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It’s an interesting look at AWS pricing since the cost of the M1 Mac Mini ($699) and it’s power consumption (avg 26 watts) are known. Based on hardware costs (significant) and power costs (insignificant) you’re looking at a hardware ROI at about 6 months from the $.65 per hour price. AWS has an estimated 60% gross profit margin, so from there it’s probably possible to estimate some other interesting things about their costs, utilization rate and
depreciation schedule. Edit: Sorry, my napkin math assumed a unstated utilization rate of 40 hours per week, but that’s not a great assumption due to the 24 hour minimum. Still, some proportion of machines will be idle, though 75% idle seems like a bad guess. |
Imagine you’re developing an app in regulated market and need to have Macs for CI/CD There’s a lot more to this than just keeping some Mac mini’s under your desk. How are you managing physical security in your environment? Do you have all the associated certifications in place? Can we see your last audit? Who’s fixing this when something breaks? What about your in house IT folks that done want to build out a whole new operation to manage Macs now? What if next week you need 5x as many instances but only for 2 days? That’s what your paying for in the price here, not just the cost of the instance itself and power.
When faced with all those requirements and challenges the pricing looks inexpensive.