OK, but would it be possible to rvng it to run? I guess that would be illegal, but...just like with software piracy...if it's possible, it will be done....what's stopping someone setting up a data center in a more permissive part of the world and running images on whatever hardware they like?
I’m sure it’s happening - hackentoshes have existed forever - but ARM makes that harder and I doubt paying customers want tos some the relatively smallish amount.
I’ve always been suspicious that some of the cheaper “rent a Mac mini VM” may be doing trickery with a Linux virtual machine host.
Wouldn't this be relatively easy to test with a benchmark? Apple's ARM processors are pretty fast, especially for single-core stuff. Most data-center processors are designed for lots of cores at the cost of single-core performance. Plus, if you're using an x86 processor, you'll need to be translating ARM to x86 which is going to come at a big cost.
To get plausible Mac mini benchmarks on the fastest x86 processor, you'd need overhead to be less than 25%. Plus, you'd be buying a $650 x86 processor instead of spending $600 on a Mac mini. You'd also need to think about power. That x86 processor draws 150W base and 253W peak compared to an M1 Mac mini which hits a peak of 39W. Even if you're getting pretty cheap power (5-cents per kWh), that's still $44/year in extra costs.
I've used QEMU on Github's x86 runners to run Linux-ARM and it's painfully slow. It seems like it would be hard to make the economics work out well while still offering a plausible experience speed-wise.
The issue is that it's hard to turn that into a business. In the US, clearly a company like Github/Microsoft can't do that. You suggest finding a country that might be more permissive. The issue there is that there are a lot of treaties that most countries have signed up to that protect IP like WTO membership or the WIPO Copyright Treaty. Maybe those wouldn't prevent what you're suggesting, but they probably do. There are some countries outside that, but not a lot and some of them are probably non-starters like North Korea or Iran.
And who would your customers be? You won't get US or EU companies wanting to use your Hackintosh Cloud. They know the jeopardy they'd get in if they were building Hackintoshes. Renting them probably isn't much better. What happens when Apple figures out that a company has been building their iOS apps on the Hackintosh Cloud?
Plus, if you were to create a Hackintosh Cloud that got any traction, it would be a constant moving target as Apple tried to foil your plans. What happens when the next security update also has something that makes your machines not boot? Sure, you find a workaround over the next month and in the meantime your customers find that your service isn't worth it. Companies pay a fortune for things to be reliable.
Finally, how much could you really undercut genuine M1 pricing? Scaleway will rent me an M1 Mac mini for €80/mo (€0.11/hour) or an M2 Pro for €173. You're going to need to pay really smart people to keep breaking Apple's attempts against you. Scaleway just buys some Mac minis. Plus, the ARM processors you're buying won't have the performance of Apple's chips and might even have slightly different behavior for things like memory ordering. Maybe that won't matter most of the time, but if I'm paying for a build cloud, I probably don't want to be second guessing it.
When it comes to cloud services, I think buying genuine Macs isn't really the issue. I mean, Github is charging $350/mo for mediocre 2-core x86 runners. They're charging nearly $7,000/mo for an M1 runner. If you wanted to compete with Github's runners, you could just rent Scaleway servers at €80/mo and still hugely undercut Github's pricing as long as you got a bit of usage. At half of Github's price, you'd need about 17 hours of usage per month to cover Scaleway's price - less than 2.5% utilization.
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