This is a very silly restriction, at least to apply uniformly to all Macs. I think if you buy a more powerful Mac they should let you virtualize more Mac instances. Like an M5 maybe limit to 2, but maybe let an M5 Pro do 4 and an M5 Max do 8 or something.
Why should they impose a limit at all? Your hardware is a natural limit, you'll stop of your own accord when you reach its thresholds.
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.
Rent seeking, of course. They want to charge you for every physical and logical machine you use. Virtualization gets around that.
They'd probably charge separately for every feature of the processor if they could.
That would make more sense except they don't even have an option to pay for it.
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”.
It’s extremely frustrating.
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.
Because we have customers that use macOS and both x86 and apple silicon are build targets of ours.
yeah I'm glad I paid extra for linux on a used dell, I'd hate to be slumming in some poverty ridden ghetto like mac users with their vm limits
I run up to a dozen Linux VMs at once on my Macs.
I've never hit the referenced limit because it isn't a limit on running VMs it's a limit on running macOS, and I hardly ever run macOS VMs.
I'm not sure why people don't use Mac's are so obsessed with telling people who do use Macs that they're wrong, and yet here we are.
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.
(where "abuse" means using the hardware to run software)
Well yeah and Apple wouldn’t be able to abuse its pseudo-monopolistic market position. That would be so sad…
I tried to launch a MacOS instance on EC2 recently (on my work account), and was blocked.
So I asked the IT dept and they said it's stupidly expensive to run a MacOS instance on EC2, and that they would just send me a Macbook Pro instead.
I wish I were kidding.
And thus they need a massive datacenter full of systems, rather than a pile of paid licenses.
And macOS remains a toy for use only by individuals that is a massive pain for developers to support.
> Your hardware
Ah but when you buy an iPhone or a Mac, Apple sees it as their hardware graciously made available to you for a limited time and under ToS.
> Why should they impose a limit at all?
Whenever I see apple silliness, I have to remember:
"You're not the target market."
Yeah but. They happily sold it to you
They sold it to you, with a limit.
They are likely scared of people who would run MacOS virtual desktop farms, without also buying an appropriate number of Apple machines.
That’s what I would be worried about if my primary source of income was hardware sales.
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.
Well, but their customers are those that buy Apple hardware.
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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.
Imagine buying a mac studio with 500+ GB of memory and being limited to 2 vms.
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.
You are not Apple's target market, and never will be.
They don't care what you want to do with the hardware you own.
You realise you can run VMs for any other os right? It's a limit on running macOS not a limit on running VMs.
They discontinued the 512GB Studio, and the Pro is gone, so no fear there now.
They still EXIST though. And I saw one the other day on the Refurbished store. They’re definitely still around.
Even a 256GB model would run a load of 16GB VMs
Market design.
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.
>The "two VMs per unit hardware" has been in their license for at least a decade.
I'd be pretty surprised if there isn't a workaround or hack for this.
Microsoft has had limits on some things like RDP on some versions of Windows, but there have always been ways to get around it.
You are commenting on the article that discusses exactly that.
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?
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>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.
The limit isn't really a resource issue, since you can run pretty much an "unlimited" number of non-Mac VMs. I suspect it's more of a business decision, such as preventing people from setting up shop as a low-cost Mac VPS provider.
Maybe it doesn't work. Why are you so sure it would? It may perform very badly.
I've run multiple Windows VMs as well as multiple Docker sessions at the same time on different MBPs (my current one being an M3 Max). Didn't really budge the machine at all.
But aren't Mx based macs supposed to be the fastest computers you can get? Why wouldn't they be able to run more than 2 VMs?
I can run a ton of Windows VMs at the same time, wouldn't Windows be a comparable resource hog to MacOS?
Apple M2 CPUs can have up to 192GB of RAM. If we look at the Mac Neo that has only 8GB of RAM, then an M2 host should be able to run at least 20 VMs before memory gets scarce.
There's no good reason Apple limits to 2 VMs except for greed, which they are well known for.
Remember you’re not battling against a HW limitation, but against Tim Cook’s fear of selling less macs.
I buy a $100 Windows 11 Pro licence, and my limit is 1024 VMs
Hyper‑V on Windows 11 supports up to 1024 simultaneous VMs per host if the hardware can handle it. On my little Windows ARM laptop I can easily run 4 VMs before it runs out of steam.
The limit of 2 is just for virtualizing macOS. You can run as many Linux VMs as you want at once on macOS.
There's first class support for Linux on Windows, and Microsoft has a developers VM available for download so you can run as many Windows as you want. I do a Hyper-V Quick Create and there are three flavors of Linux to choose from, or Windows, with all the development tools pre-installed.
The only reason Linux exists on Windows is they're trying to redo the 90s playbook of dominating then destroying the competition. I was almost on board in the Windows 10 era, switching a whole lot of my time to doing things in WSL on Windows.
Windows 11 and the walled garden greed they're trying to enable is so bad that this dominating Linux attempt is certainly failing, the only reason I haven't completely ditched my Windows system is that my several TB external drive is at large and I haven't taken the time to actually do it.
Plus Steam and their Wine work is absolutely killing it so the one thing that was keeping me motivated to still have a Windows presence is pretty much gone.
On Mac, you can run lots of Windows/Linux VMs and two Mac VMs.
On Windows, you can run lots of Windows/Linux VMs and zero Mac VMs.
I've run MacOS x86 VMs on Windows, it used to work great for a while. I haven't done that lately. I just don't care that much about supporting Apple users anymore, Apple makes it too expensive and difficult.
> zero Mac VMs.
Legally (the last time I checked)
But you can’t run 1024 copies of that one license. This is what this limit is actually about.
It really is silly. The other day I decided to try this openclaw thing out but concerned about the security stuff, so I took VM for a spin only to find out the iCloud and the App Store were restricted.
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Seems Mykola Grymalyuk started working at Apple 2 years after this blog post. You either die a hero..
starting with M3+ you can use Hypervisor.framework/Virtualization.framework to spin up nested VMs.
it would be amusing if that bypassed the limit.
IIRC, that's only for Linux guests that can nest. macOS can only one level deep. That is: you can't have a macOS guest (running on the Apple hardware host) make its own macOS guest.
Lol with 2 VMs per VM you can do an infinite VM linked list where each macOS hosts a "guest" and a "next host". I'm too lazy to test this out. Any takers?
I think it's a little funny that my response is "no I'm not wasting my weekly tokens on that, it's not a good enough bit"
I’m very curious, why did Apple put such a limitation?
Because their business model is to sell tightly integrated hardware and software as a package. The hardware sales fund the software development. They don't want people who haven't bought the hardware using the software.
The VM limit only applies to the number of macOS VMs launched from macOS itself.
My 2018 mac mini officially supports VMware ESXi to be installed directly on the hardware and virtualize any number of macOS machines
Funny enough I can even launch more than 2 macOS vms on my framework chromebook with qemu + KVM from the integrated Linux terminal.
macOS is proprietary software. You need a license for every copy you run, whether it's in a VM or not. The VM limit is written into the macOS EULA.
> to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software, or any prior macOS or OS X operating system software or subsequent release of the Apple Software, within virtual operating system environments on each Apple-branded computer you own or control that is already running the Apple Software, for purposes of: (a) software development; (b) testing during software development; (c) using macOS Server; or (d) personal,
non-commercial use.
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This implies anyone doing this using VMware violates the EULA?
