Unsure if you've seen the comments elsewhere in the thread but in case you haven't and this is a genuine question - because Apple's EULA forces Amazon to do this.
I'm honestly kind of surprised that this isn't a service that Apple offers directly. Keep it part of their walled garden. Only apps compiled on the ACC (Apple Cloud Compiler) will receive certificate signing which allows them to be offered in the AppStore. And by a service Apple offers, I of course mean a service Apple requires.
Yes - I did know that. I guess my question is directed more at Apple. Why stipulate this unless they want to hobble reasonable use-cases or inflate usage arbitrarily.
Is the answer simply "Because they can and they like money?"
> Why stipulate this unless they want to ... inflate usage arbitrarily
That's exactly it. If you could rent Macs by the minute, you wouldn't need to own Mac hardware anymore to build Mac apps, and the cloud provider wouldn't need to own as much.
> Why stipulate this unless they want to hobble reasonable use-cases or inflate usage arbitrarily.
It seems this is Apple's sole motivation when it comes to anything developer related, which seems odd considering their goal is to commodotize software to sell their hardware - you'd think they wouldn't keep making it harder to make software for their platforms
But only as a second-order effect. This will lead to needing to buy more Apple hardware to support such a service but it's the service provider that rakes in the cash (or doesn't because people don't need 24h) as a result of this EULA.
Surely this just means that more people won't bother and we're back to hackintoshes or upgrading old Apple hardware. Making something uneconomical isn't a great strategy to drive growth.
Yea this should work because the license merely says it must be on Mac hardware and given that you're not letting everyone share/use the computer like AWS the new restrictions won't really matter.
> Could you virtualize a newer MacOS version on your Mac hardware?
Yes but I'm more likely to vierualize on my more powerful and better value PC. The EULA is rather hard to enforce and I don't have any moral qualms in this particular case.
But the 24hr thing kills it for me. I will never get 24 hours use out of it. Maybe a few hours. Why am I paying for the other 21 hours?
Maybe someone can wrap this SaaS in a other Saas and sell timeshares in a virtual Mac.