> A Mac Mini is $900 - I break even in nine months by buying the hardware outright.

When you take resale value into account, purchase makes even more sense than renting.

Used M1 Mac Minis from 2020 are currently selling for about $500 when they originally retailed for $699.

> A Mac Mini is $900 - I break even in nine months by buying the hardware outright.

The clue to their decision may be right there, potentially going for an increase in sales.

But nowadays it seems they suffer from a lack of vision and drive; perhaps (hopefully) they’ll come around.

I looked at our GitHub Actions monthly expenses, then at the price of a M4 Mac mini (just when they were released, and still cheap), and decided to buy one as it would pay for itself in less than a year. There are definitely still cases when buying hardware still makes sense, over renting in the cloud.

the problem of buying machine is that it doesn't scale. you have to buy another one if the test gets heavier.

I have a test suite that needs to run on a Mac in a project that merges < 20 PRs a year. No point in provisioning our own Mac and maintaining it for that.