Yes. Apple's not going to come after you for running too many VMs on your personal machine, but if you're running a commercial enterprise involving macOS VMs they do care.
VMware vSphere is not a product intended to be used by consumers. It's intended to be run by enterprises at scale. ESXi is running the vms not macOS.
Yes. And the license only allows you to run macOS guests on macOS hosts. So using esxi means you don’t have any license for whatever macOS guests you run.
You are confusing macos guests on KVM (Linux) and macos guests on ESXi which is a real enterprise product, and officially enables you to run as many macos vms as your hardware supports.
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.
MacOS is full of these anti-owner decisions. They want full control over your experience for their benefit.
Probably to prevent a single hardware system from being used to run an online identity farm.
Doesn't make too much sense, the VMs don't get unique hardware identifiers that one could (ab)use for spamming iMessage.
That kind of tracks as the source of the concern. My first thought was it’d be something IDMS-related as well. I don’t know enough about that system to pinpoint exactly what.
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This is a really cool article, but the existence of such an arbitrary limit on any serious development platform is weird.
Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?
I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.
At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac. Because this sample is from my experience, it’s skewed to startups and tech companies. For sure, lots of devs outside those areas, but tech companies are a big chunk of the world’s developers.
So yea I would say Apple is a “serious development platform” just given how much it dominates software development in the tech sector in the US.
I have the feeling a lot of people take Macs because the other option is a locked down Windows, and Linux is not offered.
This. I ran Linux at work until last year, when it was finally disallowed. I went with locked-down Mac over locked-down Windows.
The hardware for a Linux laptop right now is not great. Especially for an arm64 machine. Even if the hardware is good the chassis and everything else is typically plastic and shitty.
That is a surprising sentiment. Most dell and Lenovo laptops work just fine and are usually of reasonably good build quality (non-plastic chassis etc.).
arm64 is however mostly bad. The only real contender for Linux laptops (outside of asahi) was Snapdragon's chips but the HW support there was lacking iirc.
They give us Dell Linux machines from work. They suck so bad and we have so many problems. Overheating, camera is terrible, performance is bad relatively to the huge weight of the device. Everything is a huge step down from Macs.
Whenever I see Linux people comparing Linux and Mac I'm amazed at the audacity. They are not in the same league. Not by a mile. Even the CLI is more convenient on the Mac which is truly amazing to me.
How is the Mac CLI more convenient? There isn't even a package manager in the box, they ship loads of old outdated tools too. Plus there's the whole BSD/GNU convention thing you have to watch out for.
I don't find my ThinkPad running Linux overheats, nor is it particularly heavy. And performance is comparable to the similarly priced MBP at the time. Camera sucks, but compared to my Surface so do the Macs...
We are lucky in that we can choose our machines (within reason, and no real support if things get broken) and run an arch flavour.
I use thinkpad x1 carbons and have nearly 0 issues. The hardware is not quite as nice as a macbook but it does the job and is nice enough.
Prefer my Konsole setup on KDE and I use both interchangeably all day tbh. Camera yea. The irony is heating issues become less of an issue with arm.
Recently an article on HN front page was about a guy who had to file down his MBP because the front edge of it was too sharp and resting his wrists on it hurt his hands. At least two people in the comment section noted how the sweat on their hands over time caused the sharp edge of the MBP chassis to pit and it caused it to turn in to a sharp serrated edge that actually cut their hands.
You can say other laptops are "plastic and shitty" all you want, but Apple's offerings aren't necessarily the best thing out there either. I personally like variety, and you don't get that from Apple. I can choose from hundreds of form factors from a lot of vendors that all run Linux and Windows just fine, plastic or not.
Which is none trivial. The laptop scene is particularly difficult though.
I have a personal Framework 13 and a work-issued MacBook Pro. I love Framework’s mission of providing user-serviceable hardware; we need upgradable, serviceable hardware. However, the battery life on my MacBook Pro is dramatically better than on my Framework. Moreover, Apple Silicon offers excellent performance on top of its energy efficiency. While I use Windows 11 on my Framework, I prefer macOS.
Additionally, today’s sky-high RAM and SSD prices have caused an unexpected situation: Apple’s inflated prices for RAM and SSD upgrades don’t look that bad in comparison to paying market prices for DIMMs and NVMe SSDs. Yes, the Framework has the advantage of being upgradable, meaning that if RAM and SSD prices decrease, then upgrades will be cheaper in the future, whereas with a Mac you can’t (easily) upgrade the RAM and storage once purchased. However, for someone who needs a computer right now and is willing to purchase another one in a few years, then a new Mac looks appealing, especially when considering the benefits of Apple Silicon.
>>At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac
I work in video games, you know, industry larger than films - 10 out of 10 devs I know are on Windows. I have a work issued Mac just to do some iOS dev and I honestly don't understand how anyone can use it day to day as their main dev machine, it's just so restrictive in what the OS allows you to do.
It makes sense that you use Windows in a video game company. We use windows as well at work and it's absolutely awful for development. I would really prefer a Linux desktop, especially since we exclusively deploy to Linux.
Weird .. macOS is still completely open is my experience. Can you give an example?
I compile a tool we use, send it to another developer, they can't open it without going through system settings because the OS thinks it's unsafe. There is no blanket easy way to disable this behaviour.
We also inject custom dlibs into clang during compilation and starting with Tahoe that started to fail - we discovered that it's because of SIP(system integrity protection). We reached out to apple, got the answer that "we will not discuss any functionality related to operation of SIP". Great. So now we either have to disable SIP on every development machine(which IT is very unhappy about) or re-sign the clang executable with our own dev key so that the OS leaves us alone.
If SIP is kicking in, it sounds like you're using the clang that comes with Apple's developer tools. Does this same issue occur with clang sourced from homebrew, or from LLVM's own binary releases?
Yes, it kicks in even with non apple supplied clang(most notably, with the clang supplied as part of the Android toolchain, since we sometimes build Android on MacOS and having to re-sign the google-supplied clang with our own certificate is now a regular thing every time there is an update released).
> We also inject custom dlibs into clang during compilation
I am curious what you are doing
We use Unreal Build Accelerator which injects a custom dlib into clang to intercept the compilation process and distribute it to worker machines.
If it's being sent to another developer then asking them to run xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine on the file so they can run it doesn't seem insurmountable. I agree that it's a non-starter to ask marketing or sales to do that, but developers can manage. Having to sign and then upload the binary to Apple to notarize is also annoying but you put it in a script and go about your day.
But Apple being "completely open", it is not.
I work as a consultant for the position, navigation, and timing industry and 10 of 10 devs were on Windows. Before that I worked for a big hollywood company and while scriptwriters and VP executive assistants had Macs, everyone technical was on Windows. Movies were all edited and color graded on Windows.
>it's just so restrictive in what the OS allows you to do.
The people using them typically aren't being paid to customize their OS. The OS is good for if you just want to get stuff done and don't want to worry about the OS.
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> Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?
This is one of those comments that is so far away from reality that I can’t tell if it’s trolling.
To give an honest answer: Using Macs for serious development is very common. At bigger tech companies most employees choose Mac even when quality Linux options are available.
I’m kind of interested in how someone could reach a point where they thought macs were not used for software development for 20 years.
> I’m kind of interested in how someone could reach a point where they thought macs were not used for software development for 20 years.
