[crazygringo]

Can someone remind me why Apple is so anti-VM in seemingly every instance?

It just seems so arbitrary and unhelpful, and I have a hard time imagining that the amount of hardware purchased it forces outweigh the benefits from making macOS/iOS better platforms for development and computation.

It just seems like such an odd stance to take.

[musicale]

Apple is not anti-VM. It is anti VM-on-non-Apple-hardware. ;-)

Presumably they have determined that lost hardware sales would offset any increased app or service sales from allowing VMs on non-Apple hardware.

Though I don't actually know what platform macOS and iOS VMs run on in GitHub Actions and Azure pipelines.

Edit: apparently Azure pipelines uses Mac pros. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/age...

[13of40]

Considering a couple years ago, "Apple Hardware" was an intel CPU with an nvidia GPU I've always wondered why you couldn't just throw a million dollars at them so they could stick apple stickers on your rack and let you run MacOS VMs. The company I used to work for had to do crazy gymnastics just to test software and scan for malware on their OS.

[mulmen]

There’s more to a mac than the sticker. It’s specific hardware that is tested and supported by the software. That’s worth a premium. Verifying your rack is a cost Apple doesn’t want to take on. iCloud doesn’t run on MacOS. It runs on Linux. Just buy the right hardware for the job.

[buzer]

Does Apple dogfood their OS X/iOS CI pipelines, i.e. are they running them on some off-the-shelf Macs like they expect everyone else to do? I remember reading that at least in the past they were running virtualized OS X on regular servers for those (actually found following: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18117885).

And it's not like Apple would need to verify anything. They can grant the license, but say that the only supported configuration is Mac, it's up to VMWare and such to provide the support if they want to say that you can run OS X on their platform.

[my123]

> are they running them on some off-the-shelf Macs like they expect everyone else to do?

No. Last time I poked into Xcode Cloud, it was running on Ice Lake server Xeons, which didn't ship on any Mac.

[mulmen]

Azure doesn't run on Windows. Why would iCloud run on MacOS? There's exactly one organization in the world that needs to run iCloud, why would MacOS target that use case? I doubt Apple eats their own dogfood.

[tiernano]

Azure does run on Windows. It's HyperV server below the rest of the hardware. It's a custom Windows install that you can't purchase, but it's Windows none the less.

[throwaway2990]

Nvidia? Which apple product had Nvidia in it?

[Fuzzeh]

My Mid 2014, 15" Macbook Pro has both Intel and Nvidia.

Chipset Model: Intel Iris Pro

Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M

This Macbook pro was a free upgrade from Apple after I'd had 3 mainboard replacements because they'd had faulty GPU's on my 2011 MBP ( see https://web.archive.org/web/20170119031155/https://people.ca... for background) - Basically after I found out what was going on I took my 'repaired' machine home and stress tested it until it failed. After the very quick repeated failures Apple decided to replace my machine completely.

[throwaway2990]

So more than “a couple of years ago”

Cos been almost 10 years since apple ditched Nvidia.

[Fuzzeh]

I have no idea when they last used nvidia. I'm just answering the question "Which apple product had Nvidia in it"

[cpuguy83]

MacBook pros did for awhile until they leaked some detail about an upcoming product and Apple switched vendors.

[windowsrookie]

I'm not sure where you heard this from?

Back in 2007-2009 Nividia shipped defective GPUs to everyone, including Apple.

Every MacBook Pro from that era was affected. Nvidia and Apple couldn't come to an agreement to who should pay for the bad GPUs. It cost Apple a lot of money and Nvidia din't seem to care.

After that, Apple slowly started removing Nvidia GPUs from their products. AMD also shipped bad GPU's around ~2011 and Apple went back to Nvidia for a generation or two until AMD sorted their issues out. From Then on it was AMD GPUs only until the M1.

[cpuguy83]

Can't reply to the child comment, but...

I only found one article about this from back in 2008. It was definitely a thing back then, I just can't find it.... But indeed likely second fiddle to the gpu issues around the same time, I totally forgot about that.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

The comment time stamp is clickable, you should see the reply button there.

