Mac at Any Scale (namespace.so)

108 pointsby anner_3 hours ago37 comments

borschtplease 10 minutes ago

Apple still lives in the world where software developed in IDE on a personal computer and shipped as a boxed software on a disquette with a licence key. Xcode cloud is a joke. All their automation is a joke. It’s not surprising even their own software development stuck because of their ecosystem because they use same tools, same cryptic software signing with their plists, p8, chains, certificates, lack of ui testing, horrible cpp, objc legacy. You just drowning in this environment. How I wish we have proper web app apis at last

therepanic 6 minutes ago

and what kind of world do we live in now

bensyverson 3 minutes ago

A world where people use Claude to operate doomed SaaS products

kccqzy an hour ago

Amazing article. It just goes to show how many problems they are solving just to work around bugs and limitations within Apple itself. I’d wager a guess that if Apple made a new Xserve with the same performance as a Mac mini but twice the price people would still buy them, because figuring out data center operations is expensive.

00deadbeef 42 minutes ago

This article is dated November 3rd yet I've read it months ago, it was already in my history.

andai 34 minutes ago

Title should be edited to "Putting hundreds of MacBooks in a data center (because Apple is silly)" imo

traceroute66 11 minutes ago

Honestly, my first thought was "does the datacentre know ?"

12 MacBooks per shelf, if we say roughly 5U per shelf (21.12/4.445 rounded up), so roughly 9 shelves per 47U rack, so 100-ish MacBooks per rack.

That's a scary density of LiPo battery.

The author complains about the lack of redundant power in Mac Minis, but there are other ways to get redundant power into one AC input.

corvad 13 minutes ago

Hmm hundreds of laptop batteries in a datacenter doesn't seem too smart.

miniman1337 2 hours ago

Isnt it against the Apple EULA to sell VMs of Macos? Love the creative problem solving with the HW.

kylec an hour ago

I don't know about selling, but Apple permits up to 2 virtualized Macs to run on a Mac. If they are circumventing this limit that would be an issue, but it doesn't sound like they are.

miniman1337 an hour ago

Ah okay - and the 24 hour minimum rental time doesn't apply to VMs? Im just curious how they are getting around the limits that Mac Stadium and AWS have.

zamadatix 15 minutes ago

They aren't getting around any limitations. How you decide to bill for meeting the limitations is a business decision, and you can do it via either higher average rates and allow more granular rentals to be financially covered that way or by requiring a 24 hour minimum.

I.e. just because Apple requires you to do things in 24 hour increments does not mean your billing has to expose it in exactly the same way.

hmartin an hour ago

> A well-known limitation is that Apple only allows two macOS VMs per physical Mac. It can be a Mac Pro with 24 cores and 192 GB memory, yet it is limited to running only two guest VMs. This limitation leaks into our product offering: we can only slice Mac resources in two halves. So we run instances with 6 or 12 cores on 14-core Mac Minis and 8/16-core instances on 18-core MacBooks (we reserve a couple cores for management overhead).

fillskills 28 minutes ago

Man, kudos to the person or AI who designed their website. Easy to read, easy to find any information, with eye catching branding.

skrrtww an hour ago

> You can't build iOS apps without a Mac.

I'm not sure this is true anymore.

giwook an hour ago

It is.

nout an hour ago

You can build iOS apps on Omarchy now

shye 8 minutes ago

Omarchy is even less production ready than racking up laptops.

solyin 3 minutes ago

Plus there's the issue that DHH is a racist twat.

graypegg an hour ago

xtool [0] came up on here a while ago [1]. I think it still requires you get a big xcode app bundle off a macos machine and drop that into xtool, since there's no other way to get the iOS library header files from Apple. The other parts of xcode just aren't used as far as I know. Other than that caveat, you're running builds in xtool's own environment on whatever platform you choose. You can even do code signing.

[0] https://xtool.sh

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44011515

bluesign 7 minutes ago

Technically you can, legally not sure

nwellinghoff an hour ago

I really wonder if Apple's logic to require a sale of a unit for 2 VMs is fiscally correct. Seems like it would be better to open it up to virtualization such that more devs can make iOS and macOS apps. Is the community of devs being forced to buy mac hw just do dev a iOS/macOs app so large that its worth putting us through all this HASSLE? Maybe they are worried about clone machine/farms that will eat into their sales. Idk. Because they are so VM unfriendly, I refuse to deal with Apple's bs.

intrasight 32 minutes ago

> Is the community of devs being forced to buy mac hw just do dev a iOS/macOs app so large

Yes.

Why else would you buy such an expensive machine with such a crappy operating system?

someguyiguess 29 minutes ago

Not crappy. Skill issue.

N7lo4nl34akaoSN 20 minutes ago

It's Unix and it can run any pro creative app you like.

solatic an hour ago

The cost of cloud Mac hardware is quite frankly ludicrous across the board. Namespace's minimum for an M6 is, what, $0.06/minute for 6 vCPU? And that's on the cheap end - Semaphore wants $0.09/minute for 4 vCPU and GitHub Actions wants $0.062/minute for M1 hardware (forget AWS pricing even which is even more atrocious).

If I run just a UI test suite for an hour, that's $3.60/run, which is now higher than what I'm paying for AI inference that made the change that triggered the run. That's crazy! If I ran even just one run per night that would run me more than $100/month. A Mac Mini is $900 - I break even in nine months by buying the hardware outright. If I run multiple UI test suites per day, I break even much faster. These ARM chips are so power-light that the cost of electricity is practically irrelevant, and after all, these aren't rack-mounted monstrosities with 90 dB fans - they're meant to cool themselves sitting on your desk. Maybe it's different if you need like 60 of them?

Is anyone even running the numbers before they sign up? Or are companies really running that many Minis and are paying the premium to outsource the DCOps?

MonkeyClub 42 minutes ago

> 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.

robin_reala 32 minutes ago

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.

devmor an hour ago

The registry distribution subject "for another blog post" is the most interesting part of this to me. I'm very interested in the efficiency/locality metrics that went into designing that. I look forward to that future post.

wslh 41 minutes ago

I am lost, doing it in a Hackintosh is feasible but against EULA terms? I remember having a Hackintosh around the office two years ago (yes, it was x64 based). BTW I just found "ARM is not a universal architecture, there will be no more Hackintosh" [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/1uboij0/arm_is_...

scosman an hour ago

Wild to see them using MacBook Pros and not Mac Mini/Studio. Curious how that possible makes sense for economics and cooling.

fckgw an hour ago

They answer that in literally the first paragraph in the article.

TL:DR; They couldn't buy enough minis or studios.

supersimpleguy 8 minutes ago

If only they covered that in the article you didn't read.

Did you literally open the link, see a picture of Macbooks, and come directly back here before reading a single word?

varispeed 15 minutes ago

So they buy up the machines, likely create supply issues (add waiting time etc.), then rent them out at premium?

People are outraged landlords doing that with housing.

Yet someone such rent seeking behaviour is acceptable?

Get fucked.