If you work with engineering or CAD software then Macs aren't super common at all. They're definitely ubiquitous in the startup/webapp world, but not necessarily synonymous with programming or development itself.
Most "serious" companies do not support Linux in their IT infrastructure. I've begged to run Linux, but it's a hard no from IT. They only support Windows and MacOS, and that's all. So I choose a Windows desktop, because I am not a fan of Apple. Having been forced to use Macs in past jobs, I'll choose Windows every time. I liked being able to dual-boot Windows on a MBP in the past, but that is no longer an option.
It is a weird situation. Apple products are consumer products but they make us use them as development hardware because there is no other way to make software for those products.
Making software for other Apple products pretty low on the reasons I use a MBP.
128GB of RAM and an M4 Max makes for a very solid development machine, and the build quality is a nice bonus.
An artificial limit on the number vms you are allowed to launch doesn't make it solid
macOS* VMs. And if you don’t care about that, is it no longer solid?
Anything being developed for the Apple ecosystem requires use of the Apple development platform. Maybe the scope could be called "unserious," but the scale cannot be ignored.
I am aware.
However having used Xcode at some point 10 years ago my belief is that the app ecosystem exists in spite of that and that people would never choose this given the choice.
For me at least, not being Linux is a feature. Linux has always been “almost Unix” to the point where now it has become its own thing for better or worse. OS X was never trying to be Linux. It would be better if we still had a few more commercial POSIX implementations.
That is fair but in my experience most devs are targeting linux servers not BSD(or any other flavour) which is helped by OSX. If OSX was linux derived it would suit them just as well.
edit: I suppose I should also note the vast majority of people developing on mac books (in my experience anyway) are actually targeting chrome.
> I suppose I should also note the vast majority of people developing on mac books (in my experience anyway) are actually targeting chrome.
Point taken. Most developers probably make do with Linux containers rather than MacOS VMs.
There is no reality that macOS could be based on Linux.
Turns out, an operating system is more than just a kernel with some userspace crap tacked on top, unlike what Linux distros tend to be.
> Turns out, an operating system is more than just a kernel with some userspace crap tacked on top, unlike what Linux distros tend to be.
This is also my opinion of OSX, let's not pretend that the userland mess is the most beautiful part of OSX.
Apple has great kernel and driver engineering for sure but once you go the stack above, it's ducktape upon ducktape and you better not upgrade your OS too quickly before they fix the next pile they've just added.
Heterogeneity is the feature. The Linux ecosystem is better off for it (systemd, Wayland, dconf, epoll, inotify are all based on ideas that were in OS X first) and not being beholden to Linux is a competitive advantage for Apple everyone wins.
> Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?
i dont think anyone asks this question in good faith, so it may not even be worth answering. see:
> I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.
yea fwiw macs own for multi-target deployments. i spin up a gazillion containers in whatever i need. need a desktop? arm native linux or windows installations in utm/parallels/whatever run damn near native speed, and if im so inclined i can fully emulate x86/64 envs. dont run into needing to do that often, but the fact that i can without needing to bust out a different device owns. speed penalty barely even matter to me, because ive got untold resources to play around with in this backpack device that literally gets all day battery. spare cores, spare unified mem, worlds my oyster. i was just in win xp 32bit sp2 few weeks ago using 86box compiling something in a very legacy dependent visual studio .net 7 environment that needed the exact msvc-flavored float precision that was shipping 22 years ago, and i needed a fully emulated cpu running at frequencies that was going to make the compiler make the same decisions it did 22 years ago. never had to leave my mac, didnt have to buy some 22 year old thinkpad on ebay, this thing gave me a time machine into another era so i could get something compiled to spec. these techs arent heard of, but its just one of many scenarios where i dont have to leave my mac to get something done. to say its a swiss army knife is an understatement. its a swiss army knife that ships with underlying hardware specs to let you fan out into anything.
for development i have never been blocked on macos in the apple silicon era. i have been blocked on windows/linux developing for other targets. fwiw i use everything, im loyal to whoever puts forth the best thing i can throw my money at. for my professional life, that is unequivocally apple atm. when the day comes some other darkhorse brings forth better hardware ill abandon this env without a second thought. i have no tribalistic loyalties in this space, i just gravitate towards whoever presents me with the best economic win that has the things im after. we havent been talking about itunes for like a decade.
Apple had real Unix a decade before the Linux crap was made, a bad unix copy. Nextstep was much better than Linux crap. "A budget of bad ideas" is what Alan Kay said about Linux [1], he invented the personal computer.
My 1987-1997 ISP was based on several different Unix running on Apple, probably long before you where born.
It's interesting how "real Unix" is still thrown around as a badge of prestige when Linux basically runs the world now.
Alan Kay invented a dead end (smalltalk). Meanwhile Linux became the future.
Apple had a terrible Unix until they bought NextStep.
Are you talking about A/UX? That was one of the first Unix systems I was exposed to.
Yes but I had others too. BSD on both 68000 and PowerPC
Yeah, they were that, and for the last 20 years they have been the iphone company.
It’s crazy that you can compile a custom kernel and it’ll boot and the GUI will run.
> When using a custom kernel collection with Apple Silicon, there are some unfortunate downsides. The biggest being that streamlined OS updates are no longer available.
This might be a blessing in disguise.
Can this work with lume as well? Currently it has a similar limitation.
it should, lume is a thin wrapper around Apple's Virtualization.framework as i understand it
IIRC you can just turn off sip and set the boot argument that controls it without a custom kernel
This feels like an underrated comment if true
Apple has a 2 VM limit?
2 MacOS VMs due to licencing. You can run as many VMs with other guest OSs as you want.
Another limitation: only five active user accounts (with UIs) per machine.
Very funny to see HN hate on Microsoft and Google but then love a company where they cannot even run an app on their mobile platform without Apple's permission or only a certain number of VMs on the hardware they own .
I’ve been looking for this for forever. Finally, the right label.
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HN is not one person. I'm very happy to hate on all of them. I see what you mean though. I've given up on getting normal people to care, but seeing programmers who are absolutely smart enough to run their own Linux system on computers they actually own actively choose not to do so is very disconcerting.
>seeing programmers who are absolutely smart enough to run their own Linux system on computers they actually own actively choose not to do so is very disconcerting.
I run macOS because Apple understands that QA testing is something of actual importance, and designing yet another package manager is not.
I do spin up Linux every now and again to see if it's good yet, and always walk away.
Why do documents print at ~50dpi on my network printer?
Why does the system simply not wake up ~20% of the time when I open my laptop's lid?
Why do I have to unplug and reconnect my USB WiFi Dongle every hour or so when the internet randomly drops out?
Why does the system stop recognising my USB SD Card reader occasionally, forcing me to hard reboot the system?
Why is the audio distorted over HDMI when I enable HDR?
Why does Kodi only detect a refresh rate of 30Hz when the system itself has no issues seeing that the monitor is 60Hz?
All of these are real problems that real users have had, but instead of solving them the Linux development community instead chooses to devote their time and resources navel gazing about systemd alternatives or creating a fragile AUR package for software that already has a sensible and officially supported distribution method.
All operating systems have bugs, and Apple doesn't have the QA it used to have. MacOS has basically been exclusively trending down in quality for a while now, while Linux continues to get better.
What you have to realize is that what Linux distros are doing is inherently more complicated. They're making a general purpose operating system intended to run on every computer.
Apple is making one operating system intended to run on maybe 0.1% of devices. Oh, and they also make those devices.
