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This is a very silly restriction, at least to apply uniformly to all Macs. I think if you buy a more powerful Mac they should let you virtualize more Mac instan
by kylec 5mo ago
This is a very silly restriction, at least to apply uniformly to all Macs. I think if you buy a more powerful Mac they should let you virtualize more Mac instances. Like an M5 maybe limit to 2, but maybe let an M5 Pro do 4 and an M5 Max do 8 or something.
- benoau 5mo agoWhy should they impose a limit at all? Your hardware is a natural limit, you'll stop of your own accord when you reach its thresholds.
- naikrovek 5mo agoThey 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 5mo agoApple 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- woodson 5mo agoWell, but their customers are those that buy Apple hardware.
- moondev 5mo agoImagine buying a mac studio with 500+ GB of memory and being limited to 2 vms.
- FireBeyond 5mo agoThey discontinued the 512GB Studio, and the Pro is gone, so no fear there now.
- naikrovek 5mo agoThey 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
- naikrovek 5mo agoYeah 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.
- stephenr 5mo agoYou realise you can run VMs for any other os right? It's a limit on running macOS not a limit on running VMs.
- naikrovek 5mo agoYes we all realize that. It’s MacOS VMs that we want to run.
- 5mo ago
- mysteria 5mo agoIMO 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.
- matheusmoreira 5mo agoRent seeking, of course. They want to charge you for every physical and logical machine you use. Virtualization gets around that. They'd probably charge separately for every feature of the processor if they could.
- JoshTriplett 5mo agoThat would make more sense except they don't even have an option to pay for it.
- VanTheBrand 5mo agoThe option is you have to buy another machine. There are mac ec2 instances and several mac cloud hosts that all would abuse this if they could, instead to stay compliant they buy more machines.
- JoshTriplett 5mo agoAnd thus they need a massive datacenter full of systems, rather than a pile of paid licenses. And macOS remains a toy for use only by individuals that is a massive pain for developers to support.
- benoau 5mo ago(where "abuse" means using the hardware to run software)
- leptons 5mo agoI tried to launch a MacOS instance on EC2 recently (on my work account), and was blocked. So I asked the IT dept and they said it's stupidly expensive to run a MacOS instance on EC2, and that they would just send me a Macbook Pro instead. I wish I were kidding.
- thealistra 5mo agoYou should be happy that you have such a financially aware IT dept. The machines are truly expensive and after managing a farm of 150 Mac minis at work I can tell why. It is like 3 days running the EC2 buys you a Mac mini? And you can only rent the machine in day increments
- isodev 5mo ago> Your hardware Ah but when you buy an iPhone or a Mac, Apple sees it as their hardware graciously made available to you for a limited time and under ToS.
- m463 5mo ago> Why should they impose a limit at all? Whenever I see apple silliness, I have to remember: "You're not the target market."
- colechristensen 5mo agoMarket design. They don't want to be in the server business, they don't want there to be third party VM providers running Mac farms selling oversubscribed giving underpowered disappointing VM experiences to users who will complain. A bunch of folks want Apple to enter a market Apple doesn't want to enter into. They have tools available which would enable that market which they are kneecapping on purpose so that nobody unwillingly enters them into it. The "two VMs per unit hardware" has been in their license for at least a decade.
- leptons 5mo ago>The "two VMs per unit hardware" has been in their license for at least a decade. I'd be pretty surprised if there isn't a workaround or hack for this. Microsoft has had limits on some things like RDP on some versions of Windows, but there have always been ways to get around it.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- marmarama 5mo agoSure you can do it technically, but then you have a licensing compliance issue, so no reputable business will do it. You can run x86 macOS VMs in Windows or Linux too with a little bit of technical trickery, but again, you end up with a license issue, so no-one reputable does it.
