By Peter Cohen
To develop Apple apps, you need a Mac. So, what do you do if you don’t have one? One option is to turn to the cloud. Since late 2020, Amazon Web Service (AWS) has offered the capability. AWS customers can already instantly provision macOS environments in the cloud, instead of relying on on-premises hardware. But up to now, there’s been a bottleneck: Virtual Mac instances built using Amazon’s EC2 service have been Intel-only. AWS has added Apple’s custom M1 silicon to the mix after months of previewing the capability in limited release. AWS recently announced the general availability of Elastic Compute 2 (EC2) M1 Mac instances for all AWS developers.
The company said the new Mac instances provide up to 60 per cent better price performance than their predecessors. AWS has been testing EC2 M1 Mac instances in preview mode since they were announced at the re:Invent 2021 conference, but this news marks their general availability for everyone.
