Not a lawyer, I do wonder if such terms would hold up in court. I can see the case for EULA around virtualization when you're running multiple instances of macOS. But say I just buy a bunch of Mini's and rent (full access to) them out (bare metal, full system) per hour, rather than 24hr. Or for non-"development" work, whatever that means. Could Apple really put up a good case in court?
It seems unlikely that they could successfully sue me if I buy a bunch of Macs and give some people physical time-limited access (say, students in a classroom). What makes the difference? Remote access? Charging rent? I'm not sufficiently invested in these matters for a deep dive, so hoping someone with legal knowledge could chime in.
Inevitably, this inconsistency will be resolved, but not in the way you or I would like. Tesla is already removing features that previous owners unlocked at sale of the car.
Depends on if the courts look at this as a hardware issue or "digital" software one. I have a feeling they would look at like renting physical hardware in which the first sale doctrine would absoltely apply.
of course like with anything in the legal system it will take a company like Amazon that has their own team of $1,000/hr lawyers to face up against Apple's team of $1,000/hr lawyers in order to get a precedent setting case
That looks like a loophole for Apple. I wonder if soon you'll have to log in with your biometric identity document in order to use it plus always recording camera will ensure only the person who is licensed to use it, use it.
To use MacOS you have to first agree on their Terms, and through this they can legally block you from using it in certain ways. Like the famous "It is only legal to run OS X in a virtual machine if the host computer is a Mac." rule.
One thing is, they could write anything in the EULA, I was just wondering how much it is actually enforceable (even with a click-through "consent".
Second, I wonder on what legal basis they can actually impose usage restrictions of a whole Mac (hardware+software) via an EULA as long as I don't breach any copyright (which I don't think I do if I rent out usage of the entire system for a few hours).
AFAICT (again, not a lawyer), everything rests on section 1.J.[1] "Except as expressly permitted in Section 3, you may not rent, lease, lend, sell, redistribute or sublicense the Apple Software." being enforceable. (Section 3. contains the infamous terms for Leasing for Permitted Developer Services with the 24hr restriction). I don't know if such terms would hold up in court. If I read the thing correctly, the the EULA forbids people from lending their MacBook to a friend, or even resell it, which strikes me as quite absurd.
I have a hard time believing 1.J.[1] could be enforced as it sounds like you cannot sell your MAC, use it in a work or school environment. Apple can't risk to prove the point in court because if it is enforceable no organisation will touch their products.
I think the wording is ambiguous enough that it takes an actual court case to resolve.
In a broad interpretation, the prohibitions on rent/lease/lend/sell of "the Apple Software" would apply to the whole system (harware+software), which would forbid me to sell my old Mac. This would never hold up in court. But in a narrow reading, where the prohibitions only apply to the software, separated from the hardware it does not look like there is anything stopping me from renting out (access to) the entire Mac to a single user[1], for whatever purpose and duration I want. So those 24hr and "development purposes" would be moot.
[1] There's probably more than enough precedence to uphold number-of-users restrictions of software, e.g. Windows Server CALs.
I wonder the degree to which this is about apple trying to reduce their services crypto workload? When developers say they "want a mac instance" they often "want a mac instance that can talk to apple services like a normal mac instance" in order to sign apps and such. I'm not sure but I think arranging for that capability probably involves round trips with apple services to get required key signing artifacts into place ...
If instances are totally ephemeral in the same way as we are used to with linux vm's maybe that runs the risk of creating a real problem for apple services?
Taking a particular perspective and not really talking about the legalities, I can see some not so savory “non-development” work particularly when no one is seriously going to try putting macOS as a production machine for running SAAS apps, except perhaps using some of those specialized, bespoke chips:
- running apps in the cloud, not for q/a, but as a farm for adclicks and fraud. People already do that
- farm for generating and submitting low quality games primarily to sell ads. People already do this.
- Use backup images on systems with Secure Enclave in order to crack the encryption. Someone security company whose clients are state level actors, and increasingly, law enforcement, are doing this with iphones. I don’t know if a mac cloud makes this possible for other hardware
- The M1 is an Apple exclusive SoC with a lot of bespoke, specialized chips, and unified memory, and is only going to get faster for future Macs. I can see people trying to access a cloud for that, while ignoring the branding that links consumer, end-user experience with “Apple”. (Esp since Nvidia has bought ARM, and that RISC-in-cloud is becoming a big deal)
I am not saying those are a good enough reason to set the ELUA the way Apple did, but that I get why Apple might do this.
The flip side from my perspective. A monthly dedicated host on MacStadium is much cheaper than running an AWS Windows 2019 Server ondemand, or even with Reserved Instance pricing.
Why does that matter to me and the company I work for? Because Unity is behind on their Linux version, so CI builds are going to run on either Mac or Windows. I don’t really care that much about elastic compute for this, though being able to use AMIs matters more. The main reason we have not moved to using Macstadium dedicated hosts is that I would need to set up something like Chef as configuration management for what would be essentially a fleet of pet servers.
But if our team wants to deploy to either Mac or Windows as production systems ... I would be discouraging them from doing so.
Does this mean Apple explicitly allows re-sale (os license follows used laptop if you sell it), and explicitly forbids renting. (I can rent you my laptop, but then there's no way for you to legally run OS X on it)?
If you are in the US, it doesn't necessarily matter whether the terms would hold up in court. The question comes down to how deep your pockets are and how much money you are willing to spend to fight Apple. Apple certainly has deep pockets. There aren't a lot of companies that can take the financial hit to fight against a behemoth in court.
There's a limit to the power of deep pockets in court, especially if the remedy is not $billions. Many civil cases spend more time on damages than they do the actual dispute at hand.
It seems unlikely that they could successfully sue me if I buy a bunch of Macs and give some people physical time-limited access (say, students in a classroom). What makes the difference? Remote access? Charging rent? I'm not sufficiently invested in these matters for a deep dive, so hoping someone with legal knowledge could chime in.