M1 Mac mini instances now generally available in Amazon AWS cloud service

Mac mini with M1 chip

Amazon Web Services has announced that its M1 Mac mini cloud computing instances are out of preview and are currently generally available to customers.

Following a preview in December 2021, AWS is now making the M1 Mac mini instances live for all users. According to Amazon, the new instances provide up to 60% better price performance than Intel Mac mini instances.

The AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service lets users run on-demand macOS workflows in the cloud. Each instance is a dedicated Mac mini attached via Thunderbolt to the AWS Nitro System, and users can choose between macOS Big Sur and macOS Monterey as operating systems.

Amazon says that its Mac instances carry a number of benefits for developers, including reducing costs and allowing for quick rearchitecting and testing for Apple Silicon.

The cloud computing giant first added Intel-based Mac mini instances to its service in December 2020.

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4 Comments

AppleUfmyI 7 Years · 60 comments

About 2 years ago

Price it out. We rented a dedicated machine and it’s like buying a physical machine each month.

sconosciuto 4 Years · 295 comments

About 2 years ago

AppleUfmyI said:

Price it out. We rented a dedicated machine and it’s like buying a physical machine each month.

interesting. A Mac mini is rather inexpensive, especially at the lowest-spec configs. What's the use case for this service?

Marvin 18 Years · 15355 comments

About 2 years ago

sconosciuto said:

AppleUfmyI said:

Price it out. We rented a dedicated machine and it’s like buying a physical machine each month.

interesting. A Mac mini is rather inexpensive, especially at the lowest-spec configs. What's the use case for this service?

I would expect the use case to be for companies without wide access to Mac hardware to be able to build apps like cross-platform apps, say Electron apps and iOS apps.

They'd only pay for the day they use the server so it would be cheaper than buying a Mac.

There's a note saying the minimum Mac allocation is 24 hours and is priced at $0.65/hour so if a company needed to make a Mac build of their app, they'd be billed for 24 x $0.65 = $15.60.

If someone was running the server 24/7 like a web host, this wouldn't be cost-effective at all as it would reach $5k within a year. Long-term use would be better using colocation hosting where you buy the machine outright and they plug it in and you pay the network costs:

https://macminicolo.net

mpantone 18 Years · 2254 comments

About 2 years ago

sconosciuto said:

AppleUfmyI said:

Price it out. We rented a dedicated machine and it’s like buying a physical machine each month.

interesting. A Mac mini is rather inexpensive, especially at the lowest-spec configs. What's the use case for this service?

Per the Amazon EC2 webpage:

"By using Amazon EC2 Mac instances, you can create apps for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari."

If you read the rest of the webpage, this service is clearly aimed at collaborative app development not something like web hosting. It's up to potential customers to assess the value of EC2 Mac instances vis-a-vis their objectives.

There isn't anything preventing a group from trying it out for a few days, weeks, months, and then abandoning it.

Based on my past experience with EC2 (which is now several years ago), once you shut down the instance, charges stop accumulating. At the time, I was on a trial one-year subscription to an entry level Windows Server instance that was free with limited usage.