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.

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JoshTriplett 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That would make more sense except they don't even have an option to pay for it.

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jonnrb an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Yes they do. It's called "another Mac". And I'm not even being snarky here: I legitimately think someone at Apple thought this through and said "yeah if they need more than 2 VMs running at the same time, there are probably multiple users and they can each get their own Mac".

	▲	stingraycharles an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Nah, Apple has been extremely restrictive about virtual machines in all kinds of ways, e.g. the minimum terms anyone is able to lease out a VM or Mac to someone else is 24h, making cloud-like workloads practically impossible. For some reason, Apple really doesn’t like virtual machines, and it’s much more intentional than just “probably multiple users”. It’s extremely frustrating.

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VanTheBrand an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The 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.

	▲	benoau an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		(where "abuse" means using the hardware to run software)
	▲	JoshTriplett an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And 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.