[deecewan]

there was a point in time when you could run nvidia gpus in mac pros. there were first-party drivers for nvidia cards on macOS

[throwaway2990]

The Nvidia fanboys are out to downvote not knowing it’s been almost 10 years since apple used Nvidia. Lol

[matwood]

Apple almost went out of business allowing macOS to run on non-Apple hardware. I think there are still people there who have an irrational fear from that time.

From a current financial/business standpoint, Apple considers itself a hardware company that includes their custom OS with their hardware. From that angle it makes no sense to allow it to run on non-Apple hardware. Sort of like Sony being ok with the PS OS running on Xbox.

[red_trumpet]

But it also makes no sense to forbid it. If Apple were a hardware company, letting people use their software on other devices wouldn't cut their baseline. After all, people buy Apple because of the hardware, right?

Apparently not, and because they subsidise the software using hardware sales, they don't want to decouple the two.

The Sony/PS situation is exactly the opposite: Sony subsidizes hardware using software (games) sales. Which is why they don't allow you to use different software on a PS.

[alwaysbeconsing]

Now that Apple leans into services revenue it might make sense to license the OS for clones, if they could still sell you an Apple Music subscription on your Samsung iOS device. But as matwood said above in the 90s they traded high-end hardware sales for much less lucrative license fees and lost badly. It was one of the very first things Jobs tried to fix when he returned, and he ended the program because he couldn't get terms he liked from the licensees. (Which in retrospect is weird because it put them entirely out of business, but shrug.)

[saagarjha]

Apple makes it pretty annoying to run VMs on Apple hardware too. Their license agreement has restrictions in it that are kind of unfortunate.

[lostlogin]

Why are people so hung up on the licence agreement? VMs run fine all on all sorts of hardware, Mac’s, Nucs, NASs, actual servers etc.

I often see posted that using VMs violates the agreement, has someone been sued or something?

[janosdebugs]

The post is literally about someone getting sued for providing this very service. Are you missing a /s?

[lostlogin]

A poorly written comment by me, as I was thinking of macOS and trying to ask:

“Has an individual running a few VMs ever lost a lawsuit?”

Obviously fighting Apple would be terrible, but has an individual (as opposed to a company) ever run into trouble?

[saghm]

Exactly. At an old job, we had basically a glorified closet full of Mac minis for running our Mac CI builds on; the Linux builds just used EC2 instances.

[withinrafael]

GitHub uses macOS VMs as part of some agreement under NDA (that supercedes the terms outlined in the EULA).

See previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29419610

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

TIL wtf? Has there been anything new on this front? Very interesting.

[eptcyka]

Apple is anti-VM - there is a soft limit on how many VMs one can run on their M1/M2 Macs. The number is 2.

[pasc1878]

That is the number of macOS VMs. Linux windows etc is not limited

[eptcyka]

If I cared about Linux VMs, I wouldn't be running macOS as my host.

[jraph]

Maybe you don't, but it's common for macOS users to run Linux VMs to get shit done.

[eptcyka]

Sure, but for getting shit done, you can always use nested VMs or SSH into a real linux machine if need be. Regardless, the fact that you can run an unspecified amount of Linux VMs yet macOS VMs are limited to 2 is even more egregious. It's far cheaper to get Linux VMs anywhere than macOS VMs.

[ijidak]

It's probably more about lock-in. They likely don't want a migration path out of their walled garden.

[qwerty456127]

> Apple is not anti-VM. It is anti VM-on-non-Apple-hardware. ;-)

Do you mean they allow VMs on iPads already?

[Mad_ad]

works okayish on iPad Pro https://getutm.app/

[l8rlump]

They want to sell hardware. I'm reminded of this every day when I can't use Apple Reminders and Calendar properly on non-Apple devices. I have an Apple phone but use a non-Apple computer. You used to be able to have a web interface to Reminders, but they changed it and now you can't add tasks in the web interface. No worries then, let's use Caldav. Hmmm, can't add a Caldav server to iCloud anymore. Ahh, we can add a Caldav account to iOS! Nope, it doesn't obey the sync schedule. You can set the schedule to anything but it just syncs when it wants to, maybe every couple of hours if you're lucky. I might be cynical but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a ploy to get more people into buying more of their devices.