And MacOS is still trending down in quality, somehow.
You're not wrong about the downwards trend in quality but we're still a long ways off from macOS or even Windows having the same level of QA issues that Linux does, on a regular desktop system.
>I run macOS because Apple understands that QA testing is something of actual importance, and designing yet another package manager is not.
Apple demonstrated with their latest releases that they don't give a single fuck about QA. OSX 26 is very buggy. The corner resize debacle, the glass debacle, and problem after problem that has made it to the HN front page is enough to know they don't care about QA the way you think they do.
The list of problems are described are not typical, I've seen none of that running Linux. YMMV
Apple decided to focus on "Glass", an outdated UI style that was introduced in Windows Vista. They didn't have to, it wasn't wanted by anyone and it has caused significant embarrassment for apple and problems for users. Why couldn't they replace Finder with something actually useful? Why couldn't they fix the UI so "About this software" isn't the first thing on the first menu which is a waste of space. They made MacOS objectively worse.
> The list of problems are described are not typical, I've seen none of that running Linux. YMMV
Haven't run into any of those problems either. Linux has been a "just works" experience for me for nearly a decade now. Buying Intel hardware seems to have done the trick.
It's pointless to engage in such argumentation though. Even if the experience was poor, it wouldn't matter, because the cost of a "good experience" is being a serf in Apple's digital fiefdom, and that is an unacceptable moral failing. It's not about practicality, it's about not being reduced to begging the trillion dollar corporation for permission to do basic things with "your" computer.
I recently went (almost) all-in on Linux after many years on Windows. The final straw for me was that I paid for a "lifetime license" for Outlook, because I've been using Outlook for decades, and have every email I've ever sent or received in Outlook. Well, I upgraded the CPU on the server where I run the VM which hosts Outlook, and then Microsoft wanted me to purchase a full new copy of Outlook because of the CPU upgrade. That was it, I'm done.
I moved Linux Mint and Thunderbird for email, and it's honestly been great. I switched all of my Windows-based VMs to Linux Mint.
My main workstation/laptop is still on Windows due to some hardware issues, but I will work those out in time. Mainly I have a USB4 port that also outputs Displayport, which I connect to a Displayport splitter so I can run three 4k monitors. That's the only thing that I haven't solved on Linux, but I haven't put much time into it. And I don't really blame Linux for that, I more blame the laptop manufacturer for not fully supporting Linux.
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On the other hand I’m very conveniently enjoying my experience, I don’t have to waste time screwing with stuff I have no interest in screwing with - like the OP’s examples, and if I want to run Linux I’ll just install it and do what I want or rent out some compute time somewhere.
Besides, you can buy a Mac and do whatever you want and go buy a bunch of off the shelf components to do whatever hobby stuff you want to do too.
Freedom, perhaps, starts with not making up and applying limitations on yourself.
> Freedom, perhaps, starts with not making up and applying limitations on yourself.
Nothing wrong with applying limitations to oneself. That's discipline, principles. It's important stuff.
The real problem is accepting the completely made up limitations that others apply on you. Corporation wakes up one day and just decides people can't run more than two virtual machines? That's stupid. Actually defending this with "but convenience" arguments as if convenience was supposed to override freedom? No.
Freedom isn't something you actively work towards. It's something you start with. It's the status quo. Others take it away from you. You can either accept it passively and enjoy the "convenience", or you can resist and go down the harder path. It's very disappointing to see people on Hacker News choose the former path.
You’re just living under the illusion of freedom. You are completely dependent on the decisions of others and their good graces for all of your computing needs, from the silicon to the Linux distro you use. You’re just drawing an arbitrary line a little further to feel like you’re in control, but you’re not.
Silicon? Sure. Billion dollar fabs are huge single points of failure. It's turning into a problem too due to the war on general purpose computing. Free software doesn't matter if we can't run it. Linux distro? Not really. It's only a matter of how much effort I want to put into things. I can make my own distro, I can't make my own trillion dollar fab.
Anyway, what even is this argument? Can't control everything, so it doesn't matter? Don't even bother trying? Just give up? Just accept your lot in life as a serf in Apple's digital fiefdom? I'm pessimistic about the future but even I haven't completely succumbed to such total nihilism yet.
You're trying to assert this big claim about freedom because some users can't I guess run more than 2 VMs on their MacBook Pro. Since we don't care we're not trying, we just gave up, we're serfs even. Well you're still a serf too your bounds of serfdom are just long enough to trick you into believing otherwise.
Who cares? I don't. I can't do anything with open source software either - like I'm going to spend hundreds or thousands of hours figuring our how any given software package works and that's going to somehow make me more free? C'mon. I can't tell Apple no anymore than I can tell someone maintaining a Linux distribution no.
The VM limitation is only for macOS guests, otherwise I can spin up as many VMs as I like, which is no different to doing so in Linux (since it cannot run macOS VMs).
>TL;DR you sacrificed your freedom for convenience
Yes I did, just like you did when you chose to live as a taxpaying member of society rather than a hermit scouring the bush for berries and fish.
Enjoy your VMs.
Living as a taxpaying member of society is something that is imposed on us. If we refuse, violent men with guns show up at our doors to arrest us and seize our property. At least we get to try and vote out idiots imposing stupid quotas on the population.
The issue of computer freedom does not even come close to this. None of this is imposed on us. We have the power to choose differently at any time. We can choose not to accept the monopolistic corporation's terms.
Yes and many people choose differently to you and that’s ok. They are free to do so.
I use a Macbook for work and do all my development via ssh on remote Linux instances. Each OS is doing what it does best. I last tried a Linux laptop for development in 2020 and my conclusion was the same as in 2010: never again for at least a decade. I have better things to do than fix broken drivers and curse at shitty trackpads.
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Please avoid these kinds of sneers that characterize the whole community as being united in “hate” or “love” for any particular company or technology.
HN is a diverse global community and its views about most topics form a normal distribution, and most people here are able to form nuanced opinions that consider the positives and negatives in all these topics. This kind of “very funny” swipe relies on a caricature that's easy to portray if you focus on the loudest voices on one side of any discussion but falls away if you make the effort to read the discussions in depth.
Since when are users in this place shy about bashing Apple?
Plenty of hate out there of apple alongside the love.
In the very same comments sometimes, those frustrating geniuses
Inside of me are two wolves. One that’s like “F Apple” and another that is like “Are they going to do an M5 ultra or…?”
We can appreciate their hardware achievements and at the same time condemn them for their monopolistic anti-user decisions.
There it is--pretty much that.
Adults can hold 2 thoughts in their head at their same time.
Paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald? "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
Holding contradictory ideas isn't the laudable skill. Any uncritical person can believe conflicting things without being troubled by them. The genius is holding such ideas in disbelief long enough to let evidence alter or evict them.
I agree that holding inconsistent thoughts is not desirable. I don't think the thoughts in this case need to be contradictory and many times are not. I, personally, admire the HW they design and the polish that Apple delivers, while hating how closed their platform is. Am I contradicting myself?
I did not know F. Scott Fitzgerald was the source of the phrase, TIL. I just picked it up somewhere and paraphrased it since I thought it applies here.
Yes, indeed, complaining about them even though they're brilliant (tough love?) as I just did
This is a very silly restriction, at least to apply uniformly to all Macs. I think if you buy a more powerful Mac they should let you virtualize more Mac instances. Like an M5 maybe limit to 2, but maybe let an M5 Pro do 4 and an M5 Max do 8 or something.
