[naikrovek]

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.

[ryandrake]

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.

[woodson]

Well, but their customers are those that buy Apple hardware.

[mysteria]

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.

[moondev]

Imagine buying a mac studio with 500+ GB of memory and being limited to 2 vms.

[naikrovek]

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.

[leptons]

You are not Apple's target market, and never will be.

They don't care what you want to do with the hardware you own.

[naikrovek]

No kidding.

[stephenr]

You realise you can run VMs for any other os right? It's a limit on running macOS not a limit on running VMs.

[naikrovek]

Yes we all realize that.

It’s MacOS VMs that we want to run.

[stephenr]

Maybe I should have used the same dismissive tone.

Imagine thinking everyone who buys a Mac and runs VMs wants to run heaps of macOS VMs.

[naikrovek]

why else would you buy a mac to run VMs?

arm64 hardware is cheap, x64 hardware is cheap and both of those can run as many Linux or Windows VMs as you have RAM to run.

[stephenr]

For me? Infrastructure simulation.

Why buy a second extra machine to do testing of multi machine infrastructure configurations when my workstation can run the VMs locally?

For others? I don't know that's why I think it's ridiculous to assume everyone else's use case is the same as your own.

[FireBeyond]

They discontinued the 512GB Studio, and the Pro is gone, so no fear there now.

[naikrovek]

They still EXIST though. And I saw one the other day on the Refurbished store. They’re definitely still around.

Even a 256GB model would run a load of 16GB VMs