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.