That would make more sense except they don't even have an option to pay for it.

Yes they do. It's called "another Mac". And I'm not even being snarky here: I legitimately think someone at Apple thought this through and said "yeah if they need more than 2 VMs running at the same time, there are probably multiple users and they can each get their own Mac".

Nah, Apple has been extremely restrictive about virtual machines in all kinds of ways, e.g. the minimum terms anyone is able to lease out a VM or Mac to someone else is 24h, making cloud-like workloads practically impossible. For some reason, Apple really doesn’t like virtual machines, and it’s much more intentional than just “probably multiple users”.

It’s extremely frustrating.

I mean, as someone who was in that situation as a customer, we couldn't find a great cloud option for our needs, and we ended up building our first hardware lab with a bunch of macs.

It definitely caused us to buy macs we would have rented and shared.

Correct, us as well, but we’re mainly harvesting refurbished Mac Mini’s.

My biggest problem is the lack of a good CI/CD flow when you can’t work with images and virtual machines. We’re using ansible now to manage the fleet and I’m not a fan.

If they would more than 2 VMs, we’d still buy the hardware, we’d just buy larger ones and have more virtual machines on them. Very likely also use Linux as the host.

I hope one day Apple sees the light like Microsoft also did, but I’m not hopeful.

Frustrating for you, hilarious for me. I had no idea they had hobbled MacOS in this way. It doesn't surprise me at all really, and it's pretty ridiculous.

I'm not sure why people keep giving Apple their money, especially tech-savvy people that would want to run VMs.

I run up to a dozen Linux VMs at once on my Macs.

I've never hit the referenced limit because it isn't a limit on running VMs it's a limit on running macOS, and I hardly ever run macOS VMs.

I'm not sure why people don't use Mac's are so obsessed with telling people who do use Macs that they're wrong, and yet here we are.

The limit is for macOS running in a VM (which is mainly useful for developing iOS and macOS apps, for example cloud-based testing and CI/CD workflows.)

Most developers build web- and server-based systems that use Linux VMs as back-ends.

Most containers used for development are Linux containers, which also run in a Linux VM.

Because we have customers that use macOS and both x86 and apple silicon are build targets of ours.

yeah I'm glad I paid extra for linux on a used dell, I'd hate to be slumming in some poverty ridden ghetto like mac users with their vm limits

If they licensed or built their own microVMs they could offer it as an addon product and solve most of these issues without full macOS instances

The option is you have to buy another machine. There are mac ec2 instances and several mac cloud hosts that all would abuse this if they could, instead to stay compliant they buy more machines.

I tried to launch a MacOS instance on EC2 recently (on my work account), and was blocked.

So I asked the IT dept and they said it's stupidly expensive to run a MacOS instance on EC2, and that they would just send me a Macbook Pro instead.

I wish I were kidding.

You should be happy that you have such a financially aware IT dept. The machines are truly expensive and after managing a farm of 150 Mac minis at work I can tell why.

It is like 3 days running the EC2 buys you a Mac mini? And you can only rent the machine in day increments

(where "abuse" means using the hardware to run software)

Well yeah and Apple wouldn’t be able to abuse its pseudo-monopolistic market position. That would be so sad…

And thus they need a massive datacenter full of systems, rather than a pile of paid licenses.

And macOS remains a toy for use only by individuals that is a massive pain for developers to support.