people just go
| for full-machine MacStadium rental or use their own hardware.
| comex wrote:
| As of Big Sur [1], the license explicitly requires
| providers to rent out an entire machine at a time.
|
| [1] https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macos-big-sur-adds-
| leasing-te...
| mherrmann wrote:
| Just spent 4h trying to set this up. It's a pain. If you ever
| stop a running instance, the dedicated host - for which you are
| paying - stays in "Pending" mode for indefinite amounts of time.
| I am still stuck at getting macOS to recognize my non-default
| volume size > than the tiny 30 GB it comes with. Huge pains for
| something that should not be so hard (a decently strong macOS
| VM). Would not recommend.
| ManishR wrote:
| Disclosure: I work for AWS and am part of the team that built
| EC2 Mac instances
|
| 1) After every stop/terminate of Mac instances, EC2 runs a
| scrubbing workflow on the underlying Dedicated Host to wipe the
| Mac mini's non-volatile storage and reset the NVRAM variables,
| to enable same security posture as any other EC2 instance. This
| workflow also upgrades the T2 chip on Mac mini to the latest
| BridgeOS version if needed. It may take 30-60 mins for this
| scrubbing workflow to complete, and up to 2-4 hours if BridgeOS
| update is required - during which the host shows up in
| "pending" state. We're actively working on lowering this
| scrubbing duration and really appreciate your feedback here.
| Important to note - You are not billed for any duration(s)
| during which the Mac1 Dedicated Host is in "pending" state (or
| any state other than "Available").
|
| 2. Once you have increased the size of the EBS volume on your
| Mac1 instance, you can execute following commands within macOS
| guest to increase the size of your APFS container.
|
| 1. Copy and paste the first three lines
|
| PDISK=$(diskutil list physical external | head -n1 | cut -d" "
| -f1)
|
| APFSCONT=$(diskutil list physical external | grep "Apple_APFS"
| | tr -s " " | cut -d" " -f8)
|
| sudo diskutil repairDisk $PDISK
|
| 2. Accept the prompt with "y", then paste this command
|
| sudo diskutil apfs resizeContainer $APFSCONT 0
|
| Since the EBS volume was resized after boot, an instance reboot
| is required before the additional disk size is available for
| your use.
| electroly wrote:
| That's interesting about the billing. Playing devil's
| advocate here -- if I provisioned a Mac dedicated host, used
| it for the ~1 hour that I actually need, and then repeatedly
| cycled instances for the rest of the 24 hours to maximize the
| amount of time that it spends in "pending", would I indeed
| succeed in paying substantially less than 24 hours worth of
| time while still obeying the Apple-imposed "one customer per
| day" restriction? Would this violate a TOS?
| dolni wrote:
| How much concern is there on your team that Apple will make
| breaking changes to internals that you rely on? I've seen
| that happen multiple times in the past to JAMF, seemingly
| without any heads up.
| ManishR wrote:
| We have worked closely and transparently with Apple over
| the past few months not only on the product definition and
| platform design, but also on multiple architectural
| decisions for this offering. Many a times - even though not
| apparent in those moments (but only in hindsight) - Apple
| has nudged us in right directions that aligned with their
| future plans. Granted - it's challenging to keep up with
| the pace of both Apple and AWS - inadvertent regressions do
| get introduced with certain releases, but we're building
| mechanisms to catch and jointly remediate them early.
| Ultimately, both Apple and AWS are excited about this
| offering, and share the vision of bringing AWS benefits to
| all Apple developers. We only expect this collaboration to
| further deepen going forward.
| marta_weber wrote:
| Question: If you are already working with them, why do
| you have to use Mac Mini's, as opposed to, say, Apple
| giving you a special version of the OS that runs on
| "normal" hardware? Hackintoshs are real and there should
| be no reason for you to use Mac Mini's in the first
| place. Of course you can't use a Hackintosh, but the
| existence of this alternative suggests that this is a
| possible avenue to explore, especially when cooperating
| with Apple and keeping to a specific hardware that has
| the drivers or where drivers can be added easily.
| sswaner wrote:
| Because Apple is a hardware company. I wouldn't expect
| them to be supportive of a Hackintosh solution, to the
| point of making it difficult to operate.
| fearface wrote:
| Who would provide large-scale hardware support to AWS for
| this approach? Certainly not Apple as it's not their
| hardware. Also in a few minth from now people will want
| M1 cpu's and you wouldn't have worked towards that at
| all. If someone is fine with the Hackintosh experience,
| there are ways to do it in AWS already now.
| rsync wrote:
| This is _The Question_ and it applies to every single one
| of these stupendously wasteful deployments of time,
| space, energy and capital.
|
| Every single mid-sized IT shop in the world has an urgent
| and valid use-case to virtualize OSX in an efficient and
| portable manner. Most individual power-end-users have
| similar use-cases.
|
| How many hours / dollars / gigatons-of-carbon / calories
| are wasted on this comically inefficient, user-hostile
| and _gratuitously complex_ state of affairs ?
| NautilusWave wrote:
| Apple's whole shtick is hardware/software integration;
| they'd have to make and sell the hardware for the VMs to
| run on.
| dvdbloc wrote:
| Or at least have Apple send them Mac Mini hardware not in
| a Mac Mini case that would hopefully lead to a more
| integrated or robust solution than a computer sitting in
| a sled. Would this be beneficial?
| oarsinsync wrote:
| I assume this is the v1 product, and simply preparing for
| the v2 using Apple silicon (M1? M2?)
|
| Apple sells integrated hardware and software. They don't
| license macOS to anyone else. Why would they start now
| having seen that strategy fail in their corporate history
| already?
