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Comment by BGStucki | Hacker News Reader

Brian Stucki here. If I had the power over Apple that you think I do, I definitely would have pushed for iPhone Socks first.

Joking aside, the software license agreement was certainly a cause for personal celebration. It might be helpful for you to compare macOS 11 to previous versions. (Linked in my post.) If I/MacStadium did anything, we showed that there was a need for this sort of service and that both Apple and developers would benefit with some official way to do it. Amazon joining is further proof of that.

I’ve always pushed for the safe road at MacStadium (and my company Macminicolo before that) even if it meant losing out on gray area business. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve answered “but what if Apple shuts this service down?” Not anymore.

With the new Eula, the guidelines are now set. Doing everything above board paid off.

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I get that you're happy because Apple has now explicitly permitted what you were doing.

I'm less clear on why you're happy that they didn't allow more stuff, like renting by the minute or for arbitrary purposes. You seem to depict companies that were doing this as "below board", while you as "above board". This is certainly true now, but before the changes both would have been a grey area - I don't see much of a difference.

Would I be correct saying that you're happy because in one stroke Apple has moved you from grey area to explicitly permitted, and part of your competition from grey area to explicitly forbidden?

For the record in no way I think that Apple took this decision to favor you or anyone else except themselves. It just seems that you won a regulatory lottery.

Regulations benefit incumbents. That holds whether the regulations are national laws or corporate policies. When you make new rules, the established ecosystem adapts and doubles down while new players have a harder time getting started.

This is not true at all. Anti monopoly regulations, for example, exist for the sole purpose of privileging new entrants over incumbents. The actions against Microsoft, or the breaking up of AT&T certainly did not help the incumbents.

An example closer to home is that entrepreneurial activity in Silicon Valley is often attributed to California law forbidding non competes in employment contracts. This is regulation, without which, as you see in nearly every other state, workers are severely bound by their employment contracts in the work they can do while and after being employed by a company.

If regulations seem to benefit incumbents, it’s because incumbents exist and therefore can play a role in setting regulations. The counterbalance to this should be public pressure and political action, but incumbents recognizing that do much to dissuade the public from pushing for such action, including convincing people of pithy, but 180 degrees wrong ideas such as “regulations always benefit incumbents”.

> This is not true at all. Anti monopoly regulations, for example, exist for the sole purpose of privileging new entrants over incumbents. The actions against Microsoft, or the breaking up of AT&T certainly did not help the incumbents.

The intended purpose is to help the new entrants, but I don't see Microsoft or AT&T losing anything or their smaller competitors gaining anything after the regulatory action against them.

> An example closer to home is that entrepreneurial activity in Silicon Valley is often attributed to California law forbidding non competes in employment contracts. This is regulation, without which, as you see in nearly every other state, workers are severely bound by their employment contracts in the work they can do while and after being employed by a company.

That's a matter of negotiation. I always (successfully) negotiated with my employer to exclude my personal projects from the contract. I find that employees have a lot more negotiating power than they realize.

> If regulations seem to benefit incumbents, it’s because incumbents exist and therefore can play a role in setting regulations.

I think that's synonymous with the original statement made by OP. You're just providing another reason why it's true.

I don't see ... AT&T losing anything

AT&T lost big. It ended up going bankrupt.

The "AT&T" you know today is not the same company. It is Southwestern Bell, which bought the AT&T brand in the bankruptcy fire sale and renamed itself.

It did so because AT&T was a more valuable brand than Southwestern Bell. Looks like it worked.

Technically Southwestern Bell was spun off from the AT&T breakup from the 80's.

So basically SBC was one of many companies spun off from AT&T, then it bought up several of the other Baby Bell companies spun off, too. Really, it was AT&T buying AT&T.

It worked on paper, but the victor was still from the same tree.

Microsoft didn't lose anything.

> It is Southwestern Bell, which bought the AT&T brand in the bankruptcy fire sale and renamed itself.

Southwestern Bell was the same subsidiary that broke off from AT&T Corporation. AT&T Inc was the merger of the companies that were originally broken up from AT&T Corporation. Here is the org chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T#Chart_of_AT&T_Baby_Bell...

AT&T became even bigger after the breakup: https://www.businessinsider.com/att-breakup-1982-directv-bel...

You think that AT&T Corporation going broke and selling to a company that originated from the AT&T Corporation, which later renamed itself to AT&T Inc is a good example of a government-imposed corporate breakup?! It literally divested from those companies only to have most of them merge under the same name again.

> Microsoft didn't lose anything.

Quite a few observers, including people internal to Microsoft, felt it cost the company significant momentum at the time, and confidence after.

Before the court case, Microsoft was a brutal competitor (remember the Simpsons episode?). Not so much after.

Regulations can benefit incumbents in two ways.

