This falls on deaf years but I say it every chance I get.
I would pay a significant premium to install MacOS on a machine without violating their ToS.
I would pay a significant premium to install MacOS on a machine without violating their ToS.
It's very frustrating to a lot of people that macOS VMs aren't easy (licensing/ToS-wise) to spin up on non-Apple hardware, especially since Apple doesn't sell high-end servers any longer. Yes, that calculus will be different when the new Mac Pro begins to sell, but a lot of IT departments would rather add Apple VMs for testing/build/dev to their on existing on-premise compute clouds (vSphere/etc.) than spin up brand new ones on Apple hardware.
Additionally, there's a lot of demand for local Apple VMs on Windows machines. Microsoft makes a lot of money from software that's running on my Mac - especially Office and Windows (via Parallels Desktop or Boot Camp). Why shouldn't Apple make money from VMs running on Windows and Linux machines?
I have to run a bunch of VMs for builds, and I really wish I could be running Linux instead.
Furthermore, there's a longstanding (3 year) bug where the kernel would (very rarely) fail to execute a process. This would manifest as "/bin/sh: fail to execute binary file", because the posix_spawn() call returns an error (this is the actual bug), the libc interprets this as trying to execute a script, and falls back to running it through /bin/sh (this is standard Unix behavior), which can't execute it either because it's not a script.
That such a bug would persist for so long doesn't inspire confidence in the quality of the kernel.
That says more about Apple's current priorities than anything else. Sure, Linux is more mature, but if Apple were to release serverOS for specific types of workloads that are needed, you can bet any bugs that would interfere significantly would be prioritized up.
It would be ... well, kind of them to offer IT solutions they use internally to other IT departments tasked to support work on Apple platforms. At the very minimum, they could license a version of macOS (or "serverOS") tuned for server workloads, VM deployments, and Apple Remote Desktop sessions.
(Also, if someone can find a maintainable method for it, I'd love to support someone who maintains a cross-compiler toolchain that targets macOS, making it possible to build Rust and C apps for macOS without having macOS installed. But that's not a complete substitute for having an actual macOS cloud build server, on which the compiled applications can run as part of the build process.)
How hard would it be to integrate something like that into rustup, to make it easy to install a capable cross-compiler backend?
> They could even make it a subscription.
Yes, my only point is that it would have to cost a lot more than the margin of a single iMac.
The slickness of Mac OS X is partially because it's only deployed on high-end, well known hardware.
But like I said, I would pay an outrageous fee to use MacOS on a non-Apple machine without violating the EULA. And I only want it for professional use, where I can justify certain expenses (like a $500 software license + yearly renewal for updates), but can't justify spending $2-5k on an Apple machine that won't give me the performance, maintenance, or upgrade path available from off the shelf components.
It's such a weird business calculus to develop for MacOS. I genuinely love their products and software, but it constantly feels like developers get screwed every generation (especially smaller shops that do heavy lifting on MacOS).