[scrollaway]

This shit is why I use Google products on my iphone: gmail, calendar (with reminders), contacts, etc. (Paid version at that: I pay for google workspace, even for personal use)

I'm not locked in to the Apple ecosystem: I can use it on my Linux desktop, or switch to an Android phone at any time.

[lostlogin]

Is that a solution, or an additional poison?

[scrollaway]

Why would it be an additional poison?

It's solving problems in my life. I have a calendar, it's synced across all my devices, I have no fear of lock-in, and I have full control over my data without fearing about my account getting locked (as I pay for Workspace). Same for email, same for contacts.

What's the poison there?

[lostlogin]

You don’t have full control of your data. Google isn’t some Mecca of freedom, it’s an advertising company.

[scrollaway]

Google is a company providing me a service I pay for, with a contract I signed.

Do you think my data would be safer if I used UnknownCalMailCompany Inc, a company with zero track record in terms of privacy, safety, or long-term viability?

[AmericanChopper]

Sounds like you’ve just chosen to lock yourself into a different vendor, only one that integrates less elegantly with your device.

[ta_le]

There is no vendor lockin with Google when it comes to hardware, the services even work in a browser

[gat1]

Yes.

[matwood]

So instead you're locked to Google. It's fine, many people are because of Gmail. Other people though would rather be locked to Apple.

[scrollaway]

I’m not even sort of locked to google.

[zirgs]

And this is why I don't want to buy any Apple device. It seems that it's all or nothing for them. If you have a mix of apple and non-apple devices then you'll have all sorts of compatibility problems.

[ElFitz]

> I might be cynical but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a ploy to get more people into buying more of their devices.

I’d bet on just not testing that use case because they don’t care enough about it. Thus not catching and never fixing any arising issue or regression.

[l8rlump]

Maybe, but combined with the downplayed stripping of features from the iCloud web interface, I'm still skeptical.

[the_other]

> You used to be able to have a web interface to Reminders, but they changed it and now you can't add tasks in the web interface.

I just used iCloud.com. Seems to work fine for adding reminders. Are you talking about an API, or the iCloud web UI?

[l8rlump]

iCloud web UI. Sorry, I just tried again and you can add tasks, but you can't set a due date or time, which I rely on heavily. You used to be able to do this until they went to the "new" Reminders. They gave us a prompt to upgrade to the new reminders, but you don't realize that you lose these features, and as far as I can tell, you can't go back after you "upgrade".

[the_other]

I just set a due date and time on a reminded with the web UI. Add the item, click "details", click "on a day", set a date and time. It's not easy, or a nice UI, but it's functional for this visual user. I didn't check the accessibility.

[lawn]

The walled garden is absolutely essential to Apple's business idea. If you want to use an Apple product, then they want you to commit to their ecosystem completely.

It makes perfect sense that they'd be against anything that circumvents their walled garden, and a VM does just that by allowing users/developers to use their OS without buying their hardware.

I personally hate it, and it's why I'll never touch any Apple product.

[poulpy123]

That and their price is why I will never have an apple product too

[kaba0]

They have a very good price-to-value ratio, especially when you account for their high resale value, so that's not really a good reason to avoid apple.

It is simply unbeatable on the laptop market currently, imo.

[poulpy123]

I was more thinking to the iphone (I don't have laptop). You can't find a cheap new iphone, and even the cheapest iphone is more than I would put in a phone myself.

It's true that now high end android phones are as expensive than high end iphones, so on this point of view it's not a criteria

[windowsrookie]

I purchased two brand new iPhone SE's for $100 each around black Friday from Straight Talk. Required one month of prepaid service and then they were unlocked, I used them down in South America.