Why should they impose a limit at all? Your hardware is a natural limit, you'll stop of your own accord when you reach its thresholds.
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.
Rent seeking, of course. They want to charge you for every physical and logical machine you use. Virtualization gets around that.
They'd probably charge separately for every feature of the processor if they could.
That would make more sense except they don't even have an option to pay for it.
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”.
It’s extremely frustrating.
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.
Because we have customers that use macOS and both x86 and apple silicon are build targets of ours.
yeah I'm glad I paid extra for linux on a used dell, I'd hate to be slumming in some poverty ridden ghetto like mac users with their vm limits
I run up to a dozen Linux VMs at once on my Macs.
I've never hit the referenced limit because it isn't a limit on running VMs it's a limit on running macOS, and I hardly ever run macOS VMs.
I'm not sure why people don't use Mac's are so obsessed with telling people who do use Macs that they're wrong, and yet here we are.
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.
(where "abuse" means using the hardware to run software)
Well yeah and Apple wouldn’t be able to abuse its pseudo-monopolistic market position. That would be so sad…
I tried to launch a MacOS instance on EC2 recently (on my work account), and was blocked.
So I asked the IT dept and they said it's stupidly expensive to run a MacOS instance on EC2, and that they would just send me a Macbook Pro instead.
I wish I were kidding.
And thus they need a massive datacenter full of systems, rather than a pile of paid licenses.
And macOS remains a toy for use only by individuals that is a massive pain for developers to support.
> Your hardware
Ah but when you buy an iPhone or a Mac, Apple sees it as their hardware graciously made available to you for a limited time and under ToS.
> Why should they impose a limit at all?
Whenever I see apple silliness, I have to remember:
Yeah but. They happily sold it to you
They sold it to you, with a limit.
They are likely scared of people who would run MacOS virtual desktop farms, without also buying an appropriate number of Apple machines.
That’s what I would be worried about if my primary source of income was hardware sales.
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.
Well, but their customers are those that buy Apple hardware.
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.
Imagine buying a mac studio with 500+ GB of memory and being limited to 2 vms.
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.
You are not Apple's target market, and never will be.
They don't care what you want to do with the hardware you own.
You realise you can run VMs for any other os right? It's a limit on running macOS not a limit on running VMs.
They discontinued the 512GB Studio, and the Pro is gone, so no fear there now.
They still EXIST though. And I saw one the other day on the Refurbished store. They’re definitely still around.
Even a 256GB model would run a load of 16GB VMs
Market design.
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.
>The "two VMs per unit hardware" has been in their license for at least a decade.
I'd be pretty surprised if there isn't a workaround or hack for this.
Microsoft has had limits on some things like RDP on some versions of Windows, but there have always been ways to get around it.
You are commenting on the article that discusses exactly that.
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.
The limit isn't really a resource issue, since you can run pretty much an "unlimited" number of non-Mac VMs. I suspect it's more of a business decision, such as preventing people from setting up shop as a low-cost Mac VPS provider.
Maybe it doesn't work. Why are you so sure it would? It may perform very badly.
I've run multiple Windows VMs as well as multiple Docker sessions at the same time on different MBPs (my current one being an M3 Max). Didn't really budge the machine at all.
But aren't Mx based macs supposed to be the fastest computers you can get? Why wouldn't they be able to run more than 2 VMs?
I can run a ton of Windows VMs at the same time, wouldn't Windows be a comparable resource hog to MacOS?
Apple M2 CPUs can have up to 192GB of RAM. If we look at the Mac Neo that has only 8GB of RAM, then an M2 host should be able to run at least 20 VMs before memory gets scarce.
There's no good reason Apple limits to 2 VMs except for greed, which they are well known for.
Remember you’re not battling against a HW limitation, but against Tim Cook’s fear of selling less macs.
I buy a $100 Windows 11 Pro licence, and my limit is 1024 VMs
Hyper‑V on Windows 11 supports up to 1024 simultaneous VMs per host if the hardware can handle it. On my little Windows ARM laptop I can easily run 4 VMs before it runs out of steam.
The limit of 2 is just for virtualizing macOS. You can run as many Linux VMs as you want at once on macOS.
There's first class support for Linux on Windows, and Microsoft has a developers VM available for download so you can run as many Windows as you want. I do a Hyper-V Quick Create and there are three flavors of Linux to choose from, or Windows, with all the development tools pre-installed.
The only reason Linux exists on Windows is they're trying to redo the 90s playbook of dominating then destroying the competition. I was almost on board in the Windows 10 era, switching a whole lot of my time to doing things in WSL on Windows.
Windows 11 and the walled garden greed they're trying to enable is so bad that this dominating Linux attempt is certainly failing, the only reason I haven't completely ditched my Windows system is that my several TB external drive is at large and I haven't taken the time to actually do it.
Plus Steam and their Wine work is absolutely killing it so the one thing that was keeping me motivated to still have a Windows presence is pretty much gone.
On Mac, you can run lots of Windows/Linux VMs and two Mac VMs.
On Windows, you can run lots of Windows/Linux VMs and zero Mac VMs.
I've run MacOS x86 VMs on Windows, it used to work great for a while. I haven't done that lately. I just don't care that much about supporting Apple users anymore, Apple makes it too expensive and difficult.
> zero Mac VMs.
Legally (the last time I checked)
But you can’t run 1024 copies of that one license. This is what this limit is actually about.
It really is silly. The other day I decided to try this openclaw thing out but concerned about the security stuff, so I took VM for a spin only to find out the iCloud and the App Store were restricted.
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Seems Mykola Grymalyuk started working at Apple 2 years after this blog post. You either die a hero..
starting with M3+ you can use Hypervisor.framework/Virtualization.framework to spin up nested VMs.
it would be amusing if that bypassed the limit.
IIRC, that's only for Linux guests that can nest. macOS can only one level deep. That is: you can't have a macOS guest (running on the Apple hardware host) make its own macOS guest.
Lol with 2 VMs per VM you can do an infinite VM linked list where each macOS hosts a "guest" and a "next host". I'm too lazy to test this out. Any takers?
I think it's a little funny that my response is "no I'm not wasting my weekly tokens on that, it's not a good enough bit"
I’m very curious, why did Apple put such a limitation?
Because their business model is to sell tightly integrated hardware and software as a package. The hardware sales fund the software development. They don't want people who haven't bought the hardware using the software.
The VM limit only applies to the number of macOS VMs launched from macOS itself.
My 2018 mac mini officially supports VMware ESXi to be installed directly on the hardware and virtualize any number of macOS machines
Funny enough I can even launch more than 2 macOS vms on my framework chromebook with qemu + KVM from the integrated Linux terminal.
macOS is proprietary software. You need a license for every copy you run, whether it's in a VM or not. The VM limit is written into the macOS EULA.
> to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software, or any prior macOS or OS X operating system software or subsequent release of the Apple Software, within virtual operating system environments on each Apple-branded computer you own or control that is already running the Apple Software, for purposes of: (a) software development; (b) testing during software development; (c) using macOS Server; or (d) personal, non-commercial use.
This implies anyone doing this using VMware violates the EULA?
Yes. Apple's not going to come after you for running too many VMs on your personal machine, but if you're running a commercial enterprise involving macOS VMs they do care.