The best cases occur where they raise a floor uniformly. For example I would prefer to add anti pollution systems to my paint factory, because I live in town too, and I just don't want to pollute. It would raise the price of my paint $1/gal, and not enough customers will chose a product just because it polluted less. Many of my competitors feel the same. If we all do it everybody benefits and nobody suffers relative to their competition. This is even more important in cases where the customer can't signal through the market, e.g. electricity generation. These can benefit incumbents but not necessarily hurt new entrants, especially when they are cap ex rather than op ex (e.g. minimum wage rather than an additional piece of equipment).

There are many bad examples as well, some of which raise a floor asymmetrically. For example FB, or at least their CEO, is willing to have the CDA's section 230 abolished because they have such a dominant customer base and enough cash that they believe they would be able to afford to do the resulting government mandated controls and fight any lawsuits, while a new entrant would not.

> Would I be correct saying that you're happy because in one stroke Apple has moved you from grey area to explicitly permitted, and part of your competition from grey area to explicitly forbidden?

I don't know how any competition would be negatively impacted by Apple implementing these terms, unless the competition was already selling services that were on a short-term basis (below 24 hours).

And to circle back around, this EULA enables MacStadium's hardware hosting competition to enter the market... thus comes Amazon into the playing field. I just don't see how having to compete with Amazon is, all of a sudden, a better deal for MacStadium. If anything, it just highlights the volatile nature of running a business in the Apple ecosystem.

> For the record in no way I think that Apple took this decision to favor you or anyone else except themselves. It just seems that you won a regulatory lottery.

"Congratulations, you're a winner... your prize is to compete with Amazon!" Some would certainly wear it with a badge of honor!

Why wouldn't Apple just let people rent out computers for any amount of time, as long as they don't contain music or movies? I can understand why Apple would wan't someone to pay $3.99 to rent a movie for 48 hours, and then sub-rent that movie a couple dozen times. But why do they care about someone running CI?

Because tens of thousands of devs working on other platforms would be able to rent a Mac for half an hour, build their cross-platform framework code as an XCode project, and then submit to the App Store, without ever touching a Mac, testing on a Mac, and so on.

At least this puts a barrier to entry.

This one!

> I don't know how any competition would be negatively impacted by Apple implementing these terms, unless the competition was already selling services that were on a short-term basis (below 24 hours).

Almosto all of MacStadium post is about those competitors, did we read something different?

And Amazon would be much more of a competition were they allowed to rent by the minute, it's their selling point!

Macstadium competes against other short-term rental companies but also against real Macs, Hackintoshes on physical machines, Hackintoshes on virtual machines (inc EC2), and non-consumption.

Hacks on VMs are a pretty direct competitor I’d think.

> Macstadium competes against other short-term rental companies but also against real Macs, Hackintoshes on physical machines, Hackintoshes on virtual machines (inc EC2), and non-consumption.

MacStadium isn't doing short-term rentals not because it can't but because the EULA doesn't allow it. Anybody doing short-term rentals is doing it on Mac hardware so they can just as easily sell long-term rentals. Aside from MacStadium being a major player in this field, I see absolutely nothing that favors them compared to their competition. In fact, it seems to have created Amazon as a competitor.

And the Hackintosh thing is the reason a Mac hosting companies exist in the first place. If Hackintoshes were allowed, there would be no companies offering Mac hosted hardware. I don't see how that's related to this particular situation tho. Apple created the need for Mac hosted hardware so blaming Mac hardware hosting companies for this is a bit backward.

> Hacks on VMs are a pretty direct competitor I’d think.

The VMs have to run on Mac hardware as well.

Condition: Person X has a need to run macOS for 3 hours for whatever reason. They have a lot of options, including the ones I listed.

Various options have different drawbacks, including EULA violations, but all represent viable alternatives for some (therefore competition) to Macstadium.

It represents an opportunity to MacStadium as well, since they too would be able to sell the hardware by the hour. Currently, the only reason they can't is due to the EULA. There is no other reason why a mac hardware hosting company couldn't sell hourly access to a Mac machine.

Hi, thanks for weighing in. I'm sure you picked up that I'm pretty mad, but I'll try to tone it down a little bit. I'm not an Amazon employee or someone who is personally harmed by this or anything, aside from being a developer for Apple's platforms who occasionally looks around for CI services. I'm mostly arguing about the principle of the thing.

Anyways: I read your blog post back when it came out. Whether Apple took your input into account when making the EULA, I don't know; I am sure that you must have some sort of amicable relationship at the very least. Running services "on the border" like this is never easy, but I would think that your business model (which includes buying a huge number of Macs) has probably kept Apple mostly on your side. I know the work you've done to keep it this way and to be honest, I was happy for you when Apple announced their rack-mountable Mac Pros and gave you a mention at the Mac Mini event.

