As appropriate a model this still is in the development VM scenario, you still need a valid license for each operating system copy you run.
Microsoft will sell you these individually; Apple apparently implicitly grants you up to three per Mac that you buy, and won’t let you pay for any more even if you want to.
In other words, what’s limited here is not really the hypervisor itself, but rather the “license granting component” that passes through the implicit permission to run macOS, but only up to some limit.
They'd probably charge separately for every feature of the processor if they could.
It’s extremely frustrating.
It definitely caused us to buy macs we would have rented and shared.
I'm not sure why people keep giving Apple their money, especially tech-savvy people that would want to run VMs.
So I asked the IT dept and they said it's stupidly expensive to run a MacOS instance on EC2, and that they would just send me a Macbook Pro instead.
I wish I were kidding.
And macOS remains a toy for use only by individuals that is a massive pain for developers to support.
Whenever I see apple silliness, I have to remember:
"You're not the target market."That’s what I would be worried about if my primary source of income was hardware sales.
Currently services like Github Actions painfully and inefficiently rack thousands of Mac Minis and run 2 VMs on each to stay within the limits. They probably wouldn't mind paying a fee to run more VMs on Mac Studios instead.
They don't care what you want to do with the hardware you own.
Even a 256GB model would run a load of 16GB VMs
Ah but when you buy an iPhone or a Mac, Apple sees it as their hardware graciously made available to you for a limited time and under ToS.
They don't want to be in the server business, they don't want there to be third party VM providers running Mac farms selling oversubscribed giving underpowered disappointing VM experiences to users who will complain.
A bunch of folks want Apple to enter a market Apple doesn't want to enter into. They have tools available which would enable that market which they are kneecapping on purpose so that nobody unwillingly enters them into it. The "two VMs per unit hardware" has been in their license for at least a decade.
I'd be pretty surprised if there isn't a workaround or hack for this.
Microsoft has had limits on some things like RDP on some versions of Windows, but there have always been ways to get around it.
You can run x86 macOS VMs in Windows or Linux too with a little bit of technical trickery, but again, you end up with a license issue, so no-one reputable does it.
because imposing an artificial limit keeps them from exposing how low the natural limits turn out to be? Apple Silicon need always to be spoken with reverence, ye brother of the faith, do not fuel the faithless lest they rend and threadrip that which we've made of wholecloth.
I can run a ton of Windows VMs at the same time, wouldn't Windows be a comparable resource hog to MacOS?
Apple M2 CPUs can have up to 192GB of RAM. If we look at the Mac Neo that has only 8GB of RAM, then an M2 host should be able to run at least 20 VMs before memory gets scarce.
There's no good reason Apple limits to 2 VMs except for greed, which they are well known for.
Hyper‑V on Windows 11 supports up to 1024 simultaneous VMs per host if the hardware can handle it. On my little Windows ARM laptop I can easily run 4 VMs before it runs out of steam.
Windows 11 and the walled garden greed they're trying to enable is so bad that this dominating Linux attempt is certainly failing, the only reason I haven't completely ditched my Windows system is that my several TB external drive is at large and I haven't taken the time to actually do it.
Plus Steam and their Wine work is absolutely killing it so the one thing that was keeping me motivated to still have a Windows presence is pretty much gone.
On Windows, you can run lots of Windows/Linux VMs and zero Mac VMs.
Legally (the last time I checked)
it would be amusing if that bypassed the limit.
My 2018 mac mini officially supports VMware ESXi to be installed directly on the hardware and virtualize any number of macOS machines
Funny enough I can even launch more than 2 macOS vms on my framework chromebook with qemu + KVM from the integrated Linux terminal.
> to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software, or any prior macOS or OS X operating system software or subsequent release of the Apple Software, within virtual operating system environments on each Apple-branded computer you own or control that is already running the Apple Software, for purposes of: (a) software development; (b) testing during software development; (c) using macOS Server; or (d) personal, non-commercial use.
https://i0.wp.com/williamlam.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/...
I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.
So yea I would say Apple is a “serious development platform” just given how much it dominates software development in the tech sector in the US.
arm64 is however mostly bad. The only real contender for Linux laptops (outside of asahi) was Snapdragon's chips but the HW support there was lacking iirc.
Whenever I see Linux people comparing Linux and Mac I'm amazed at the audacity. They are not in the same league. Not by a mile. Even the CLI is more convenient on the Mac which is truly amazing to me.
The honeymoon of Lego-brick replaceable USB ports is over?