The iPhone SE is better than any comparable Android phone and will receive updates for another 5 years.

So "You can't find a cheap new iPhone" is not true. If you're willing to take 1 extra step and get a month of prepaid service you can get a cheap iPhone.

[poulpy123]

There is no iphone for 100$ and 1 month of service where I live

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

We get dazzled by "benchmark number higher" and ignore other factors. The lock-in means I'd need to have a gun to my head to use an Apple product. I can't game on it or use Linux. My laptop and desktop are both ~10 years old- how long are Apple computers supported? These factors don't show up in benchmarks but they are just as important.

[kaba0]

Your laptop and desktop are 10 years old, and that’s it. They are not supported by anyone, they just didn’t die on you yet. Apple actually supports their devices for that long easily, that’s one category they really outshine their competitors in.

Also, the macs are not at all locked down if we are talking about that. OSX is pretty much a general linux with a generally supported graphical environment on top.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213264

MBP from 2017 is the oldest supported device.

[chrisshroba]

One guess: if macOS could be virtualized, it would be even easier to run things like Messages, FaceTime, and Photos on non-Apple hardware, which reduces some of the lock-in effect that keeps people from leaving the ecosystem (i.e. Green Bubble Effect)

[vlovich123]

Not necessarily. iMessage & FaceTime AFAIK are cryptographically locked onto Apple HW. I could be wrong, but my understanding is that each piece of Apple HW ships with a burned in unique private key that Apple records the public key of in it's internal database. That private key would be missing in a VM context.

It's possible my data is out of date though because iMessage spam is real & I'm not sure how that's done if it needs a valid private key that Apple can ban.

[jonpalmisc]

I haven’t looked at this in detail in a while either, but I don’t think the claims here are correct.

It is true that Apple employs some efforts to prevent/discourage you from using those services illegitimately, but using iMessage and FaceTime from a Hackintosh has been possible for years, largely without jumping through any hoops.

[alex0110010]

As far as I am aware, you need at least one Apple Device to get it started on a Hackintosh. So you might still need one iPhone and then also receive iMessages on a Android by using a VM in the background. And this sounds so complicated, that I would doubt that more then a handful of people world wide would do it.

[csharpminor]

Yes, and would lead to iMessage spam and FaceTime robocalls.

[dzikimarian]

There's ton of other instant messaging apps that can run on anything or even have an API. I use some of them and weirdly spam is not a problem at all.

Also you can run iMessage without mac if you really want to.

[lostlogin]

Would it?

Have a crack and you can probably get a macOS VM running on whatever hardware you have in short order.

[lostlogin]

> One guess: if macOS could be virtualized, it would be even easier to run things like Messages, FaceTime, and Photos on non-Apple hardware

I can be and it’s not hard to do. I assume your referring to breaking the licence agreement?

[techdragon]

1: This will likely lead to a small (and I do mean small) hit to their sales from people taking advantage of a VM who would have previously had to buy a device…

2: Control over the platform.

[andyjohnson0]

> Can someone remind me why Apple is so anti-VM in seemingly every instance?

Apple is primarily a hardware company. If people are using VMs then they're not buying hardware.

[brightball]

Best guess?

They don’t charge for their OS because it is attached to their hardware.

[Gigachad]

Doesn't seem to make all that much sense though. The value of their OS is how perfect it works with their hardware. Sure some people want to run MacOS on a standard desktop, but that doesn't seem to be a significant group of people.

[brightball]

Would it be more if it was easier though?

[HybridCurve]

Apple is mostly a hardware company. Aside from aesthetics, people are attracted to their products because of the UI for the OS. If you get that for little to nothing, why would anyone buy their overpriced hardware?

[michaelcampbell]

They don't make money on non-Apple hardware.

[garbagecoder]

Probably from almost going out of business because they didn't control their own platform.

[EGreg]

Yeah, Apple remembers very well the "clone wars". Steve Jobs came back and killed that off.

[wombatpm]

Clones were great until they went upscale with powerful expandable machines that competed with their profitable high end tower macs