Mac at Any Scale

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.

I'm a little surprised that people would rather rent a Mac than buy one. Less so now that Apple raised the prices but for a long time a M4 Mac Mini was $599 which only works out to about 6 months at these prices.

Especially since they're not like a regular server, loud and power hungry. They're the definition of quiet and power sipping. I have one do all my background coding work when I want to keep my laptop clear (being headless helps with me moving around too).

Apple still lives in the world where software developed in IDE on a personal computer and shipped as a boxed software on a disquette with a licence key. Xcode cloud is a joke. All their automation is a joke. It’s not surprising even their own software development stuck because of their ecosystem because they use same tools, same cryptic software signing with their plists, p8, chains, certificates, lack of ui testing, horrible cpp, objc legacy. You just drowning in this environment. How I wish we have proper web app apis at last

Yeah Apple needs to fix this by either making Xcode Cloud better, make more Mac minis (or just dedicated server hardware), or even loosening the two-VM limit. This kind of thing is bad for the average consumer and just plain wasteful.

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

I could see Mac minis being used for data center type setups. But MacBooks are distinctly consumer devices. I know your company is trying to solve a niche. But if it stops becoming a niche, consumers will be impacted because of operations like yours.

Honestly, my first thought was "does the datacentre know ?"

12 MacBooks per shelf, if we say roughly 5U per shelf (21.12/4.445 rounded up), so roughly 9 shelves per 47U rack, so 100-ish MacBooks per rack.

That's a scary density of LiPo battery.

The author complains about the lack of redundant power in Mac Minis, but there are other ways to get redundant power into one AC input.

> Another source of pain: FileVault disk encryption. Or rather decryption.

Amazon solves this by disabling FileVault and warns against enabling it.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-mac-...

Amazon also has much tighter integration and offers the Macs bare-metal. This has the downside that you can only gets Macs as dedicated hosts, so it's another layer to manage, and that it takes around an hour to wipe the Mac whenever you shut it down, even if you're not going to release the underlying dedicated host. Also for the last year, even grabbing a Mac dedicated hosts often runs into "None available" for hours at a time. Amazon tells you "try this other zone" but even that is no guarantee. I wasn't even able to get our TAMs to tell me whether trying other regions was likely to help. Besides that, it takes 5-10 minutes to launch a Mac, and once you acquire one, there's a 24 hour minimum billing period due to Apple licensing restrictions. Which is all to say, as a single customer, you can't really build an elastically scaled Mac CI/CD farm on top of AWS. You really need to size for your peak load. Which is expensive compared to just buying your own Macs, but $former_employer didn't want to be in the datacenter business.

FWIW, I believe MacStadium was the first to offer Macs in datacenters as a service:

https://9to5mac.com/2020/12/27/macstadium-mac-mini/

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

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

"Luckily by now we found almost perfect cables that bend exactly as we want them to bend. And we bought the entire supply of them. There are zero more of them available to order on Amazon." Everyone is hoarding at any cost...

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

Hmm hundreds of laptop batteries in a datacenter doesn't seem too smart.

Author here. Happy to answer questions.

> 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.

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

I'm hoping AI will change that soon.

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?

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.

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_...

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Wild to see them using MacBook Pros and not Mac Mini/Studio. Curious how that possible makes sense for economics and cooling.

So they buy up the machines, likely create supply issues (add waiting time etc.), then rent them out at premium?

People are outraged landlords doing that with housing.

Yet someone such rent seeking behaviour is acceptable?

Get fucked.