VMware vSphere is not a product intended to be used by consumers. It's intended to be run by enterprises at scale. ESXi is running the vms not macOS.
https://i0.wp.com/williamlam.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/...
Yes. And the license only allows you to run macOS guests on macOS hosts. So using esxi means you don’t have any license for whatever macOS guests you run.
You are confusing macos guests on KVM (Linux) and macos guests on ESXi which is a real enterprise product, and officially enables you to run as many macos vms as your hardware supports.
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.
MacOS is full of these anti-owner decisions. They want full control over your experience for their benefit.
Probably to prevent a single hardware system from being used to run an online identity farm.
Doesn't make too much sense, the VMs don't get unique hardware identifiers that one could (ab)use for spamming iMessage.
That kind of tracks as the source of the concern. My first thought was it’d be something IDMS-related as well. I don’t know enough about that system to pinpoint exactly what.
This is a really cool article, but the existence of such an arbitrary limit on any serious development platform is weird.
Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?
I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.
At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac. Because this sample is from my experience, it’s skewed to startups and tech companies. For sure, lots of devs outside those areas, but tech companies are a big chunk of the world’s developers.
So yea I would say Apple is a “serious development platform” just given how much it dominates software development in the tech sector in the US.
I have the feeling a lot of people take Macs because the other option is a locked down Windows, and Linux is not offered.
This. I ran Linux at work until last year, when it was finally disallowed. I went with locked-down Mac over locked-down Windows.
The hardware for a Linux laptop right now is not great. Especially for an arm64 machine. Even if the hardware is good the chassis and everything else is typically plastic and shitty.
That is a surprising sentiment. Most dell and Lenovo laptops work just fine and are usually of reasonably good build quality (non-plastic chassis etc.).
arm64 is however mostly bad. The only real contender for Linux laptops (outside of asahi) was Snapdragon's chips but the HW support there was lacking iirc.
They give us Dell Linux machines from work. They suck so bad and we have so many problems. Overheating, camera is terrible, performance is bad relatively to the huge weight of the device. Everything is a huge step down from Macs.
Whenever I see Linux people comparing Linux and Mac I'm amazed at the audacity. They are not in the same league. Not by a mile. Even the CLI is more convenient on the Mac which is truly amazing to me.
How is the Mac CLI more convenient? There isn't even a package manager in the box, they ship loads of old outdated tools too. Plus there's the whole BSD/GNU convention thing you have to watch out for.
I don't find my ThinkPad running Linux overheats, nor is it particularly heavy. And performance is comparable to the similarly priced MBP at the time. Camera sucks, but compared to my Surface so do the Macs...
We are lucky in that we can choose our machines (within reason, and no real support if things get broken) and run an arch flavour.
I use thinkpad x1 carbons and have nearly 0 issues. The hardware is not quite as nice as a macbook but it does the job and is nice enough.
Prefer my Konsole setup on KDE and I use both interchangeably all day tbh. Camera yea. The irony is heating issues become less of an issue with arm.
Recently an article on HN front page was about a guy who had to file down his MBP because the front edge of it was too sharp and resting his wrists on it hurt his hands. At least two people in the comment section noted how the sweat on their hands over time caused the sharp edge of the MBP chassis to pit and it caused it to turn in to a sharp serrated edge that actually cut their hands.
You can say other laptops are "plastic and shitty" all you want, but Apple's offerings aren't necessarily the best thing out there either. I personally like variety, and you don't get that from Apple. I can choose from hundreds of form factors from a lot of vendors that all run Linux and Windows just fine, plastic or not.
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Well they do have the Max+ 395 - 128GB beast https://frame.work/desktop
Which is none trivial. The laptop scene is particularly difficult though.
I have a personal Framework 13 and a work-issued MacBook Pro. I love Framework’s mission of providing user-serviceable hardware; we need upgradable, serviceable hardware. However, the battery life on my MacBook Pro is dramatically better than on my Framework. Moreover, Apple Silicon offers excellent performance on top of its energy efficiency. While I use Windows 11 on my Framework, I prefer macOS.
Additionally, today’s sky-high RAM and SSD prices have caused an unexpected situation: Apple’s inflated prices for RAM and SSD upgrades don’t look that bad in comparison to paying market prices for DIMMs and NVMe SSDs. Yes, the Framework has the advantage of being upgradable, meaning that if RAM and SSD prices decrease, then upgrades will be cheaper in the future, whereas with a Mac you can’t (easily) upgrade the RAM and storage once purchased. However, for someone who needs a computer right now and is willing to purchase another one in a few years, then a new Mac looks appealing, especially when considering the benefits of Apple Silicon.
>>At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac
I work in video games, you know, industry larger than films - 10 out of 10 devs I know are on Windows. I have a work issued Mac just to do some iOS dev and I honestly don't understand how anyone can use it day to day as their main dev machine, it's just so restrictive in what the OS allows you to do.
It makes sense that you use Windows in a video game company. We use windows as well at work and it's absolutely awful for development. I would really prefer a Linux desktop, especially since we exclusively deploy to Linux.
Weird .. macOS is still completely open is my experience. Can you give an example?
I compile a tool we use, send it to another developer, they can't open it without going through system settings because the OS thinks it's unsafe. There is no blanket easy way to disable this behaviour.
We also inject custom dlibs into clang during compilation and starting with Tahoe that started to fail - we discovered that it's because of SIP(system integrity protection). We reached out to apple, got the answer that "we will not discuss any functionality related to operation of SIP". Great. So now we either have to disable SIP on every development machine(which IT is very unhappy about) or re-sign the clang executable with our own dev key so that the OS leaves us alone.
If SIP is kicking in, it sounds like you're using the clang that comes with Apple's developer tools. Does this same issue occur with clang sourced from homebrew, or from LLVM's own binary releases?
Yes, it kicks in even with non apple supplied clang(most notably, with the clang supplied as part of the Android toolchain, since we sometimes build Android on MacOS and having to re-sign the google-supplied clang with our own certificate is now a regular thing every time there is an update released).
> We also inject custom dlibs into clang during compilation
I am curious what you are doing
We use Unreal Build Accelerator which injects a custom dlib into clang to intercept the compilation process and distribute it to worker machines.
If it's being sent to another developer then asking them to run xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine on the file so they can run it doesn't seem insurmountable. I agree that it's a non-starter to ask marketing or sales to do that, but developers can manage. Having to sign and then upload the binary to Apple to notarize is also annoying but you put it in a script and go about your day.
But Apple being "completely open", it is not.
I work as a consultant for the position, navigation, and timing industry and 10 of 10 devs were on Windows. Before that I worked for a big hollywood company and while scriptwriters and VP executive assistants had Macs, everyone technical was on Windows. Movies were all edited and color graded on Windows.
>it's just so restrictive in what the OS allows you to do.
The people using them typically aren't being paid to customize their OS. The OS is good for if you just want to get stuff done and don't want to worry about the OS.
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> Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?
This is one of those comments that is so far away from reality that I can’t tell if it’s trolling.
To give an honest answer: Using Macs for serious development is very common. At bigger tech companies most employees choose Mac even when quality Linux options are available.
I’m kind of interested in how someone could reach a point where they thought macs were not used for software development for 20 years.
> I’m kind of interested in how someone could reach a point where they thought macs were not used for software development for 20 years.
If you work with engineering or CAD software then Macs aren't super common at all. They're definitely ubiquitous in the startup/webapp world, but not necessarily synonymous with programming or development itself.