| my123 wrote:
| Not indefinite - there's a 24 hour minimum for macOS instances
| on the cloud...
| mherrmann wrote:
| That's not what I meant. I want to deploy a new instance on
| the host which I have to rent for min 24. But I can't because
| the host is "pending".
| andrewdb wrote:
| It will be a beautiful day when we can run macOS workloads in a
| container/vm.
| unixhero wrote:
| When would I need this?
| amelius wrote:
| Does this mean we can finally compile for the Apple platform
| without owning an Apple computer?
| ratww wrote:
| You could already do it using CIs like BitRise, Circle or even
| GH Actions. CIs are probably cheaper due to the AWS 24h
| minimum.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Also, MS offered host Mac builds years ago for Visual Studio
| Team Services - now known as Azure Devops.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Yes but there's a minimum rent period of 24h, which means
| you'll lose the benefits of a cloud provider over an on-premise
| OSX "build box".
| amelius wrote:
| Strange, Apple should be subsidizing compilation for Apple's
| platform instead.
| kevincox wrote:
| That moves less hardware.
|
| If they actually wanted to make it easy to develop software
| they would allow compiling on other platforms, and ideally
| provide a VM to test on.
|
| This is why I support IE and Edge on personal sites but not
| Safari. You can download free VMs from Microsoft for web
| testing, but you have to pay Apple to make things work on
| their platform.
| jackconsidine wrote:
| I've been waiting on an excuse to ditch my faltering Mac. Being
| able to RDP into an EC2 and build iOS apps or even run an
| emulator will be huge! Yes I know there were a few other
| providers before, but hadn't found one that worked in my
| pipeline.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Where's the win over getting a <$700 Mini (new or used) at home
| and RDPing in when you are out?
| [deleted]
| jackconsidine wrote:
| Fair point, but I just really prefer on demand usage. I'm
| averse to maintaining a mac mini (even having it plugged in
| and hooked up to the network). To have a server guaranteed to
| not have issues is the win for me. Also, pay-as-you-go
| generally works better for my line of business than the
| upfront investment, even if there is a breakeven point.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Apparently industries have much more faith in APPL than in AMD.
| It took way longer to have Rayzen computing nodes than ARM M1
| ones.
| Macha wrote:
| These aren't M1 Macs, they're x64. There's nothing AMD CPUs can
| do that Intel cannot, though maybe the cost/usage patterns
| benefit one vendor or another at certain points in time.
|
| Apple have made it so building/testing iOS apps requires access
| to OS X, and OS X can only be run on Apple hardware, so they've
| ensured there is some segment that requires access to Apple
| hardware.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Is there some licensing issue with Apple that requires this
| minimum monthly usage?
|
| It appears aws is charging $1/hr with a 24 hr minimum which is
| similar to every other provider out there that is offering MacOS
| instances.
|
| I was excited to see that AWS was offering these as I assumed it
| would be priced just like everything else - hourly with no
| minimums.
|
| I literally need access a few hrs a month for submitting binary
| updates to the app store. And I suspect there are a lot of other
| users with this same use case which may explain the consistent
| policy of minimum monthly usage.
| gregmac wrote:
| It's also per-instance, so if you use one to run a build or
| automated test suite and tear it down afterwards, it costs you
| 24 hours each time. Some simple napkin math: if you average
| running two builds/test runs per day, not including weekends,
| you'll pay somewhere over $12k/yr. Crazy.
|
| We test some cross-platform software with an installer, and
| there's automated tests for every Windows version since 7,
| dozens of various Linux distros/versions (including x86 and
| ARM), but we never got around to automating Mac largely because
| of the complexity with getting back to a "clean" environment
| (eg: what you get with a fresh EC2 image). Having relatively
| few users compared to all other platforms plus the cost being a
| couple of orders of magnitude higher, I doubt we'll take
| advantage of this. Too bad.
| simlevesque wrote:
| Couldn't you keep the instance the first time every day ? I
| don't know Macs that much but I assume that AWS could offer a
| way to wipe it without breaking the instance.
| [deleted]
| ManishR wrote:
| Disclosure: I work for AWS and am part of the team that built
| EC2 Mac instances
|
| The 24 hours minimum is applicable to the allocation duration
| a Mac1 Dedicated Host, and not to the instances running on
| that host. Put differently - once allocated, a Mac1 Dedicated
| Host can only be released from your account after 24 hours.
| You can however can launch, stop, start, and terminate as
| many mac1.metal instances with fresh macOS AMIs on that host
| as you need while that host remains allocated to you.
|
| Additionally, Savings Plan
| (https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/) on Mac1 instances can
| provide up to 44% savings over On-demand prices for longer
| term commitments.
| gregmac wrote:
| Ok that sounds promising. I haven't really used dedicated
| instances so I'll have a closer look at this. Thanks!
| oefrha wrote:
| Well, Apple is a hardware company first and foremost, their
| business model is to sell you a Mac regardless of how little
| you use it. Letting a third-party rent a single hardware unit
| to hundreds or thousands of people per month and capture most
| of the profit while doing so is against their business model,
| so not surprisingly they try to prevent that from happening.
| wmf wrote:
| Yes, Apple requires a 24-hour minimum.
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| Yes. It's licensing.
| jjeaff wrote:
| So when I buy a mac mini at Best Buy, am I somehow agreeing
| to that policy?
| Macha wrote:
| When you click accept in the initial setup that has a link
| to T&Cs that informs you can return it for a refund if you
| don't agree.
|
| How legally enforceable clickwrap such as that is varies
| from country to country.
| epmaybe wrote:
| How do you test the updates without a Mac? Sorry I'm sure I'm
| missing something
| seanwilson wrote:
| > It appears aws is charging $1/hr with a 24 hr minimum which
| is similar to every other provider out there that is offering
| MacOS instances.
|
| How much per month? Around $720?
