Amazon now offers M1 Mac mini as a service through AWS

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The company told us it was coming when it first introduced Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Mac instances last year. Now it is here. Amazon has announced that developers can now hire an online M1 Mac to test their apps as a preview of the service begins.

Apple as a service – now from Amazon

EC2 Mac instances are dedicated Mac minis made available as a service via the AWS Nitro System. When you do this you get a Mac that behaves like any other Mac, but is online. It means you can scale your build and test fleets of Macs, paying as you go.

If you are a Mac developer and re-architecting your apps to natively support Macs with Apple silicon, you may now build and test your apps and take advantage of all the benefits of AWS. Developers building for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV will also benefit from faster builds.

These instances can be used to build, test, package, and sign Xcode applications for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Safari.

The instance advantage

EC2 M1 Mac instances deliver up to 60% better price performance over the x86-based EC2 Mac instances for iPhone and Mac app build workloads. These Macs run on bare metal servers, each hosting a Mac mini and can be accessed and hired via the AWS Management Console.

[Also read: How Apple can put Apple Silicon in every smart home’s heart]

EC2 M1 Mac instances are now available in preview in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon), with other AWS Regions coming at launch. In the two preview Regions, the on-demand price is $0.6498 per hour.

Even better, running these M1-series Macs makes Amazon’s server farm costs lower…

What Apple said

When Amazon announced its plan last year, Apple’s Bob Borchers, Vice President, Worldwide Product Marketing, said: “With the launch of EC2 Mac instances, we’re thrilled to make development for Apple’s platforms accessible in new ways, and combine the performance and reliability of our world-class hardware with the scalability of AWS.”

You can sign up for the preview of EC2 Mac M1 instances here.

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