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

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

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?

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

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.