The problem from my side (at least where you and MacStadium are involved) mostly lies with the blog post you wrote. Look, I get it, Apple's changes make the EULA work for you. That's great! But I'm sure you also realize that spelling this out clearly in the way that they did means that the "gray area" becomes a black area for basically everyone else. What I didn't appreciate is you calling it a "gray area" and coming up with rationale for why what they want is not reasonable. Apple came in, almost certainly looked at your business specifically, made its rules to hurt developers and these companies, and now you're writing blog posts about how Apple is your friend and you were right all along. It feels like you've decided to start singing praises for a bully that decided to leave you alone, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

There's still a huge hole for a service that lets you rent a Mac for the a couple minutes so you can build your Xcode project. It's not your fault that doesn't exist, it's Apple's. But could you maybe not publicly celebrate that Apple has created a situation that happens to help you and make it generally worse for others? Can we stop trying to normalize or even argue that sharing a Mac is something wrong, something that Apple would think is ruining the "performance experience" you should get from a Mac?

>aside from being a developer for Apple's platforms who occasionally looks around for CI services

So, you give him all this shit and you're not even using his service?

>There's still a huge hole for a service that lets you rent a Mac for the a couple minutes so you can build your Xcode project. It's not your fault that doesn't exist, it's Apple's.

If we're talking for CI of builds, sure. But in that case, one wouldn't be much affected (the C in CI means continuous, so you wont just rent for a few minutes).

Otherwise, as a user, I'm quite satisfied with less developers being able to build XCode projects and submit apps without even owning a Mac to test them on. Looks like it would bring a delluge of poorly ported apps based on cross-platform APIs and only tested in non-Mac platforms (if that).

I like you and I think your posts are generally high quality, so I am going to say that an elitist "screw people who cant afford an overpriced mac" is not a good thing imo.

Will we get some lower quality apps, sure, do those already exist? yeah. It just sounds like gatekeeping for not much benefit.

It's important developers (or their QA people) be able to use the device they're publishing to.

Is that why web developers have their hands on every iteration of every device on the planet? Or do they have some sort of tooling that emulates that experience for them?

No, but that's why the web is a subpar experience to native...

No :) the reason is profit margins - native has turned right over to web in electron land.

>I like you and I think your posts are generally high quality

Thanks! I try to add the ocassional low quality comment for balance :-)

>so I am going to say that an elitist "screw people who cant afford an overpriced mac" is not a good thing imo.

Well, my intented meaning was more like "Don't create/sell apps for a platform you dont even own to test in".

The main reason to go for "by the minute" builds on the Cloud for a machine you don't own is to either help with porting to an architecture you don't use, or to churn apps with some cross platform framework to a platform you don't use/care about.

I think the latter would be more frequent.

If they were mere poor hobbyists guys legitimately coding for the platform, they'd own a machine, either new, or second hand, or whatever. It's when you don't code in the platform, but only want to target it for selling that you have an issue...

> The main reason to go for "by the minute" builds on the Cloud for a machine you don't own is to either help with porting to an architecture you don't use, or to churn apps with some cross platform framework to a platform you don't use/care about.

You can also go for "by the minute" builds on the Cloud for a machine you do own. Suppose the developers and testers have Macs on their desks, but you still want to have your CI run in the Cloud. Now I'm not an expert on cloud pricing so I could be wrong, but I imagine you could benefit from paying by the minute in that case, depending on the specifics of your situation (builds per day, time per build, total cost of ownership of having a build farm in house).

If cost is a barrier to entry, then an old used Mac is going to be significantly cheaper than any AWS offering.

Yes, I think I reserve the right to judge him for a decision that hurts iOS/macOS developers as a whole. Can't I judge Facebook for being a privacy violating nightmare even though I've never had an account with them?

As for your other comments: I know what CI is; I use it daily! The way my CI runs (which is how most CI is!) is that a when a commit gets pushed a machine gets spun up to build it, then a few minutes later it shuts itself down once the compilation is complete. Why would I want to pay to have a Mac for an entire day in this scenario? I'd have to be pushing code every few minutes to have any hope of efficiently using one machine.

And believe me, I hate cross-platform garbage apps just as much as you do. But I am not in favor of putting arbitrary restrictions on how people can write their apps. Xcode used to be a soft-requirement to build apps and look how well that worked out: native developers have to stick with it all the time, even when it's acting up and being buggy, and developers who couldn't care less have reverse engineered it to the point where they either generate an Xcode project from a source tree and build from the command line, or they just package their own app bundle themselves with the magic bits that Xcode would usually apply. Trying to stop people from making garbage apps by limiting their tooling options rarely works. And, in fact, I personally know people who go services like MacStadium (VNCing in) to use Xcode for the couple days it takes to set up a build system with the right certificates and profiles, then they never touch a Mac ever again. It's the native developers with their own Macs who want to use a fresh machine to build their code for Mojave or something that they aren't running on their personal computers.

Maybe a case can be made to eliminate the 24 hour minimum by focusing on reducing carbon emissions Why force someone to rent for a day when they need it for an hour?

“This 23 hours of global warming is proudly sponsored by the Appleverse.”

Let's start by killing crypto-coin, which is basically global-warming-as-money...

True dat

Your article sounds as if it had previously not been allowed to offer such services. Or was it a grey zone before?

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