Most "serious" companies do not support Linux in their IT infrastructure. I've begged to run Linux, but it's a hard no from IT. They only support Windows and MacOS, and that's all. So I choose a Windows desktop, because I am not a fan of Apple. Having been forced to use Macs in past jobs, I'll choose Windows every time. I liked being able to dual-boot Windows on a MBP in the past, but that is no longer an option.
It is a weird situation. Apple products are consumer products but they make us use them as development hardware because there is no other way to make software for those products.
Making software for other Apple products pretty low on the reasons I use a MBP.
128GB of RAM and an M4 Max makes for a very solid development machine, and the build quality is a nice bonus.
An artificial limit on the number vms you are allowed to launch doesn't make it solid
macOS* VMs. And if you don’t care about that, is it no longer solid?
Anything being developed for the Apple ecosystem requires use of the Apple development platform. Maybe the scope could be called "unserious," but the scale cannot be ignored.
I am aware.
However having used Xcode at some point 10 years ago my belief is that the app ecosystem exists in spite of that and that people would never choose this given the choice.
For me at least, not being Linux is a feature. Linux has always been “almost Unix” to the point where now it has become its own thing for better or worse. OS X was never trying to be Linux. It would be better if we still had a few more commercial POSIX implementations.
That is fair but in my experience most devs are targeting linux servers not BSD(or any other flavour) which is helped by OSX. If OSX was linux derived it would suit them just as well.
edit: I suppose I should also note the vast majority of people developing on mac books (in my experience anyway) are actually targeting chrome.
> I suppose I should also note the vast majority of people developing on mac books (in my experience anyway) are actually targeting chrome.
Point taken. Most developers probably make do with Linux containers rather than MacOS VMs.
There is no reality that macOS could be based on Linux.
Turns out, an operating system is more than just a kernel with some userspace crap tacked on top, unlike what Linux distros tend to be.
> Turns out, an operating system is more than just a kernel with some userspace crap tacked on top, unlike what Linux distros tend to be.
This is also my opinion of OSX, let's not pretend that the userland mess is the most beautiful part of OSX.
Apple has great kernel and driver engineering for sure but once you go the stack above, it's ducktape upon ducktape and you better not upgrade your OS too quickly before they fix the next pile they've just added.
Heterogeneity is the feature. The Linux ecosystem is better off for it (systemd, Wayland, dconf, epoll, inotify are all based on ideas that were in OS X first) and not being beholden to Linux is a competitive advantage for Apple everyone wins.
> Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?
i dont think anyone asks this question in good faith, so it may not even be worth answering. see:
> I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.
yea fwiw macs own for multi-target deployments. i spin up a gazillion containers in whatever i need. need a desktop? arm native linux or windows installations in utm/parallels/whatever run damn near native speed, and if im so inclined i can fully emulate x86/64 envs. dont run into needing to do that often, but the fact that i can without needing to bust out a different device owns. speed penalty barely even matter to me, because ive got untold resources to play around with in this backpack device that literally gets all day battery. spare cores, spare unified mem, worlds my oyster. i was just in win xp 32bit sp2 few weeks ago using 86box compiling something in a very legacy dependent visual studio .net 7 environment that needed the exact msvc-flavored float precision that was shipping 22 years ago, and i needed a fully emulated cpu running at frequencies that was going to make the compiler make the same decisions it did 22 years ago. never had to leave my mac, didnt have to buy some 22 year old thinkpad on ebay, this thing gave me a time machine into another era so i could get something compiled to spec. these techs arent heard of, but its just one of many scenarios where i dont have to leave my mac to get something done. to say its a swiss army knife is an understatement. its a swiss army knife that ships with underlying hardware specs to let you fan out into anything.
for development i have never been blocked on macos in the apple silicon era. i have been blocked on windows/linux developing for other targets. fwiw i use everything, im loyal to whoever puts forth the best thing i can throw my money at. for my professional life, that is unequivocally apple atm. when the day comes some other darkhorse brings forth better hardware ill abandon this env without a second thought. i have no tribalistic loyalties in this space, i just gravitate towards whoever presents me with the best economic win that has the things im after. we havent been talking about itunes for like a decade.
Apple had real Unix a decade before the Linux crap was made, a bad unix copy. Nextstep was much better than Linux crap. "A budget of bad ideas" is what Alan Kay said about Linux [1], he invented the personal computer.
My 1987-1997 ISP was based on several different Unix running on Apple, probably long before you where born.
Apple built several supercomputers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmsIZUuBoQs
[2] Founder School Session: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o
It's interesting how "real Unix" is still thrown around as a badge of prestige when Linux basically runs the world now.
Alan Kay invented a dead end (smalltalk). Meanwhile Linux became the future.
Apple had a terrible Unix until they bought NextStep.
Are you talking about A/UX? That was one of the first Unix systems I was exposed to.
Yes but I had others too. BSD on both 68000 and PowerPC
Yeah, they were that, and for the last 20 years they have been the iphone company.
It’s crazy that you can compile a custom kernel and it’ll boot and the GUI will run.
> When using a custom kernel collection with Apple Silicon, there are some unfortunate downsides. The biggest being that streamlined OS updates are no longer available.
This might be a blessing in disguise.
Can this work with lume as well? Currently it has a similar limitation.
it should, lume is a thin wrapper around Apple's Virtualization.framework as i understand it
IIRC you can just turn off sip and set the boot argument that controls it without a custom kernel
This feels like an underrated comment if true
Apple has a 2 VM limit?
2 MacOS VMs due to licencing. You can run as many VMs with other guest OSs as you want.
Another limitation: only five active user accounts (with UIs) per machine.
Very funny to see HN hate on Microsoft and Google but then love a company where they cannot even run an app on their mobile platform without Apple's permission or only a certain number of VMs on the hardware they own .
Someday I may be able to retire this link, but today is not that day: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy
I’ve been looking for this for forever. Finally, the right label.
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HN is not one person. I'm very happy to hate on all of them. I see what you mean though. I've given up on getting normal people to care, but seeing programmers who are absolutely smart enough to run their own Linux system on computers they actually own actively choose not to do so is very disconcerting.
>seeing programmers who are absolutely smart enough to run their own Linux system on computers they actually own actively choose not to do so is very disconcerting.
I run macOS because Apple understands that QA testing is something of actual importance, and designing yet another package manager is not.
I do spin up Linux every now and again to see if it's good yet, and always walk away.
Why do documents print at ~50dpi on my network printer?
Why does the system simply not wake up ~20% of the time when I open my laptop's lid?
Why do I have to unplug and reconnect my USB WiFi Dongle every hour or so when the internet randomly drops out?
Why does the system stop recognising my USB SD Card reader occasionally, forcing me to hard reboot the system?
Why is the audio distorted over HDMI when I enable HDR?
Why does Kodi only detect a refresh rate of 30Hz when the system itself has no issues seeing that the monitor is 60Hz?
All of these are real problems that real users have had, but instead of solving them the Linux development community instead chooses to devote their time and resources navel gazing about systemd alternatives or creating a fragile AUR package for software that already has a sensible and officially supported distribution method.
All operating systems have bugs, and Apple doesn't have the QA it used to have. MacOS has basically been exclusively trending down in quality for a while now, while Linux continues to get better.
What you have to realize is that what Linux distros are doing is inherently more complicated. They're making a general purpose operating system intended to run on every computer.
