From Frederic Lardinois “AWS brings the Mac mini to its cloud” posted Tuesday on TechCrunch:
The target audience here — and the only one AWS is targeting for now — is developers who want cloud-based build and testing environments for their Mac and iOS apps. But it’s worth noting that with remote access, you get a fully-featured Mac mini in the cloud, and I’m sure developers will find all kinds of other use cases for this as well…
David Brown, AWS’s vice president of EC2, tells me that these are completely unmodified Mac minis. AWS only turned off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It helps, Brown said, that the minis fit nicely into a 1U rack.
“You can’t really stack them on shelves — you want to put them in some sort of service sled [and] it fits very well into a service sled and then our cards and all the various things we have to worry about, from an integration point of view, fit around it and just plug into the Mac mini through the ports that it provides,” Brown explained. He admitted that this was obviously a new challenge for AWS. The only way to offer this kind of service is to use Apple’s hardware, after all.
It’s also worth noting that AWS is not virtualizing the hardware. What you’re getting here is full access to your own device that you’re not sharing with anybody else. “We wanted to make sure that we support the Mac Mini that you would get if you went to the Apple store and you bought a Mac mini,” Brown said…
AWS will charge $1.083 per hour, billed by the second. That’s just under $26 to spin up a machine and run it for 24 hours. That’s quite a lot more than what some of the small Mac mini cloud providers are charging (we’re generally talking about $60 or less per month for their entry-level offerings and around two to three times as much for a comparable i7 machine with 32GB of RAM).
“Pretty much every one of our customers today has some need to support an Apple product and the Apple ecosystem, whether it’s iPhone, iPad or Apple TV, whatever it might be. They’re looking for that bold use case,” Brown said.
My take: The waning of Wintel.
See also: Apple in the server rack?
$26/day x 365 days = $9,500/year for a $700 machine! That’s either very expensive air conditioning or an enormous profit!
“$26/day x 365 days = $9,500/year for a $700 machine!”
Rather obviously, that much profit margin creates a huge impetus to compete. Note that, ultimately, the most competitive entity would be Apple itself….
If, as Gregg Thurmann wrote earlier, Apple puts an “S1” server ARM chip, with many many cores, like the Ampere server ARM CPU Altra that is mentioned in Erik Eingheim’s article 3 days ago “Why is Apple’s M1 chip so fast?”, in a future Mac Pro, that would be something to marvel at!
But then after using it I’d probably keep it.
I surmise you are an individual developer. Aren’t we talking here about larger shops of developers worker on a whole host of multiple programs in development and through the use of AWS these larger shops are able to incur cost savings in capital expenditures (equipment), rental space per square foot (storage) etc. When one adds these cost savings incurred for a group of developers working on a multiplicity of programs then it seems to make common sense to me which avenue to pursue. It’s the same cost effective premise used by many others, such as contractors, who rent needed equipment to complete jobs resulting in less storage capacity, insurance, maintenance, upkeep, etc. Rent what is needed.
Great points I failed to consider. Thanks for opening my eyes.
It’s obvious that Amazon sees a great need to support Apple developers in light of the merging of processors and OS in Apple products. I think Amazon’s decision is predicated on a whole lot of developers, who previously did not develop for Mac/iPhone et al, joining the fun.
How many exclusively Windows programs are going to be ported to ARM Macs? What happens to Mac sales when that happens?
Per Neil Cybart’s latest piece-“ Approximately 90% of Apple users don’t use, and probably never will use, a Mac.”
I wonder if he’s rethinking that now? This should grow both the base, but also the percentage of folks within the base that use Macs. This is huge.
Or did the price remain the same in exchange for Apple’s tech support to facilitate AWS’s implementation?
I would hope that we could all smell an increased P/E as a result of nebulous things like this AND the inevitable ripple-effect of Apple Silicon to boot,
…AND new devices,
…AND new services,
…AND new users,
…AND new apps,
…AND…
“…Apple had approached a somewhat fair valuation after so many years of languishing.”
What is a “fair” valuation will always be argued, for all stocks. But what several of us knew was that the market was completely missing the boat when it came to Apple’s true value. In a sense, the market’s re-visioning of Apple was inevitable, although it was nearly impossible to predicte. Even now, there are some still learning. (That latest selloff which saw Apple below $110/share was literally a week ago.)
Apple remains a fast-moving target. That’s why the so-called “law of large numbers” was, and is, the sheerest FUD.
Patience pays.
“What a long, strange trip it’s been.”
— The Grateful Dead