Discussion

Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit

kylec: This is a very silly restriction, at least to apply uniformly to all Macs. I think if you buy a more powerful Mac they should let you virtualize more Mac instances. Like an M5 maybe limit to 2, but maybe let an M5 Pro do 4 and an M5 Max do 8 or something.

Khalid_nowaf: I’m very curious, why did Apple put such a limitation?

RestartKernel: This is a really cool article, but the existence of such an arbitrary limit on any serious development platform is weird.

tempest_: Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.

obilgic: Can this work with lume as well? Currently it has a similar limitation.

czk: it should, lume is a thin wrapper around Apple's Virtualization.framework as i understand it

cluckindan: Probably to prevent a single hardware system from being used to run an online identity farm.

czk: starting with M3+ you can use Hypervisor.framework/Virtualization.framework to spin up nested VMs.it would be amusing if that bypassed the limit.

thomascountz: Anything being developed for the Apple ecosystem requires use of the Apple development platform. Maybe the scope could be called "unserious," but the scale cannot be ignored.

tempest_: I am aware.However having used Xcode at some point 10 years ago my belief is that the app ecosystem exists in spite of that and that people would never choose this given the choice.

jonhohle: For me at least, not being Linux is a feature. Linux has always been “almost Unix” to the point where now it has become its own thing for better or worse. OS X was never trying to be Linux. It would be better if we still had a few more commercial POSIX implementations.

amelius: It is a weird situation. Apple products are consumer products but they make us use them as development hardware because there is no other way to make software for those products.

benoau: Why should they impose a limit at all? Your hardware is a natural limit, you'll stop of your own accord when you reach its thresholds.

naikrovek: 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.

tempest_: That is fair but in my experience most devs are targeting linux servers not BSD(or any other flavour) which is helped by OSX. If OSX was linux derived it would suit them just as well.edit: I suppose I should also note the vast majority of people developing on mac books (in my experience anyway) are actually targeting chrome.

ryandrake: 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.

ab_testing: Very funny to see HN hate on Microsoft and Google but then love a company where they cannot even run an app on their mobile platform or only a certain number of VMs on their computer.

mschuster91: Doesn't make too much sense, the VMs don't get unique hardware identifiers that one could (ab)use for spamming iMessage.

dghlsakjg: Since when are users in this place shy about bashing Apple?Plenty of hate out there of apple alongside the love.

edude03: IIRC you can just turn off sip and set the boot argument that controls it without a custom kernel

Barbing: In the very same comments sometimes, those frustrating geniuses

ralph84: Because their business model is to sell tightly integrated hardware and software as a package. The hardware sales fund the software development. They don't want people who haven't bought the hardware using the software.

jaredklewis: At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac. Because this sample is from my experience, it’s skewed to startups and tech companies. For sure, lots of devs outside those areas, but tech companies are a big chunk of the world’s developers.So yea I would say Apple is a “serious development platform” just given how much it dominates software development in the tech sector in the US.

peyton: That kind of tracks as the source of the concern. My first thought was it’d be something IDMS-related as well. I don’t know enough about that system to pinpoint exactly what.

gambiting: >>At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a macI work in video games, you know, industry larger than films - 10 out of 10 devs I know are on Windows. I have a work issued Mac just to do some iOS dev and I honestly don't understand how anyone can use it day to day as their main dev machine, it's just so restrictive in what the OS allows you to do.

RealityVoid: Adults can hold 2 thoughts in their head at their same time.

OptionOfT: I have the feeling a lot of people take Macs because the other option is a locked down Windows, and Linux is not offered.

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