Amazon Web Sevices’s (AWS) latest addition to its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (opens in new tab) (EC2) service will now let users rent and run an M1 Mac Mini in the cloud.
First rolled out in 2006, EC2 allows users to run virtual machines in AWS’s cloud, and this new instance, dubbed Mac2, looks to help developers create apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari.
Mac2 will cost around $0.65 an hour, and will give users a Mac mini computer attached via the Thunderbolt interface to the AWS Nitro System, with an Apple Silicon M1 chip with 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, 16 GiB of memory, and the 16-core Apple Neural Engine.
What will this get me?
The virtual machine connects to your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), boots from Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, uses EBS snapshots, Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), security groups, and can work with other AWS services such as Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Systems Manager.
This isn’t the first time that Amazon has offered virtual Macs via its EC2 service, it already offers x86-based EC2 Mac instances, however, it claims the newer instances deliver up to 60% better price performance over these.
Interested?
You can find out how to launch an EC2 M1 Mac instance from the AWS Management Console or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) by heading here (opens in new tab) to view Amazon’s blog post on the subject.
If you’ve got any additional questions that need to be cleared up, head to this FAQ (opens in new tab) which the cloud hosting giant has pulled together.
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