Yes they do. It's called "another Mac". And I'm not even being snarky here: I legitimately think someone at Apple thought this through and said "yeah if they need more than 2 VMs running at the same time, there are probably multiple users and they can each get their own Mac".
replyNah, Apple has been extremely restrictive about virtual machines in all kinds of ways, e.g. the minimum terms anyone is able to lease out a VM or Mac to someone else is 24h, making cloud-like workloads practically impossible. For some reason, Apple really doesn’t like virtual machines, and it’s much more intentional than just “probably multiple users”.
replyIt’s extremely frustrating.
I mean, as someone who was in that situation as a customer, we couldn't find a great cloud option for our needs, and we ended up building our first hardware lab with a bunch of macs.
replyIt definitely caused us to buy macs we would have rented and shared.
Frustrating for you, hilarious for me. I had no idea they had hobbled MacOS in this way. It doesn't surprise me at all really, and it's pretty ridiculous.
replyI'm not sure why people keep giving Apple their money, especially tech-savvy people that would want to run VMs.
yeah I'm glad I paid extra for linux on a used dell, I'd hate to be slumming in some poverty ridden ghetto like mac users with their vm limits
replyThe option is you have to buy another machine. There are mac ec2 instances and several mac cloud hosts that all would abuse this if they could, instead to stay compliant they buy more machines.
replyWell yeah and Apple wouldn’t be able to abuse its pseudo-monopolistic market position. That would be so sad…
reply(where "abuse" means using the hardware to run software)
replyI tried to launch a MacOS instance on EC2 recently (on my work account), and was blocked.
replySo 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 thus they need a massive datacenter full of systems, rather than a pile of paid licenses.
replyAnd macOS remains a toy for use only by individuals that is a massive pain for developers to support.