Yeah but the "hardware" in that sense is almost entirely iPhone and iPhone-adjacent, Mac is a trailing 4th- or 5th-place line of business... maybe 6th.
Because this limit isn’t about your hardware, but their software.
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.
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".
Nah, 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”.
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.
It definitely caused us to buy macs we would have rented and shared.
Correct, us as well, but we’re mainly harvesting refurbished Mac Mini’s.
My biggest problem is the lack of a good CI/CD flow when you can’t work with images and virtual machines. We’re using ansible now to manage the fleet and I’m not a fan.
If they would more than 2 VMs, we’d still buy the hardware, we’d just buy larger ones and have more virtual machines on them. Very likely also use Linux as the host.
I hope one day Apple sees the light like Microsoft also did, but I’m not hopeful.
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.
I'm not sure why people keep giving Apple their money, especially tech-savvy people that would want to run VMs.
The limit is for macOS running in a VM (which is mainly useful for developing iOS and macOS apps, for example cloud-based testing and CI/CD workflows.)
Most developers build web- and server-based systems that use Linux VMs as back-ends.
Most containers used for development are Linux containers, which also run in a Linux VM.
The 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.
Apple had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the world of virtualization and the idea of macOS running on anything besides "metal built by Apple." They've been pretty clear for decades that they only care about customers who buy Apple aluminum and silicon.
IMO they should sell appropriately priced licenses that allow the use of more VMs. Make the licenses expensive enough so that it doesn't eat into hardware sales, or explicitly prohibit VDI/virtual seats in the license agreement.
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.
Yeah that is what I was going to do until I discovered the two VM limit. I was building a MacOS GitHub Actions farm, or rather, looking into it. I had written most of the code but my inertia screeched to a halt when I discovered the two VM limit for MacOS VMs.
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.
Sure you can do it technically, but then you have a licensing compliance issue, so no reputable business will do 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.
I've never really understood how Apple can let people download MacOS for free, and then tell them where and how they can run it - only on Apple's hardware. If I download a copy of Windows or any software ever written, I can run it on any hardware that exists that can run it. But somehow Apple gets to dictate to people where and how they can run freely available software that anyone can download?
>Why should they impose a limit at all? Your hardware is a natural limit
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.
Apple's policies banning developers from referring customers to alternative payments has been widely ruled illegal around the world, first and foremost in the USA where they were even referred for criminal investigation for continuing to do it after being court ordered to stop.
Google has been twice convicted of antitrust monopoly abuse in the last year in the USA, and found to have exploited user privacy settings several times.
Meta's harmful practices have been continuously revealed in court: allowing sex trafficking and prostitution to help train their AI, allowing scam ads because they're profitable, deliberately exploiting children spending in games because it's profitable, and illegally tracked users.
Amazon's antitrust for exploiting vendor data is ongoing, so I guess you can have a point there.
The DMA and DSA already allow fines up to 10 - 20% of global turnover (effectively 30 - 40% of annual profit) and breaking up noncompliant companies.
The issue is nobody wants to pull the trigger because the companies that would get fined or broken up have curried favour with Trump to circumvent these consequences.
That's a similar scale as GDPR violations. And EU companies I worked with were always very serious about GDPR regulations, even if their internal training confirms fines were always really small compared to maximums.
US doesn't care about warnings and small fines, though. If penalties are not enforced, it's like they don't exist.
> Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg publicly voiced his dissatisfaction and sought support from Trump, while Apple’s Tim Cook reportedly asked the White House to directly intervene against EU fines imposed on his company.
Apple even went so far as to demand the EU repeal these laws, and is likely still non-compliant in several ways; for which they should have been fined tens of billions of dollars by now!
> they should have been fined tens of billions of dollars by now!
Maybe cartoonishly large fines levied against powerful entities wasn’t such a great idea. Other incentives may have been better suited to getting the populace what they want in the long term.
>Maybe cartoonishly large fines levied against powerful entities
right, the tradition is that fines be cartoonishly small so that breaking the law can be factored into the cost of doing business, who the hell does the EU think they are to go against tradition!!?
I don't think there is an incentive lawmakers could offer that is worth more to Apple than monopolizing fees and subverting competition, there is practically no limits they will go to to preserve that status quo around the world.
The only time they have eagerly complied with anything relating to this is when Judge YGR gave them this ultimatum, they approved Fortnite a full day early once someone had to be personally responsible for defying her order a second time:
That seems like a better model than stupefying fines against the corporate entity then. Forget about billion dollar fines, just give them a slap on the wrist while telling them explicitly what they have to stop doing, but then if they keep doing it the executives are personally held in contempt.
It also solves the perverse incentive of "fine the foreign companies as a revenue generation method" because the result is getting them to comply instead of either repeatedly fining them for not doing it or trying to extract a fine so large it becomes an international political issue.
Nope. All that does is create a rash of execs/decisionmakers who become sacrificial fixtures who absolutely do not travel to the jurisdiction in question, thusly handily sidestepping the accountability. It has to be fines. At the end of the day, it's going to become a political sticking point one way or another if we're going to share and coexist on the same planet.
The "Digital Services Act" effectively takes the divisive dark money out of advertising and requires more than minimum-effort moderation, affecting Meta and X:
- bans targeted advertising based on a person’s sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or political beliefs and puts restrictions on targeting ads to children
- requires transparency on content algorithms and advertising
- requires online platforms prevent and remove posts containing illegal goods, services, or content in a timely fashion
The "Digital Markets Act" requires interoperability and competition:
- requires Apple to allow competing app stores, very contentious for Apple who invented a stack of fees for this
- requires Apple and Google to allow apps to freely use 3rd party payments, this is very contentious for Apple and they still charge for doing so
- allow 3rd parties interoperability, eg headphones and smartwatches for Apple and messaging clients for Meta, this is starting to improve
- allow removal of preinstalled apps, settings of new defaults, this is largely done although malicious compliance has kept rival browsers at bay on iPhone
> The discovery landscape is changing. AI-assisted research is expanding vulnerability discovery across the ecosystem, increasing both coverage and speed. The balance between findings and remediation capacity in open source has substantively shifted. We have a responsibility to the community to ensure this program effectively accomplishes its ambitious dual purpose: discovery and remediation. Accordingly, we are pausing submissions while we consider the structure and incentives needed to further these goals.
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