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Mac Stadium charges $720/ _year_.
| GordonS wrote:
| You obviously expect to pay over the odds for cloud VMs, but
| that's _really_ expensive. I would have thought someone as
| big as AWS would have been able to negotiate more favourable
| terms, but it seems not.
|
| Given I'd expect a lot of these to be used as iOS build
| servers, it's worth noting that Azure DevOps gives you 1,800
| build minutes on the free tier, which AFAIK you can use with
| their MacOS agents.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| CI services like Travis and Circle do Mac/iOS builds and give
| each job a minute or two at a time -- I guess this is different
| because it's a service rather than "leasing" the machine?
| Macha wrote:
| Yes, this is directly from the macOS T&Cs:
| https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...
| davidjfelix wrote:
| Big Sur's licensing states:
|
| 3. Leasing for Permitted Developer Services. A. Leasing. You
| may lease or sublease a validly licensed version of the Apple
| Software in its entirety to an individual or organization
| (each, a "Lessee") provided that all of the following
| conditions are met: (i) the leased Apple Software must be used
| for the sole purpose of providing Permitted Developer Services
| and each Lessee must review and agree to be bound by the terms
| of this License; (ii) each lease period must be for a minimum
| period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours;
| kevincox wrote:
| It seems that if you could still buy macOS separately you
| could buy more copies than computers and lease these out for
| 24h while sharing the hardware with much higher granularity
| which would lower the cost significantly.
|
| However it seems that no version of macOS since Lion (2011)
| is available to be purchased standalone anymore.
|
| It is a shame that Apple forces such a wasteful and
| inconvenient process but it is more profitable for them and
| apparently they are legally allowed to do so.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| What an absolutely stupid restriction
| bifrost wrote:
| That seems... expensive.... Wouldn't it be cheaper just to buy
| a mini?
|
| Just checked - yes it is after about 2 months.
| eli wrote:
| Isn't that true for all EC2 instances? That's not why one
| buys EC2
| penagwin wrote:
| This, although I think the 24 hour minimum set by apple
| kinda undermines the scalability asset.
|
| Obviously the 24 hour minimum means you'd be better buying
| one for most CI uses, which I think is what most people
| want them for.
|
| However I think I remember a image can that also
| manipulated used apple hardware for the metal api? They
| would still benefit from the ability to scale on at least a
| daily level.
| bradfitz wrote:
| From an AWS employee:
|
| https://twitter.com/WindexCowboy/status/13338761883858411
| 58
|
| > The use of the Dedicated Hosts concept keeps the
| license requirement decoupled from the instance life
| cycle. While you do need to allocate the Mac for a
| minimum of 24 hours, you can launch and terminate a fresh
| mac1.metal instance on that box as many times as you
| like.
| macintux wrote:
| Yes...ish.
|
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562532 for a
| huge caveat: scrubbing the old instance takes anywhere
| from 30 minutes to 4 hours.
|
| So there are time constraints that make this far from
| ideal.
| supernova87a wrote:
| Macstadium seems to be offering pricing of $59 per month,
| which is much more competitive versus buying the hardware
| outright.
| est31 wrote:
| Amazon's cloud offerings are generally quite expensive
| compared to owning yourself. That's why such a small part of
| Amazon's revenues can be such a large part of their earnings.
| bigphishy wrote:
| Also consider purchasing a refurbished mac mini.
|
| I bought one on ebay for $350 2 years back, I've added 16 GB
| RAM and a samsung evo SSD. At a total cost ~$500, this old
| mac mini is a beast.
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| Aren't you paying for the network access as well as not
| having to manage the hardware? Rack space, networking and
| usually cooling etc all add up.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| I just don't understand why Apple won't offer their own cloud
| offerings or just straightforward partner with some public clouds
| and offer servers more suitable for developers than forcing
| people to use desktops as servers.
| AlphaSite wrote:
| I think with their recent hiring spree for core K8s
| contributors and another factor they may well do. It's
| something they've dipped their toes into in the past for iCloud
| services.
|
| If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud services
| where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud, so I could
| see them extending that model to a time slice of compute as
| well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the previous model
| was too limited for most use cases, but it's not fundamentally
| broken.
|
| I don't think the economics of the M1 with 32+ cores make sense
| unless they go down the route of either build a cloud platform
| and amortise the cost of the chip design over a larger number
| of devices (or a chip let approach, but I'm not sure this
| matches their general design approach).
|
| Also I'm pretty sure they think they have a competitive
| advantage over traditional x86 and ARM vendors so they'll
| likely want to strike while that still holds.
| kbenson wrote:
| > If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud
| services where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud,
| so I could see them extending that model to a time slice of
| compute as well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the
| previous model was too limited for most use cases, but it's
| not fundamentally broken.
|
| The average Apple consumer customer can make plenty of use of
| cloud storage. What use does the average user have for cloud
| compute resources?
|
| Unless Apple starts offloading some processing to the cloud,
| and gives them some free, I'm not sure how regular users
| would use this, and offering it for free assuming the
| majority of people won't use it is just asking for some
| popular app to come along that takes advantage of that and
| screws up the economics. Not to mention people probably won't
| be happy to have a limit and pay for overage use for stuff
| that is likely provided by free on other platforms (if Google
| Photos prettifies your photos for free and Apple does it
| through metered compute with some given free, that's bad
| optics).
