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points by zamadatix 4 days ago | 0 comments
They aren't getting around any limitations. How you decide to bill for meeting the limitations is a business decision, and you can do it via either higher average rates and allow more granular rentals to be financially covered that way or by requiring a 24 hour minimum.

I.e. just because Apple requires you to do things in 24 hour increments does not mean your billing has to expose it in exactly the same way.

[–] miniman1337 4 days ago
I dont think thats an correct interpretation of the EULA, they are just choosing to ignore it - https://wiki.licenseware.io/catalog/rules/apple-macos-lease-...
[–] jtuple 4 days ago
If a business reserves a Mac for 24 hours (and allows no other users for that window), it complies with the EULA, no?

That doesn't mean the business has to charge the user for 24 hours. You could charge for 6 hours and then just let the Mac sit idle and unused the remaining 18.

You're eatting the cost of that unused time, but if its a differentiator that leads to more business than it might still be worth it.

EDIT: To be clear, imagine a case where the user has 24 hour sole access to the Mac. They could use up 24 hours if they wanted. But usage is tracked per hour, and they're only billed after the fact based on how much time they actually were running something during that 24 hour window.

[–] pvtmert 4 days ago
From the wording of the parent comment my understanding is that 24 hour period applies to the MacOS VM, not the hardware itself. Since they split each physical host into at least 2 different VMs the 24 hour period is for that VM. Even stronger case if they also lock the core affinity to the physical layout like Max editions having multiple Pro chips/dies within...

For Amazon EC2 the case is different since it doesn't allow VMs but only possible to get dedicated bare-metal hosts. Obviously Amazon could offer VMs but they would not because the current way allows them to charge 24 hours even if user uses the host only 1 hour. And obviously no body big enough challenging the status quo and impacting AWS' revenue hard enough.

[–] saagarjha 4 days ago
I don’t think they are doing this.