Additionally, today’s sky-high RAM and SSD prices have caused an unexpected situation: Apple’s inflated prices for RAM and SSD upgrades don’t look that bad in comparison to paying market prices for DIMMs and NVMe SSDs. Yes, the Framework has the advantage of being upgradable, meaning that if RAM and SSD prices decrease, then upgrades will be cheaper in the future, whereas with a Mac you can’t (easily) upgrade the RAM and storage once purchased. However, for someone who needs a computer right now and is willing to purchase another one in a few years, then a new Mac looks appealing, especially when considering the benefits of Apple Silicon.
Which is none trivial. The laptop scene is particularly difficult though.
You can say other laptops are "plastic and shitty" all you want, but Apple's offerings aren't necessarily the best thing out there either. I personally like variety, and you don't get that from Apple. I can choose from hundreds of form factors from a lot of vendors that all run Linux and Windows just fine, plastic or not.
I work in video games, you know, industry larger than films - 10 out of 10 devs I know are on Windows. I have a work issued Mac just to do some iOS dev and I honestly don't understand how anyone can use it day to day as their main dev machine, it's just so restrictive in what the OS allows you to do.
We also inject custom dlibs into clang during compilation and starting with Tahoe that started to fail - we discovered that it's because of SIP(system integrity protection). We reached out to apple, got the answer that "we will not discuss any functionality related to operation of SIP". Great. So now we either have to disable SIP on every development machine(which IT is very unhappy about) or re-sign the clang executable with our own dev key so that the OS leaves us alone.
But Apple being "completely open", it is not.
The people using them typically aren't being paid to customize their OS. The OS is good for if you just want to get stuff done and don't want to worry about the OS.
Anyone who watched the Artemis landing yesterday would have been keen to notice all the Windows PCs in use at Mission Control — nearly all hosting remote Linux applications.
Not a Mac in sight.
They were using VLC on Windows in space.
If all the Macs in the world disappeared tomorrow, everything essential would somehow continue unabated.
This is one of those comments that is so far away from reality that I can’t tell if it’s trolling.
To give an honest answer: Using Macs for serious development is very common. At bigger tech companies most employees choose Mac even when quality Linux options are available.
I’m kind of interested in how someone could reach a point where they thought macs were not used for software development for 20 years.
If you work with engineering or CAD software then Macs aren't super common at all. They're definitely ubiquitous in the startup/webapp world, but not necessarily synonymous with programming or development itself.
128GB of RAM and an M4 Max makes for a very solid development machine, and the build quality is a nice bonus.
However having used Xcode at some point 10 years ago my belief is that the app ecosystem exists in spite of that and that people would never choose this given the choice.
i dont think anyone asks this question in good faith, so it may not even be worth answering. see:
> I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.
yea fwiw macs own for multi-target deployments. i spin up a gazillion containers in whatever i need. need a desktop? arm native linux or windows installations in utm/parallels/whatever run damn near native speed, and if im so inclined i can fully emulate x86/64 envs. dont run into needing to do that often, but the fact that i can without needing to bust out a different device owns. speed penalty barely even matter to me, because ive got untold resources to play around with in this backpack device that literally gets all day battery. spare cores, spare unified mem, worlds my oyster. i was just in win xp 32bit sp2 few weeks ago using 86box compiling something in a very legacy dependent visual studio .net 7 environment that needed the exact msvc-flavored float precision that was shipping 22 years ago, and i needed a fully emulated cpu running at frequencies that was going to make the compiler make the same decisions it did 22 years ago. never had to leave my mac, didnt have to buy some 22 year old thinkpad on ebay, this thing gave me a time machine into another era so i could get something compiled to spec. these techs arent heard of, but its just one of many scenarios where i dont have to leave my mac to get something done. to say its a swiss army knife is an understatement. its a swiss army knife that ships with underlying hardware specs to let you fan out into anything.
for development i have never been blocked on macos in the apple silicon era. i have been blocked on windows/linux developing for other targets. fwiw i use everything, im loyal to whoever puts forth the best thing i can throw my money at. for my professional life, that is unequivocally apple atm. when the day comes some other darkhorse brings forth better hardware ill abandon this env without a second thought. i have no tribalistic loyalties in this space, i just gravitate towards whoever presents me with the best economic win that has the things im after. we havent been talking about itunes for like a decade.
edit: I suppose I should also note the vast majority of people developing on mac books (in my experience anyway) are actually targeting chrome.
Point taken. Most developers probably make do with Linux containers rather than MacOS VMs.
Turns out, an operating system is more than just a kernel with some userspace crap tacked on top, unlike what Linux distros tend to be.
This is also my opinion of OSX, let's not pretend that the userland mess is the most beautiful part of OSX.