| crooked-v wrote:
| Also, Apple has quite a lot of effort into specifically
| running things locally rather than in the cloud. For
| example, Photos.app does all its facial recognition and
| 'Memory' creation locally.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| They will...
| rnantes wrote:
| I could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud
| Computing platform within the next 2 years.
|
| - They would be vertically integrated with Apple Silicon
| - Apple themselves are increasingly depending on cloud services
| - Async/Await in Swift will likely land next year, making
| Server-Side Swift much more appealing - Apple is
| greatly increasing cloud / Kubernetes hires - Could
| share a single Apple Silicon ARM architecture from client(ios)
| to dev(mac) to cloud
| Aloha wrote:
| Apple however doesnt run on their own OS for their
| webservices though. Nothing in the way here, but just a note.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > I could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud
| Computing platform within the next 2 years.
|
| Apple, as a company, does not "do" long-term support; they're
| the anti-Microsoft when it comes to backwards compatibility.
| As soon as you start being an infrastructure service provider
| that means you HAVE to offer an LTSB branch of your OS, and
| Apple does not want to do that (and macOS has stagnated a lot
| since Apple devoted most of their OS engineering efforts to
| iOS). Apple doesn't offer a "real" server OS SKU at all (the
| "macOS Server" app package is for SOHO management, not for
| use as a high-availability application server OS).
|
| ...which means that Apple would have to provide an offering
| using Linux or BSD - such as a "naked" Darwin distro - but
| again, Apple does not want to have to support that, and I'm
| sure devs don't want to see the IaaS OS scene fragment
| further, and Darwin is far, far removed from being yet
| another Linux distro.
|
| Amazon offers ARM cloud systems - why should Apple risk their
| profitability by competing in an arena that doesn't pose any
| risk to their bottom-line? And what do they have to gain?
| e40 wrote:
| This is the fly in the oinment.
|
| I would love to see Apple have an LTS branch of macOS, but
| I just don't see this happening. Too much would need to
| change in the company for that to happen.
|
| From a macOS developer's standpoint, it's really a huge
| PITA there is no LTS. But, we adjust. Because we have a
| low-level product (compiler), we sometimes get into a
| situation where we need to sunset a product before we would
| normally do that, just because the older product doesn't
| run on the supported macOS versions. Doesn't happen often,
| but it does happen.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I'm dubious. The only way I could see this happening is if it
| was some companion platform for iCloud/iOS apps. I just don't
| understand what _anyone_ has to gain from Apple making an
| "open" cloud platform.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Makes sense if they start auditing / security reviewing of
| what gets pushed to their platform. Would be yet another
| Apple's security & privacy play.
|
| Obviously would work as FaaS or PaaS.
| jrwoodruff wrote:
| They tried, but it's just not their DNA. Apple isn't a B2B
| enterprise company, they're a B2C consumer company that, as a
| side effect of their consumer success, ended up with a decent
| number of devices in enterprises. But they know they can't, and
| don't want to try, to win against the big entrenched enterprise
| players.
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-apple-had-to-kill-the-xser...
| secabeen wrote:
| Yeah, they certainly don't have the right DNA on the hardware
| side. On the software side, they've been working a lot more
| closely with JAMF recently, and there's quite a bit of
| enterprise support in the MDM space there.
| mintone wrote:
| Can confirm with this, when we approached Apple on MDM they
| all but opened an account for us with JAMF.
| mrpippy wrote:
| They also bought Fleetsmith recently
| lostlogin wrote:
| Apple Remote Desktop is a pretty neglected app but it's
| fantastically good. It's got so many features that make
| remote administration so very good.
| breatheoften wrote:
| I think their cloud play _will_ be B2C driven.
|
| I predict they will build customer-facing 'cloud-powered
| features' where 'third party app code' can run on the apple
| cloud infrastructure 'on behalf' of a particular apple
| customer.
|
| They will present a utility computing model to customers --
| where each customer sees 'cloud-computing usage charges'
| displayed by app.
|
| Ultimately, the cloud-compute/cloud-storage charges will tie
| back to the customer associated usage costs for storage or
| some other abstract usage based model of for cloud resource
| costs.
|
| "Apple Cloud: build features for apple customers using usage-
| metered cloud resources -- with the customer paying for the
| usage charges they incur."
| ketamine__ wrote:
| Am I wrong to think there are workloads that can only be run
| on Mac? Seems like a competitive advantage.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Anything that requires Xcode to build. Depending on what's
| being built, if you're developing a cross-platform or Mac
| app, you might need a Mac somewhere in your pipeline.
|
| Unfortunately, Apple makes it somewhat uneconomical to use
| Macs in small bursts, as their license requires that Macs
| are leased for at least 24 hours.
| Macha wrote:
| The only workloads that can only be run on a mac are those
| which are Apple specific, such as building/testing iOS
| apps.
| ghaff wrote:
| Interestingly, AWS and Google weren't really B2B plays
| initially either. But AWS in particular recognized that if
| AWS was to be as successful as they had ambitions for, the
| were going to have to hire an enterprise sales force and do
| other things related to supporting enterprises.
|
| Apple toyed with becoming more enterprisey at various times
| but their ultimate success came mostly from BYOD and
| enterprises proving Mac options because that's what many of
| their employees wanted. They do have business sales but it's
| still more of a pull than a push thing.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Apple is still a very small and (relatively) focused
| company compared to the others.
| ghaff wrote:
| That is also true. Buy I think they also recognized that
| they didn't really need to cater to enterprises to any
| significant degree in order to sell to them directly or
| indirectly. And in a way that probably wouldn't have been
| possible 20 years ago when probably most employees took
| the IT-managed PC they were given and lived with it.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Exactly. Apple benefited tremendously, especially after
| the Intel transition, from executives and younger
| employees showing up to the workplace with a shiny new
| MacBook Pro and just expecting it to work on the network.
