Because 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.

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.

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

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".

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.

I mean, as someone who was in that situation as a customer, we couldn't find a great cloud option for our needs, and we ended up building our first hardware lab with a bunch of macs.

It definitely caused us to buy macs we would have rented and shared.

Correct, us as well, but we’re mainly harvesting refurbished Mac Mini’s.

My biggest problem is the lack of a good CI/CD flow when you can’t work with images and virtual machines. We’re using ansible now to manage the fleet and I’m not a fan.

If they would more than 2 VMs, we’d still buy the hardware, we’d just buy larger ones and have more virtual machines on them. Very likely also use Linux as the host.

I hope one day Apple sees the light like Microsoft also did, but I’m not hopeful.

Frustrating for you, hilarious for me. I had no idea they had hobbled MacOS in this way. It doesn't surprise me at all really, and it's pretty ridiculous.

I'm not sure why people keep giving Apple their money, especially tech-savvy people that would want to run VMs.

I run up to a dozen Linux VMs at once on my Macs.

I've never hit the referenced limit because it isn't a limit on running VMs it's a limit on running macOS, and I hardly ever run macOS VMs.

I'm not sure why people don't use Mac's are so obsessed with telling people who do use Macs that they're wrong, and yet here we are.

The limit is for macOS running in a VM (which is mainly useful for developing iOS and macOS apps, for example cloud-based testing and CI/CD workflows.)

Most developers build web- and server-based systems that use Linux VMs as back-ends.

Most containers used for development are Linux containers, which also run in a Linux VM.

Because we have customers that use macOS and both x86 and apple silicon are build targets of ours.

yeah I'm glad I paid extra for linux on a used dell, I'd hate to be slumming in some poverty ridden ghetto like mac users with their vm limits

If they licensed or built their own microVMs they could offer it as an addon product and solve most of these issues without full macOS instances

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.

I 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.

You 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

(where "abuse" means using the hardware to run software)

Well yeah and Apple wouldn’t be able to abuse its pseudo-monopolistic market position. That would be so sad…

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.

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.

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.

Well, but their customers are those that buy Apple hardware.

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.

Imagine buying a mac studio with 500+ GB of memory and being limited to 2 vms.

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.

You are not Apple's target market, and never will be.

They don't care what you want to do with the hardware you own.

No kidding.

You realise you can run VMs for any other os right? It's a limit on running macOS not a limit on running VMs.

Yes we all realize that.

It’s MacOS VMs that we want to run.

Maybe I should have used the same dismissive tone.

Imagine thinking everyone who buys a Mac and runs VMs wants to run heaps of macOS VMs.

why else would you buy a mac to run VMs?

arm64 hardware is cheap, x64 hardware is cheap and both of those can run as many Linux or Windows VMs as you have RAM to run.

For me? Infrastructure simulation.

Why buy a second extra machine to do testing of multi machine infrastructure configurations when my workstation can run the VMs locally?

For others? I don't know that's why I think it's ridiculous to assume everyone else's use case is the same as your own.

They discontinued the 512GB Studio, and the Pro is gone, so no fear there now.

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

Market 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.

>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.

Sure 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.

I'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?

You struggle with the concept of licenses?

You are commenting on the article that discusses exactly that.

> 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.

> Why should they impose a limit at all?

Whenever I see apple silliness, I have to remember:

  "You're not the target market."

Yeah but. They happily sold it to you

They sold it to you, with a limit.

> Your hardware

They see it a bit differently.

>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.