[mushufasa]

i wonder if there are actually higher costs associated with macOS, or if this is just segmentation based on the fact that macOS users are more willing to pay more for software

[dinkleberg]

Building Mac build farms is way more of a pain and absolutely costs more. There are a few services dedicated to making it easier, but Apple isn’t trying hard to make people’s lives easy in this.

[Spivak]

At least they're not being litigious about small shops using hackentosh VMs for CI because sticking a bunch of Mac Minis in a rack technically works but seems super silly.

[rgovostes]

Travis CI and GitHub both use MacStadium's infrastructure for macOS builds, not their own.

https://www.macstadium.com/customers/travis-ci

[brandur]

That's fascinating – I always wondered how exactly Travis was running their Mac OS builds.

Based on MacStadium's public pricing, which is $150/month for the base model of the latest Mac Mini, this cannot be cheap for Travis, especially given they offered (past tense) Mac OS builds for free.

Not surprised to see them start charging more, but it's coming at exactly the wrong time given that GitHub (with Actions) is now offering a product that's a fair bit better, and it's still free.

[geerlingguy]

MacStadium also offers some types of virtualized macOS environments, even a Kubernetes-on-Mac offering. So I'm guessing it's not all individual Mac minis running these builds... at least I hope not!

[bla3]

You can legally only run macOS on apple hardware, and that's expensive.

[Sebb767]

Also, there's a lack of dedicated server products.

[asciimike]

I loved how imgix solved this: https://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros (definitely not cheap, but super slick)

[sverhagen]

Does that actually make sense, or is it just another Engineering team doubling down on their poor early architectural choices ("or lack thereof")?

[asciimike]

My understanding is that they needed some of the functionality in CoreGraphics, thus had to use Macs.

[mst]

Which, if it allows them to get better quality results with less engineering time, could totally turn out to have been a sensible business decision.

(no idea beyond "could", but it does at least seem plausible)

[martin8412]

The latest Mac Pro is sold in a rack mount version