| It started with those two groups and once IT found a way
| to support turn systems -- or at least get them on the
| network/give them access to the file share -- Apple
| didn't need to do a lot of the glad handing for
| enterprise sales. If the CEO wants to use his Mac at
| work, IT will capitulate. And that in turn dovetailed
| with the broader BYOD movement with computers and phones.
|
| Now, Xserve didn't work for a lot of reasons, but Apple
| exited the server market, and even stopped making the
| Server variant of macOS (even though it was just a
| handful of utilities at the end), largely because I think
| it realized two things:
|
| 1. It could never truly compete with Linux (and to a
| lesser degree, IIS) without making significant tradeoffs
| that are anathema to Apple (lowering prices
| significantly, giving up usage control, and decoupling
| vertically integrated hardware/software).
|
| 2. The cost of truly making a B2B play would require
| resource investments and commitments into an area Apple
| doesn't need to care about and that would come at the
| expense of areas that are both more profitable and less
| of a PITA.
|
| Apple is the richest company in the world and amongst the
| most profitable tech companies, why would they bother
| with enterprise when they can allow partners to deal with
| the integration side and focus on doing their stuff their
| way.
|
| (There is one notable instance where Apple embraced
| enterprise, and that was when Apple added Exchange
| support in iPhone OS and admittedly, this was a huge deal
| and was ultimately a fatal blow to Blackberry. But it's
| the exception that almost proves the rule. Apple added
| support for Exchange but left it up to others to figure
| out the broader MDM situations.)
|
| Having said all that, I have always been surprised Apple
| hasn't offered some sort of build/test service themselves
| and integrated it into TestFlight. It could be a driver
| for the all-important services revenue (in my
| imagination, the annual developer fee would cover a
| certain number of build minutes a month and then
| additional minutes would cost money). I have to think
| that such a solution is either in the works or that Apple
| looked at the support challenges and just decided to let
| other people do it at scale for them.
|
| The thing is that much of the cloud is very much a
| commodity and Apple has successfully made its products
| and services anything but a commodity.
| ghaff wrote:
| >(There is one notable instance where Apple embraced
| enterprise, and that was when Apple added Exchange
| support in iPhone OS and admittedly, this was a huge deal
| and was ultimately a fatal blow to Blackberry. But it's
| the exception that almost proves the rule. Apple added
| support for Exchange but left it up to others to figure
| out the broader MDM situations.)
|
| Yep. There have been a couple of specific things.
| Exchange and now MDM profiles. Probably a few others. But
| minor tweaks to remove _major_ enterprise blockers. Small
| investments to remove complete showstoppers is just
| common sense.
|
| >Apple hasn't offered some sort of build/test service
| themselves and integrated it into TestFlight
|
| Seems pretty logical. Who knows? It's certainly the trend
| with container platforms generally.
| yholio wrote:
| Tldr, they live on expensive hardware that is well marketed
| and has polished software attractive to consumers.
| kube-system wrote:
| Neither hardware costs nor marketing is an issue for Apple
| in the B2B space. Plenty of successful B2B hardware costs
| more and has tons of marketing fluff.
|
| The reason Apple doesn't do well B2B is nothing about their
| technology or marketing, it is likely all about their
| business operations. Apple is notorious for driving their
| own product-development lifecycle with heavy priority on
| their own design language. This is completely the opposite
| of how B2B sales work, where it is not uncommon for some
| development cycles to be dictated directly by a few (or
| even one) customer. I can't see Apple playing well with
| these expectations.
| macintux wrote:
| > This is completely the opposite of how B2B sales work,
| where it is not uncommon for some development cycles to
| be dictated directly by a few (or even one) customer.
|
| Development and sales (and support). Look at how many
| SKUs competing laptop manufacturers have because
| enterprises will specify some combination of ports and
| memory and CPU, and if the manufacturer doesn't have that
| particular combination, there will be no sale.
|
| (Having said that: it's not obvious to me whether this is
| still as much of an issue as it used to be.)
| jedberg wrote:
| One of the rules on these Macs in AWS is that you have to rent
| them for a minimum of 24 hours at a time and you have to rent
| the whole machine.
|
| I think they don't want to cannibalize Mac sales. If you want
| to make an iPhone app, you have to buy a Mac to do it. They
| don't want to make it easy for you to rent one just to compile
| the app.
| jjeaff wrote:
| That's the only reason I need them, to compile a binary and
| submit it. But can apple dictate licensing terms like this?
| If aws buys a mac, can't they use it however they like? Or
| are there terms limiting this in the purchase agreement.
| est31 wrote:
| I agree that what you want to do should be possible and
| cheap, but generally if you build something for a platform
| you'd also want to test it on that platform, no? What you
| say implies that you compile the binary and don't test it
| before submitting?
| lukeramsden wrote:
| Automated testing should be done at CI stage, and you can
| submit a binary to Apple without having to send it live
| on the AppStore (TestFlight is for that), or you could
| send it to other beta distribution channels
| lock-free wrote:
| This works until you have a bug you can't replicate on a
| developer machine that your CI misses. This is a common
| thread on open source projects:
|
| > issue opened October 2013
|
| > __ is broken on MacOS
|
| > __ should fix it but I don't have a Mac to test.
| lloeki wrote:
| An alternative version of the last step:
|
| > I do have a Mac but ___ can't be replicated on my
| specific dev-tainted environment, plus I'm using macOS Y
| and you use macOS Z which is a pain for me to set up a VM
| for, if at all possible.
