The AWS EC2 Mac alternative when you need one Mac, not a fleet

AWS sells Mac capacity the way it sells all compute. A Mac is a Dedicated Host, the host is the unit of billing, and there is one Mac instance per Dedicated Host, on bare metal only. Around it sits the rest of EC2: VPC, EBS, Elastic Load Balancing, FSx and Systems Manager working with Mac instances as with any other EC2 instance, and hosts that can be shared with other accounts in your AWS organization, with EC2 Auto Scaling supported.

That is a serious platform. A team can bake a macOS image with Xcode on it and scale its Mac count with demand, and their Mac page quotes large teams that moved their whole Apple build pipeline onto it.

Coverage is on the same scale. They run M4 Mac mini hosts in six Regions (N. Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Ireland, Frankfurt and Sydney), and M4 Pro hosts in the three US ones, and older builds go wider: Intel Mac instances in 12 Regions across the US, Europe and Asia Pacific. Our Macs sit in US racks. If latency to the machine matters and you are not in North America, AWS has a region near you and we do not.

So this is not a comparison of fleets. It is a comparison of renting one Mac, or a handful, for a person or a small team.

AWS bills a Mac by time used, with one condition: billing per second with a 24-hour minimum allocation period for each Mac Dedicated Host, after which the host can be released at any time. The minimum comes from Apple's macOS licence, not from Amazon.

Their base Mac mini is $1.23 an hour on demand for an M4 Mac mini host in US East (N. Virginia). Multiply that by the minimum and you have the least a first day can cost. At the rates we read, it comes in a little under our day price, and their Pro build at $1.97 an hour on demand for an M4 Pro Mac mini host in US East (N. Virginia) works out the same way against ours. On a single day they are the cheaper buy, and we would rather say so.

Past the first day the models diverge. On AWS, a job that needs a day and a few extra hours pays for exactly that, by the second. With us it needs a second day rental.

The month is where it turns around. An hourly rate kept running for a month adds up to several times our monthly price, $160 today. Their discount is Compute and Instance Savings Plans of up to 44 percent off On-Demand pricing with a 3-year commitment, and even at the full discount a host left allocated all month costs more than ours, on a commitment of years. We sell from $32 a day or $160 a month, and a three-month term at a lower monthly rate.

They are also On-Demand only, with no Spot or Reserved Instances, and Savings Plans as the discount, so there is no spare capacity to bid for: the sheet price is the price unless you commit.

AWS's range is wide and goes back years: Intel, M1, M2, M2 Pro, M4 and M4 Pro Mac minis, and M1 Ultra, M4 Max and M3 Ultra Mac Studios. At the top end that is an M3 Ultra Mac Studio with a 28-core CPU, a 60-core GPU and 256GB of unified memory, at $6.25 an hour for an M4 Max Mac Studio host and $12.50 an hour for an M3 Ultra Mac Studio host in US East (N. Virginia). Nothing in our catalogue comes close, and our answer on Mac Studio is not offered.

At the bottom it runs to $0.65 an hour for an M1 Mac mini host in US East (N. Virginia), the lowest Mac rate on the sheet. If you need an older chip to reproduce a bug on hardware a customer still owns, use them: we carry no Intel, M1 or M2 Macs.

In the middle, their Mac minis carry more memory than ours. Their base build is an M4 Mac mini with a 10-core CPU, a 10-core GPU and 24GB of unified memory, and the Pro is an M4 Pro Mac mini with a 14-core CPU, a 20-core GPU and 48GB of unified memory, with a 2TB instance store volume per Dedicated Host on M4 and M4 Pro, for caching and build work. Ours are the base configuration of each chip, enough for browser work and most Xcode projects, not every one. If memory decides it, read the column in the table below.

Network is theirs too: up to 10 Gbps of VPC network bandwidth and 8 Gbps of EBS storage bandwidth on Mac instances. Our lines are 1 or 2.5 Gbps, by build.

The table below is read live from our catalogue on every request, with stock marked rather than hidden.

AWS publishes its figure: a launch time of roughly 6 to 20 minutes on an AWS-provided macOS image, longer with large volumes, user-data scripts or a custom image. That is the launch only. Before it you need an AWS account, a Dedicated Host in a region that has your build, a macOS image, a key pair and a security group.

Once it runs, access is SSH with a key pair, macOS Screen Sharing over VNC once you enable it, or Systems Manager Session Manager. For a graphical desktop, you enable Screen Sharing and open a port, or install a remote desktop yourself.

With us you pick a Mac on the Macs tab of your dashboard and pay by card through Stripe. We message you the moment it is ready, the login is in your dashboard, and it comes with a full remote desktop from Windows, Mac or Linux. A day rental is counted from that moment, not from when you paid.

We do not publish a minutes figure for that wait and AWS does, so on transparency that point is theirs.

On AWS, macOS arrives as an image built for EC2, and the trade-offs are written down: automatic macOS software updates disabled, and no beta or preview macOS versions, and new macOS images targeted 30 to 60 days after a minor macOS update and 90 to 120 days after a major one. If you need a new macOS release on day one, plan around that window.

There is also no Apple Intelligence features, because the instances boot from external EBS volumes. For most build work that is irrelevant; for an app that uses Apple's on-device models, it is a hard stop.

Our Macs are physical Mac minis running real macOS under a standard user account, reached by remote desktop like a machine on your desk. There is no image to bake and roll across a fleet, which is a loss if that is how you work and a relief if it is not.

Both sides clean up. AWS runs a scrubbing workflow on the host when a Mac instance is stopped or terminated, and our Mac is fully wiped when the rental ends.

We did not review AWS's support plans for this page, so we will not describe them. If support matters to you, read their plans alongside the host price.

Ours is Discord tickets and email, answered by the people who rack and run the Macs. You will usually talk to someone who can see the machine. Mac rentals are paid by card through Stripe, and the price on Mac servers is the price before tax.

If you need a Mac Studio, an older chip, more memory, a Mac outside the US, or Macs that scale inside an AWS build pipeline, use EC2 Mac. It is the bigger and more capable platform, and for a single day on a base Mac mini it is also slightly cheaper at the rates we read.

If you need one Mac for a month, or a few, and want a desktop without setting up a Dedicated Host, we are the better fit. Our month price is a fraction of an hourly host left running, and the clock starts when the Mac is ready. See rent a Mac for a day for how a day runs.

EC2 Mac is discussed widely, mostly as part of AWS as a whole. We quote no score here; a copied figure goes stale and misleads.

Our own record is the trust page, and our Mac prices are read live on this page.