Apple has great kernel and driver engineering for sure but once you go the stack above, it's ducktape upon ducktape and you better not upgrade your OS too quickly before they fix the next pile they've just added.
My 1987-1997 ISP was based on several different Unix running on Apple, probably long before you where born.
Apple built several supercomputers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmsIZUuBoQs
[2] Founder School Session: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o
Apple had a terrible Unix until they bought NextStep.
This might be a blessing in disguise.
I run macOS because Apple understands that QA testing is something of actual importance, and designing yet another package manager is not.
I do spin up Linux every now and again to see if it's good yet, and always walk away.
Why do documents print at ~50dpi on my network printer?
Why does the system simply not wake up ~20% of the time when I open my laptop's lid?
Why do I have to unplug and reconnect my USB WiFi Dongle every hour or so when the internet randomly drops out?
Why does the system stop recognising my USB SD Card reader occasionally, forcing me to hard reboot the system?
Why is the audio distorted over HDMI when I enable HDR?
Why does Kodi only detect a refresh rate of 30Hz when the system itself has no issues seeing that the monitor is 60Hz?
All of these are real problems that real users have had, but instead of solving them the Linux development community instead chooses to devote their time and resources navel gazing about systemd alternatives or creating a fragile AUR package for software that already has a sensible and officially supported distribution method.
What you have to realize is that what Linux distros are doing is inherently more complicated. They're making a general purpose operating system intended to run on every computer.
Apple is making one operating system intended to run on maybe 0.1% of devices. Oh, and they also make those devices.
And MacOS is still trending down in quality, somehow.
Apple demonstrated with their latest releases that they don't give a single fuck about QA. OSX 26 is very buggy. The corner resize debacle, the glass debacle, and problem after problem that has made it to the HN front page is enough to know they don't care about QA the way you think they do.
The list of problems are described are not typical, I've seen none of that running Linux. YMMV
Apple decided to focus on "Glass", an outdated UI style that was introduced in Windows Vista. They didn't have to, it wasn't wanted by anyone and it has caused significant embarrassment for apple and problems for users. Why couldn't they replace Finder with something actually useful? Why couldn't they fix the UI so "About this software" isn't the first thing on the first menu which is a waste of space. They made MacOS objectively worse.
Haven't run into any of those problems either. Linux has been a "just works" experience for me for nearly a decade now. Buying Intel hardware seems to have done the trick.
It's pointless to engage in such argumentation though. Even if the experience was poor, it wouldn't matter, because the cost of a "good experience" is being a serf in Apple's digital fiefdom, and that is an unacceptable moral failing. It's not about practicality, it's about not being reduced to begging the trillion dollar corporation for permission to do basic things with "your" computer.
Besides, you can buy a Mac and do whatever you want and go buy a bunch of off the shelf components to do whatever hobby stuff you want to do too.
Freedom, perhaps, starts with not making up and applying limitations on yourself.
Nothing wrong with applying limitations to oneself. That's discipline, principles. It's important stuff.
The real problem is accepting the completely made up limitations that others apply on you. Corporation wakes up one day and just decides people can't run more than two virtual machines? That's stupid. Actually defending this with "but convenience" arguments as if convenience was supposed to override freedom? No.
Freedom isn't something you actively work towards. It's something you start with. It's the status quo. Others take it away from you. You can either accept it passively and enjoy the "convenience", or you can resist and go down the harder path. It's very disappointing to see people on Hacker News choose the former path.
Anyway, what even is this argument? Can't control everything, so it doesn't matter? Don't even bother trying? Just give up? Just accept your lot in life as a serf in Apple's digital fiefdom? I'm pessimistic about the future but even I haven't completely succumbed to such total nihilism yet.
Yes I did, just like you did when you chose to live as a taxpaying member of society rather than a hermit scouring the bush for berries and fish.
Enjoy your VMs.
The issue of computer freedom does not even come close to this. None of this is imposed on us. We have the power to choose differently at any time. We can choose not to accept the monopolistic corporation's terms.
HN is a diverse global community and its views about most topics form a normal distribution, and most people here are able to form nuanced opinions that consider the positives and negatives in all these topics. This kind of “very funny” swipe relies on a caricature that's easy to portray if you focus on the loudest voices on one side of any discussion but falls away if you make the effort to read the discussions in depth.
Plenty of hate out there of apple alongside the love.
Holding contradictory ideas isn't the laudable skill. Any uncritical person can believe conflicting things without being troubled by them. The genius is holding such ideas in disbelief long enough to let evidence alter or evict them.
I did not know F. Scott Fitzgerald was the source of the phrase, TIL. I just picked it up somewhere and paraphrased it since I thought it applies here.