|
| The raise of a few free macOS CI mitigated that a bit but
| the offer is honestly poor (except at CircleCI, props to
| them), and seems like Apple could care less so much
| they're now actively making that harder than ever.
| lock-free wrote:
| > I'm using macOS Y and you use macOS Z which is a pain
| for me to set up a VM for, if at all possible
|
| If Apple should be sued for anti-consumer behavior this
| is why... It costs time and money to fix software with
| every MacOS release and I'm getting close to suggesting
| we add a 50% Apple tax on products to pay for the
| additional support it entails.
| scarface74 wrote:
| He said it was a pain. Not that it can't be done. If you
| are running on a Mac, you can set up a VM for an older
| version of MacOS on it. It's allowed in the EULA.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| It's in Apple's EULA:
| https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-
| vind...
|
| > _A "lease period must be for a minimum period of twenty-
| four (24) consecutive hours."_
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| _hl_ wrote:
| 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.
| kbenson wrote:
| 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.
| scarface74 wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| AWS can use the Mac any way it wants, but the license terms
| are part of MacOS.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Can Microsoft dictate the terms under which you can use
| their software?
|
| Some companies only charge for commercial use of their
| products. So the "it's free" argument doesn't really hold
| water.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Yes. Software companies dictate whether their software
| has to be run on a dedicate host, the allowed number of
| cores, etc. all of the time.
|
| Companies have tried to "rent DVDs" digitally by playing
| the DVD on their hardware and streaming it. It got shot
| down by the courts.
| supernova87a wrote:
| _"...But can apple dictate licensing terms like this? If
| aws buys a mac, can 't they use it however they like? Or
| are there terms limiting this in the purchase
| agreement..."_
|
| Yes, no, and yes.
| dnate wrote:
| what about buying second hand macs? I am not agreeing to
| any terms there, how can apple still enforce those rules
| then?
| supernova87a wrote:
| It's not the hardware that's restricted, it's the MacOS
| usage/license. You agree to that when you install it.
|
| Apple can't practically enforce that against you, an
| individual using a mac in your home. But then again
| you're probably not reselling your mac's functionality
| directly for profit to others. They for sure can seek to
| enforce it with AWS or others who sell it commercially.
| It's the reselling of their software and functionality
| for profit that is covered by the terms of the agreement.
| ksec wrote:
| Well there will be a ARM Mac Pro, so hopefully that will be
| rack mountable. And any Cloud customer can have it hosted.
|
| I do wish they have less restriction on macOS usage timing. And
| a services for Web Developers to test their site on Safari.
| Which is currently impossible to do with buying a Mac.
| theobeers wrote:
| It seems to me that the licensing situation--you have to
| lease a whole machine for a minimum period of 24 hours--will
| make the Mac Pro a poor choice in most contexts. The Mac Mini
| at or near its base configuration may remain the most
| sensible option.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > It seems to me that the licensing situation--you have to
| lease a whole machine for a minimum period of 24 hours--
| will make the Mac Pro a poor choice in most contexts
|
| Not necessarily. A Mac Pro would work well for single-
| tenant usage where you want to run a series of applications
| that can each burst to the whole machine but not take long
| to finish.
| skohan wrote:
| It would be kind of crazy to imagine, if the M-series
| processor for the Mac Pro is among the best performing CPUs
| in the world - which it may turn out to be - that these
| processors would be virtually inaccessible in the server
| space in any relevant way. It seems like something which
| should not result from a free market.
|
| I wonder how "usage" is defined here: for instance, if I
| run a managed service on a fleet of Macs in the cloud,
| which serves many end customers from each machine, is this
| allowed under the terms?
| ghaff wrote:
| >if I run a managed service on a fleet of Macs in the
| cloud, which serves many end customers from each machine,
| is this allowed under the terms?
|
| IANAL (and haven't read the full EULA) but probably. The
| 24 hour restriction seems to apply to leasing. I would
| assume that running a multi-tenant managed service (or,
| for that matter, serving web pages) from a Mac would not
| be seen as leasing.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Makes you wonder what kind of hardware Apple is using for all
| their own cloud services (web, mail, messaging, icloud etc.).
| ruffrey wrote:
| Apple has a self host cloud division as well as AWS according
| to news reports. Unclear if they run on Linux but it seems
| likely they must, even a bit if using AWS. Theoretically they
| could probably upload custom AMIs with macOS.
| Crash0v3rid3 wrote:
| Apple uses GCP as well as AWS.
| sl1ck731 wrote:
| I don't believe its possible to get macOS (or atleast
| wasn't) onto an AMI in anyway.
| rescbr wrote:
| I'd say it is possible to run Darwin on AWS, but I have
| never tried. FreeBSD runs well, so we know that any OS
| with drivers will boot on AWS.
|
| They're Apple after all, so they can build macOS to boot
| from a standard environment - UEFI, kernel that doesn't
| check the copy prevention string on SMBIOS, etc.
|
| Us, mere mortals, are more restricted, as we don't have
| the keys of the kingdom.
| IST-Throwaway wrote:
| When I was there, a variety of brands of hardware, mostly
| running RHEL. In fact running OS-X in datacenters was
| verboten, and eventually limited to a couple of small racks
| running on their own network segments where you could put in
| a mac pro if desperately needed to.
| TheGRS wrote:
| I remember when I worked at a startup and we were trying to
| get a team at Apple to purchase our SaaS product. They
| wanted the software hosted on a Mac, so we ran it on a Mini
| to demo. Also strange things like presenting them in Slides
| instead of Powerpoint. But this was also like 10 years ago.
