I wonder who precicely this is targeted for.
The concept is interesting, but doesn't everyone who develops for macos already have a mac?
Or is this actually an economic path with respect to cloud computing?
> I wonder who precicely this is targeted for. The concept is interesting, but doesn't everyone who develops for macos already have a mac?
Maybe, but is everyone who develops for OSX going to have an M1 in 2021-2022? I just bought a refurbished Intel-based Macbook Air (for just $50 shy of what a new M1 Air would have cost) due to concerns about virtualization software compatibility. People developing software to run on OSX may not want to invest in M1 machines this early, and small-to-midsized companies who rely on their Mac farms to run test suites etc. may not want to duplicate their infrastructure just to validate their software on M1, when they can perhaps meet their needs by using elastic M1 services.
Our startup relies on server-side HTML rendering in Headless Chrome, and some ImageMagick image manipulation. Due to how optimised these machines are for this use-case, I do plan to evaluate them to replace the much pricier AWS instances.
(if i get it correctly it's mostly cause it's a gpu bound task? (hardware acceleration of the browser engine?))
Back in 2017 hetzner offered gtx1080s for around 70€ a month with 64gb ram and and a 4+ghz quad Intel CPU, n 2x 512gb ssd
Im sure these days it's not hard enough to find smth with equilavent processing power in that price range
Maybe even direct contact with hetzner could help you out these days(they stopped offering them cause of abuse)
And if it's not a gpu bound task but badly concurrently cpu tasks
Then maybe a game server specific dedicated hosting (they use consumer CPUs with uo to 5+ghz single core performance) wouldn't also be a lot of money
N if its a good concurrency task then the amd CPU offering of hetzner beats all(high memory, insanely fast iops, lots of core) , and has a offering for 5950x these days
The M1 actually beats it in single core performance, and is quite a bit faster at running JavaScript for that headless browser due to design optimizations.
I would guess it's for people who need to run automated tests that their Mac M1 software works. Or maybe there's some program that only works on M1 and they need to run it in an automated manner (a compiler?).
Its almost always cheaper to just buy a mac mini than to rent one out 24/7 though. I think Apple also made a tos change banning renting them by the hour as well.
If you're a small operation, maybe. If you're a big company you probably want to have a service, not extra hardware you have to manage, and the rental cost is a rounding error for your software development costs.
I'm doing some work for a company that develops apps on behalf of clients. There are dozens and likely soon, hundreds of apps that sometimes all need to be updated at once. The process is automated using Fastlane but it still takes significant time per app, esp. if new screenshots are needed. We've got this running on a MacStadium-hosted Mac mini. Seems like a perfect use case. Scaleway is a little cheaper but it looks like they don't have any M1s available currently.
A customer of mine runs a static and dynamic vulnerability analysis service for Android and iOS apps (their customers are the companies developing those apps.) They have Mac Minis to perform some processing that Apple wants to be done only on a Mac.