Apple is making one operating system intended to run on maybe 0.1% of devices. Oh, and they also make those devices.
And MacOS is still trending down in quality, somehow.
You're not wrong about the downwards trend in quality but we're still a long ways off from macOS or even Windows having the same level of QA issues that Linux does, on a regular desktop system.
>I run macOS because Apple understands that QA testing is something of actual importance, and designing yet another package manager is not.
Apple demonstrated with their latest releases that they don't give a single fuck about QA. OSX 26 is very buggy. The corner resize debacle, the glass debacle, and problem after problem that has made it to the HN front page is enough to know they don't care about QA the way you think they do.
The list of problems are described are not typical, I've seen none of that running Linux. YMMV
Apple decided to focus on "Glass", an outdated UI style that was introduced in Windows Vista. They didn't have to, it wasn't wanted by anyone and it has caused significant embarrassment for apple and problems for users. Why couldn't they replace Finder with something actually useful? Why couldn't they fix the UI so "About this software" isn't the first thing on the first menu which is a waste of space. They made MacOS objectively worse.
> The list of problems are described are not typical, I've seen none of that running Linux. YMMV
Haven't run into any of those problems either. Linux has been a "just works" experience for me for nearly a decade now. Buying Intel hardware seems to have done the trick.
It's pointless to engage in such argumentation though. Even if the experience was poor, it wouldn't matter, because the cost of a "good experience" is being a serf in Apple's digital fiefdom, and that is an unacceptable moral failing. It's not about practicality, it's about not being reduced to begging the trillion dollar corporation for permission to do basic things with "your" computer.
I recently went (almost) all-in on Linux after many years on Windows. The final straw for me was that I paid for a "lifetime license" for Outlook, because I've been using Outlook for decades, and have every email I've ever sent or received in Outlook. Well, I upgraded the CPU on the server where I run the VM which hosts Outlook, and then Microsoft wanted me to purchase a full new copy of Outlook because of the CPU upgrade. That was it, I'm done.
I moved Linux Mint and Thunderbird for email, and it's honestly been great. I switched all of my Windows-based VMs to Linux Mint.
My main workstation/laptop is still on Windows due to some hardware issues, but I will work those out in time. Mainly I have a USB4 port that also outputs Displayport, which I connect to a Displayport splitter so I can run three 4k monitors. That's the only thing that I haven't solved on Linux, but I haven't put much time into it. And I don't really blame Linux for that, I more blame the laptop manufacturer for not fully supporting Linux.
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On the other hand I’m very conveniently enjoying my experience, I don’t have to waste time screwing with stuff I have no interest in screwing with - like the OP’s examples, and if I want to run Linux I’ll just install it and do what I want or rent out some compute time somewhere.
Besides, you can buy a Mac and do whatever you want and go buy a bunch of off the shelf components to do whatever hobby stuff you want to do too.
Freedom, perhaps, starts with not making up and applying limitations on yourself.
> Freedom, perhaps, starts with not making up and applying limitations on yourself.
Nothing wrong with applying limitations to oneself. That's discipline, principles. It's important stuff.
The real problem is accepting the completely made up limitations that others apply on you. Corporation wakes up one day and just decides people can't run more than two virtual machines? That's stupid. Actually defending this with "but convenience" arguments as if convenience was supposed to override freedom? No.
Freedom isn't something you actively work towards. It's something you start with. It's the status quo. Others take it away from you. You can either accept it passively and enjoy the "convenience", or you can resist and go down the harder path. It's very disappointing to see people on Hacker News choose the former path.
You’re just living under the illusion of freedom. You are completely dependent on the decisions of others and their good graces for all of your computing needs, from the silicon to the Linux distro you use. You’re just drawing an arbitrary line a little further to feel like you’re in control, but you’re not.
Silicon? Sure. Billion dollar fabs are huge single points of failure. It's turning into a problem too due to the war on general purpose computing. Free software doesn't matter if we can't run it. Linux distro? Not really. It's only a matter of how much effort I want to put into things. I can make my own distro, I can't make my own trillion dollar fab.
Anyway, what even is this argument? Can't control everything, so it doesn't matter? Don't even bother trying? Just give up? Just accept your lot in life as a serf in Apple's digital fiefdom? I'm pessimistic about the future but even I haven't completely succumbed to such total nihilism yet.
You're trying to assert this big claim about freedom because some users can't I guess run more than 2 VMs on their MacBook Pro. Since we don't care we're not trying, we just gave up, we're serfs even. Well you're still a serf too your bounds of serfdom are just long enough to trick you into believing otherwise.
Who cares? I don't. I can't do anything with open source software either - like I'm going to spend hundreds or thousands of hours figuring our how any given software package works and that's going to somehow make me more free? C'mon. I can't tell Apple no anymore than I can tell someone maintaining a Linux distribution no.
The VM limitation is only for macOS guests, otherwise I can spin up as many VMs as I like, which is no different to doing so in Linux (since it cannot run macOS VMs).
>TL;DR you sacrificed your freedom for convenience
Yes I did, just like you did when you chose to live as a taxpaying member of society rather than a hermit scouring the bush for berries and fish.
Enjoy your VMs.
Living as a taxpaying member of society is something that is imposed on us. If we refuse, violent men with guns show up at our doors to arrest us and seize our property. At least we get to try and vote out idiots imposing stupid quotas on the population.
The issue of computer freedom does not even come close to this. None of this is imposed on us. We have the power to choose differently at any time. We can choose not to accept the monopolistic corporation's terms.
Yes and many people choose differently to you and that’s ok. They are free to do so.
I use a Macbook for work and do all my development via ssh on remote Linux instances. Each OS is doing what it does best. I last tried a Linux laptop for development in 2020 and my conclusion was the same as in 2010: never again for at least a decade. I have better things to do than fix broken drivers and curse at shitty trackpads.
Please avoid these kinds of sneers that characterize the whole community as being united in “hate” or “love” for any particular company or technology.
HN is a diverse global community and its views about most topics form a normal distribution, and most people here are able to form nuanced opinions that consider the positives and negatives in all these topics. This kind of “very funny” swipe relies on a caricature that's easy to portray if you focus on the loudest voices on one side of any discussion but falls away if you make the effort to read the discussions in depth.
Since when are users in this place shy about bashing Apple?
Plenty of hate out there of apple alongside the love.
In the very same comments sometimes, those frustrating geniuses
Inside of me are two wolves. One that’s like “F Apple” and another that is like “Are they going to do an M5 ultra or…?”
We can appreciate their hardware achievements and at the same time condemn them for their monopolistic anti-user decisions.
There it is--pretty much that.
Adults can hold 2 thoughts in their head at their same time.
Paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald? "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
Holding contradictory ideas isn't the laudable skill. Any uncritical person can believe conflicting things without being troubled by them. The genius is holding such ideas in disbelief long enough to let evidence alter or evict them.
I agree that holding inconsistent thoughts is not desirable. I don't think the thoughts in this case need to be contradictory and many times are not. I, personally, admire the HW they design and the polish that Apple delivers, while hating how closed their platform is. Am I contradicting myself?
I did not know F. Scott Fitzgerald was the source of the phrase, TIL. I just picked it up somewhere and paraphrased it since I thought it applies here.
Yes, indeed, complaining about them even though they're brilliant (tough love?) as I just did
What love? I think this is bullshit.
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