| scarface74 wrote:
| That's not strange at all. I use to teach fitness classes
| part time at Coke's headquarters. We were told
| specifically not to bring in drinks or water bottles from
| competitors.
| oblio wrote:
| > We were told specifically not to bring in drinks or
| water bottles from competitors.
|
| Ridiculous :-))
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I was running OSX in a datacenter on campus, so I think you
| mean the huge server farms like where mesosphere etc were
| famously in play?
| wayne wrote:
| Somewhat surprising since unlike their customers, there's
| no license restriction to Apple running macOS on different
| hardware. Maybe they didn't want to maintain a separate
| fork only for internal use. And having their own OS makes
| it more challenging to port apps to AWS/Azure.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| The real question is how would this be beneficial to
| them? Almost everyone runs production systems on either
| Linux or Windows, so they would be an outlier, and the
| only one debugging and contributing to the operating
| system/libraries/etc.
|
| I've read before on HN about people using Mac hardware in
| production, when they needed access to macOS graphics
| API, but since this only concerns a software
| implementation, and hardware was standard until M1
| processors, it's reasonable to assume that Apple could
| port that part of OS to Linux, if they needed to use it
| from servers.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| "Running OS-X in datacenters was verboten"
|
| Why?
| cma wrote:
| Maybe they didn't want to run into a tech debt thing of
| "we can't push this update to consumers even though it
| would cause no issues for them, because it would break X
| and Y on our backend servers and the two would have to
| diverge for some time until we come up with a fix."
| toast0 wrote:
| I'm not an Apple insider, but I can imagine many reasons.
|
| For one thing, the tcp stack is ancient, and easy to syn
| flood. (It was forked from FreeBSD in 2001ish, before
| FreeBSD added syncookies and syncache). Synflooding os x
| makes the whole network stack unresponsive, including
| other interfaces like localhost.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| There was a time when they made this guys:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve
|
| With their new CPUs maybe it is time to bring them back?
|
| I mean surely they are not going to license Dell to put a
| M1 chip in a rackspace computer.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Considering how they've been making Mac servers more and
| more irrelevant, I wouldn't have my hopes up.
| kevincox wrote:
| I'm really curious what they use for their CI. Do they
| compile all of their iOS apps on Apple hardware? Or do they
| get the luxury of using proper server hardware and software?
| vondur wrote:
| Don't they use AWS like everyone else?
| ogre_codes wrote:
| They used to rely heavily on AWS and Azure, but they've
| moved a lot in-house now.
| Crash0v3rid3 wrote:
| Apple has been using GCP and AWS for years.
|
| My understanding was they ditched Azure.
| kortilla wrote:
| Big tech companies with large bandwidth requirements don't
| use AWS.
|
| Netflix doesn't use AWS for video, Facebook doesn't use AWS
| for most stuff, Google and Microsoft obviously don't now
| because of competition but they didn't before GCP and Azure
| were things.
| notRobot wrote:
| Because Apple really doesn't care about _anything_ to do with
| developers. It 's too tiny a percentage of their user base.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > Because Apple really doesn't care about anything to do with
| developers.
|
| Are you serious?
|
| Apple's single biggest event of the year is a developer
| conference. They aren't putting on week-long events for video
| editors.
|
| They also provided a bunch of Mac minis to Mac Stadium for
| OSS developers to build on.
|
| They added virtualization to the M1 (it isn't on the A
| series) and have HyperKit built into the OS is all
| specifically for developers.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > They also provided a bunch of Mac minis to Mac Stadium
| for OSS developers to build on.
|
| Well, Apple isn't giving them away, but they do indeed sell
| them to Mac Stadium.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| It's my understanding that Apple donated hardware to
| multiple projects. That said, I can't track down a link
| right now either so it's just my recollection.
| jbergens wrote:
| Isn't computer users a tiny part of all Apple users?
|
| They could probably just kill that part and make enough money
| on iOS anyway.
| api wrote:
| It's a large part of their Mac user base.
|
| That being said, I don't think Apple has enough people who
| would be interested in _hosting_ on MacOS to justify an Apple
| cloud offering. I think they know that.
| notRobot wrote:
| > _It 's a large part of their Mac user base._
|
| Is it really? Lots of devs use Macs, yes. But compared to
| the sheer number of regular, non-dev users, that has to be
| _tiiiiny_.
|
| I found lots of stats on the internet about what percentage
| of developers use Macs, but none about how just many Mac
| users are developers, so it'd be fascinating to see that
| number of anyone can find it.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| It's not about the percentage of users.
|
| Developers fuel their platform. Without developers MacOS
| and iOS are nothing. Apple knows this.
| oblio wrote:
| They definitely care about devs less than Microsoft. They
| know that they have a relatively captive rich user base
| and devs will kowtow to them in order to develop stuff
| they can sell to that user base.
|
| That's the real target.
|
| And you can see it by how they treat the development
| tools. Or CI/CD setup using their tools.
| [deleted]
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| But they make the software the other 99% use. That's what
| makes them important.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| Apple claims there are 20m registered developers on the
| App Store [1]. If each of them buys a Mac once every 4
| years, that's 5m Macs per year. IDC estimates that Apple
| shipped 18m Macs in 2019 [2]. So 28% of all Macs would
| have gone to developers. If developers buy more expensive
| machines (or more machines) than the average customer,
| their share of sales could be significantly higher.
|
| However, I don't quite believe that there really are 20m
| active developers on the Apple platform. Evans Data
| estimates that there is a total of 27m developers
| worldwide [3]. It's not plausible that 74% of them should
| be writing software for Apple platforms. On the other
| hand, not all developers using a Mac are developing for
| the App Store. A lot of them will be Web developers.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if developers' share of Mac sales
| is 30%. Maybe it's just 20%. I don't know, but it's
| definitely not tiny.
