| ▲ | kylec 5 hours 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. |
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| ▲ | benoau 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Why 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. |
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| ▲ | matheusmoreira an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Rent 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. | |
| ▲ | naikrovek 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | mysteria an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | ryandrake 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | | |
| ▲ | moondev 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Imagine buying a mac studio with 500+ GB of memory and being limited to 2 vms. | | |
| ▲ | naikrovek 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | FireBeyond an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | They discontinued the 512GB Studio, and the Pro is gone, so no fear there now. | | |
| ▲ | naikrovek 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | bdcravens 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The 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. |
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| ▲ | fortran77 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I 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. |
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| ▲ | namelosw an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It 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. |
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| ▲ | whatsupdog 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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