Comment by kylec
9 hours ago
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.
> 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
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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.
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> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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Imagine buying a mac studio with 500+ GB of memory and being limited to 2 vms.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
> zero Mac VMs.
Legally (the last time I checked)
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.
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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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