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What about renting out Mac Mini as a business?
elwebmaster
Member
in General
Do you guys think it’s profitable? I see some renting them for $120/month and the thing costs $660. Electricity and space requirements are minimal.
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Can you do it better/cheaper/more reliable/better support/high number of servers available than https://www.macincloud.com/ ? if so, write a business plan, secure funding and go for it. If going to compete on price- just witness the carnage and bad reviews of many companies on LET that scale too big for their talents with LINUX servers and "Windows Trials" servers. Who is renting for 120/mo for a 660 cost? Are they providing a value added service? maybe its a different model?
Cheaper no, but better yes: simple, you rent a Mac mini and you get a Mac mini, no sharing of server and other shenanigans. Jut quality services for business users.
Too expensive. Not gonna work.
Here's you competition with no shenanigans. https://checkout.macincloud.com/select/managed
Full dedicated mac mini available in 9 locations for $45.00 a month
or mac mini i7 for $67.50 a month
Looking forward to your competitive service
Also this https://www.scaleway.com/en/hello-m1/
There’s a non-trivial Apple licensing fee. I don’t know how much it is and I can’t find the info. But if you’re serious about pursuing it, it would be worth looking up.
Would you owning a business or just owning a job?
This entire hosting industry looks to me like if a few players were motivated they could eat up the market.
Whats to stop Apple itself from starting their own Cloud service? I know they exited the server market before but now might be a time to rethink that with M1 and soon to come M2.
Sure, it's viable but there are a half-dozen companies already doing it. Doesn't mean you can't be the next.
The usual use case is someone who wants to run mac-specific code infrequently, or doesn't want to invest in hardware - e.g., a smaller iOS developer.
You'll have the usual hosting headaches - e.g., iMessage spammers.
Because I don't think it exists. Your Apple hardware is licensed to run macOS. No other hardware is. I think as long as you're running on Apple hardware (i.e., not hackintosh) I don't think you'll have a problem. I am not a lawyer of course.
Why? Apple's focus is consumer. Dealing with enterprise clients is a very different market. I don't think they want the distraction.
I did like their Xserve kit back in the day.
They ban entire netblocks doing this pretty quickly and your brand new mac mini serials will no longer be able to create more than one or two apple ids, so the problem seems to self-terminate after a while.
You will probably get spammers that are upset they can't make new apple credentials chargebacking you though
As a small iOS dev, I have rented mac mini (at around 20ish, can't remember now) a couple of times for automatic Xcode builds however I no longer need to. Github CI/CD now offers free macOS for building, I ran out of free minutes this month with 10/15 builds so I opened my old bitrise account and found out that they are now allowing me 30min per build instead of 10min. Your target is developer because normal people won't rent it to let it idle. I wouldn't suggest you this business anymore, if you started this like 10years ago then you could have made some profit. If you have money to spare better buy Ryzen, colocate and offer Linux and Windows based KVM vps.
However, if you can provide hourly rental at around 60 USD a month and a solid API for deploying then you have a good chance to win.
Scaleway Mac Mini M1's 8gb 0.10eur/hour
Minimum 24hrs - this is dictated by the latest Apple EULA. AWS follows same practice, although much more expensive.
There isn't not afaik, the latest EULA allows for rental use minimumed to 24hrs, of course tied to apple hardware where OS X is licensed.
My buddy is running macOS on Linux servers, using an educational license (that he qualifies for). I tried his images but it doesn't work for me - VM won't start.
So far I haven't been to afford a Mac (local or cloud), so I just tell users to install Linux VM.
If I can get a Mac for $0.25/hour but without 24-hour commitment, it's awesome.
Scaleway wants 24-hour commitment but if I test software I would be done in 2~3 hours.
My web apps are tested through SauceLabs, free for open source projects.
However, it's only for testing; if app is broken, I cannot connect a debugger and do development there.
The 24hr commitment is a stipulation of the licensing agreement, made and enforced by Apple. You won't get any serious provider advertising otherwise. SauceLabs isnt renting you a whole Mac Mini.
Hackintosh stuff requires some sort of patching, no?
Not even used? Man, living where you do, you should become a contractor and make decent money.
If the energy price is high then its rendable to use mac mini's because the power comsumption.