Comment by benoau
10 hours ago
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.
10 hours ago
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.
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".
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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.
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> 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.
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They discontinued the 512GB Studio, and the Pro is gone, so no fear there now.
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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.
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.
>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.