- leptons 5mo agoI've never really understood how Apple can let people download MacOS for free, and then tell them where and how they can run it - only on Apple's hardware. If I download a copy of Windows or any software ever written, I can run it on any hardware that exists that can run it. But somehow Apple gets to dictate to people where and how they can run freely available software that anyone can download?
- 5mo ago
- fsckboy 5mo ago>Why should they impose a limit at all? Your hardware is a natural limit because imposing an artificial limit keeps them from exposing how low the natural limits turn out to be? Apple Silicon need always to be spoken with reverence, ye brother of the faith, do not fuel the faithless lest they rend and threadrip that which we've made of wholecloth.
- lxgr 5mo agoBecause this limit isn’t about your hardware, but their software. As appropriate a model this still is in the development VM scenario, you still need a valid license for each operating system copy you run. Microsoft will sell you these individually; Apple apparently implicitly grants you up to three per Mac that you buy, and won’t let you pay for any more even if you want to. In other words, what’s limited here is not really the hypervisor itself, but rather the “license granting component” that passes through the implicit permission to run macOS, but only up to some limit.
- egorfine 5mo ago> Your hardware They see it a bit differently.
- whatsupdog 5mo ago[flagged]
- bdcravens 5mo agoThe limit isn't really a resource issue, since you can run pretty much an "unlimited" number of non-Mac VMs. I suspect it's more of a business decision, such as preventing people from setting up shop as a low-cost Mac VPS provider.
- fortran77 5mo agoMaybe it doesn't work. Why are you so sure it would? It may perform very badly.
- leptons 5mo agoBut aren't Mx based macs supposed to be the fastest computers you can get? Why wouldn't they be able to run more than 2 VMs? I can run a ton of Windows VMs at the same time, wouldn't Windows be a comparable resource hog to MacOS? Apple M2 CPUs can have up to 192GB of RAM. If we look at the Mac Neo that has only 8GB of RAM, then an M2 host should be able to run at least 20 VMs before memory gets scarce. There's no good reason Apple limits to 2 VMs except for greed, which they are well known for.
- bdcravens 5mo agoI've run multiple Windows VMs as well as multiple Docker sessions at the same time on different MBPs (my current one being an M3 Max). Didn't really budge the machine at all.
- fortran77 5mo agoI buy a $100 Windows 11 Pro licence, and my limit is 1024 VMs Hyper‑V on Windows 11 supports up to 1024 simultaneous VMs per host if the hardware can handle it. On my little Windows ARM laptop I can easily run 4 VMs before it runs out of steam.
- kylec 5mo agoThe limit of 2 is just for virtualizing macOS. You can run as many Linux VMs as you want at once on macOS.
- fortran77 5mo agoThere's first class support for Linux on Windows, and Microsoft has a developers VM available for download so you can run as many Windows as you want. I do a Hyper-V Quick Create and there are three flavors of Linux to choose from, or Windows, with all the development tools pre-installed.
- colechristensen 5mo agoThe only reason Linux exists on Windows is they're trying to redo the 90s playbook of dominating then destroying the competition. I was almost on board in the Windows 10 era, switching a whole lot of my time to doing things in WSL on Windows. Windows 11 and the walled garden greed they're trying to enable is so bad that this dominating Linux attempt is certainly failing, the only reason I haven't completely ditched my Windows system is that my several TB external drive is at large and I haven't taken the time to actually do it. Plus Steam and their Wine work is absolutely killing it so the one thing that was keeping me motivated to still have a Windows presence is pretty much gone.
- oxfeed65261 5mo agoOn Mac, you can run lots of Windows/Linux VMs and two Mac VMs. On Windows, you can run lots of Windows/Linux VMs and zero Mac VMs.
- 5mo ago
- namelosw 5mo agoIt really is silly. The other day I decided to try this openclaw thing out but concerned about the security stuff, so I took VM for a spin only to find out the iCloud and the App Store were restricted.
- tomaskafka 5mo agoRemember you’re not battling against a HW limitation, but against Tim Cook’s fear of selling less macs.