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/04/app-store-
| hits-20m-registe...
|
| [2] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/01/13/apple-mac-
| shipments-dow...
|
| [3] https://www.future-processing.com/blog/how-many-
| developers-a...
| emeraldd wrote:
| I suspect they don't believe there is a market for them or at
| least not enough of a market to justify the development
| expense. I know they've tried producing a "server" in the past
| and even a server version of their operating system, but it
| didn't seem to go anywhere. Unless they had a way to
| meaningfully compete with Windows and Linux (really, linux) the
| only viable market I can see is for build systems, and that's
| pretty niche.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| With Servers you have to maintain a good supply chain and
| deal with institutional buyers. It's almost a parallels
| business to the rest of their offering. They won't get
| support at the genius bar...
|
| Server OS seemed to be targeted at small businesses to run on
| a Mac Pro or Mac Mini connected to NAS and hosting internal
| applications. But it wasn't very different from regular OSX.
| tyre wrote:
| These are pretty expensive for most uses -- another article of
| theirs calculates ~73 days to equal the cost of outright buying
| one and the 24 hour minimum is a high floor for, say, nightly
| tasks.
|
| One thing I've been wanting to do for a while is integrate with
| iMessage. iMessage stores a local SQLite database of message
| history. A forever-running MacOS instance could sync that with
| The Cloud and open up some pretty cool applications.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Its pretty standard with AWS. You also get much better
| performances from an old laptop than most VMs. You don't pay
| for the hardware but everything else.
| mataug wrote:
| I believe the 24hr minimum is a requirement by Apple not AWS.
|
| I remember reading somewhere that renting a Mac mini node from
| AWS has the same rental policies as renting a physical Mac mini
| from a rental company.
|
| It makes a lot of sense to have a 24hr minimum when renting a
| physical machine delivered to a workplace, but it seems weird
| to have the same policies when renting a Mac mini on the cloud.
| lostcolony wrote:
| It would make sense for a third party to require 24 hours
| minimum, but it seems really weird for -Apple- to be
| dictating what a third party rental company's minimum rental
| duration is. I understand it's for the license (i.e., "on
| this day the one seat license was used by X, on this other
| day, Y, and all other times by Z"), but that seems kind of
| arbitrary.
| judge2020 wrote:
| it's arbitrary but it's more the license for MacOS and not
| the Mac hardware itself. If you (are able to) flash linux
| on the Mac, you won't be bound to the MacOS license terms
| and can rent it out without the consecutive 24 hour
| minimum, although at that point you might as well just run
| a graviton2 instance.
| tidepod12 wrote:
| It's Apple's new license agreement specifically for
| "rental" companies like AWS and MacStadium. Apple
| specifically says that Mac hardware and software licenses
| must be for a minimum time period of 24 hours, and cannot
| be shared between customers.
|
| > Apple requires companies lease hardware and software "in
| its entirety to an individual or organization," ensuring
| peak performance and a one customer to one machine setup.
| Lease periods must be 24 consecutive hours and customers
| need to review and accept licensing terms for all first-
| and third-party software.
|
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/12/apple-outlines-
| de...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _another article of theirs calculates ~73 days to equal the
| cost of outright buying one_
|
| The purchase price of a machine is far from the only cost of
| adding a machine to an enterprise. Depending on how a company
| is set up, that 73 days could be as little as 10 or 20 days.
| There are a lot of other factors to consider, especially if (as
| it is where I work), only two departments uses Macs, and the
| rest of the company is Windows.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Who is the target audience for this novelty?
| ericcholis wrote:
| Developers who don't have regular physical access to a Mac.
|
| My use case might be too specific. But, at home I have a
| Windows Desktop and Laptop. In the office I use a Mac Mini.
| Currently, I need to test Apple Pay for Safari. This requires
| test iCloud credentials. On a mac, this is difficult or
| prohibitive to swap between live iCloud and test iCloud logins.
| On Windows, testing via browser emulation is shaky at best.
|
| Also, easily sharing access to a "cloud" (read: remote)
| instance of macOS with other developer staff is beneficial.
| dolni wrote:
| Seems like the type of thing that would change pretty quickly
| if developers demanded an experience that wasn't complete
| trash.
|
| How quickly would Apple fold if all of a sudden there weren't
| third party applications for their devices?
| kevincox wrote:
| The problem is that it is chicken and egg. If all the
| developers switched their ecosystem would be crap and they
| would need to fix the experience or the users would leave.
| However right now it is profitable to target their users,
| even if it is awkward, so why wouldn't Apple (from an
| economic incentive) milk the developers for every penny
| they have.
|
| Apple is very much biting the hand(s) that feed here.
| dolni wrote:
| It's one thing to say that it's a chicken and egg problem
| for existing businesses that make money in the Apple
| ecosystem. It's another thing when you are still seeing
| new development efforts.
|
| It's 2020, this shit has been happening for a while, and
| it's no secret. I haven't figured out why a self-
| respecting developer would subject themselves to that
| nonsense.
| josht wrote:
| I assume this is for co's who'd prefer rolling their own iOS
| CI/CD pipeline(s).
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Amazon said it is using Thunderbolt to connect its Nitro
| controller to the Mac Mini and provide its basic suite of EBS
| storage, networking, and security/ management features.
|
| That's pretty cool; they bridge ethernet/IP (I assume) to SATA or
| NVMe on Thunderbolt.
| RocketSyntax wrote:
| Hmm. Glad to see it happen, but expect better hardware. E.g.
| optimized for heat and such.
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