Surely you'd want CI builds for your app? I suppose you can always go the sassy option and just offload this problem onto Travis or CircleCI, but then they're the ones stuck figuring out how to rack thousands of Mac Minis, dealing with thermals in a machine that isn't set up for hot/cold aisles, a computer that doesn't have a serial port or dedicated management interface, etc.

If you're a big enough org or the app is for internal use, this might not be an option anyway. At that point I imagine most people just give up on it and figure out how to run macOS on a generic VM. But at that point you have to convince your IT department that it's worth it doing a thing that is definitely unsupported and in violation of the TOS.

Or maybe some of these are big enough that they are able to approach Apple and get a special license for N concurrent instances of macOS running on virtualized hardware? Who knows.

Companies like Google or Microsoft aren't big enough? Google's Chrome and Microsoft Office alone I would wager are more than big or popular enough to get special treatment

Adobe is smaller by contrast but I'd speculate has a much deeper relationship with Apple as well

All of them use Mac Minis as far as I know.

Well sure, for a single person team. But as soon as you're working with other people, surely you want an independent machine making builds and running tests— this is literally item 3 on the Joel Test.

You would be surprised how some teams actually develop code, even timesharing iMacs among teams.

I wonder what the overlap is between those teams who do not invest in their infrastructure, and those who ship broken products.

If you ever get a chance to meet employees at CircleCI or some other CI provider at a conference after Covid is over, consider asking them about how they rack Mac Minis.

Ah yes, how could they have been so blind. They should have just put XCode in the server racks.

The entire thread is about running OSX in data centers. In data centers you run servers if you didn't notice.

pjmlp's view appears to be that because their customers, who are not experts, don't know enough to ask for continuously tested software, they don't believe it is their professional responsibility to provide that either. This allows them to dismiss any complaints about macOS in datacenters as irrelevant.

I'm not a consultant, but I believe it would be an ethical failing on my part to hand someone else a piece of code without extensive, automated testing and CI.

Well, thank you for providing the first compelling argument as to why software practices need to be more formally regulated. Providing CI/CD should be the industry norm and expected default.

I can't tell if you're being facetious or you just don't care about automated testing and continuous integration for your code.

CI/CD is largely ignored in plenty of consulting gigs.

I care to the extent customers care.

So true. I've done a lot of freelance work over the past 20 years. CI/CD has never come up. You're sometimes lucky if you can even set up a test system / site.

I pity your customers.