Off-Prem

Manages to get its hands on some Mac Studio machines before the OpenClaw machine grabs them

Amazon Web Services has done something many others can’t achieve: Buy a bunch of Apple’s Mac Studio computers.

Mac Studio is Apple’s workstation-grade machine and has been hard to find in recent weeks as Cupertino struggles to find enough RAM to fill them, and AI enthusiasts snap up stock to run tools like OpenClaw. At the time of writing, Apple advises buyers they’ll need to wait nine or ten weeks for a Mac Studio to arrive.

The cloudy Macs AWS has racked and stacked pack Apple’s M3 Ultra SoC, Cupertino’s most powerful chip. Apple currently sells the Mac Studio with up to 96GB of RAM.

AWS on Thursday started offering a cloudy M3 Ultra with 256GB of unified memory, a configuration The Register did not see as an option on Apple.com while preparing this article.

The cloudy M3 Ultra machines run on actual Mac Studios packing a 28-core CPU, 60-core GPU, and 32-core Neural Engine. At the time of writing, AWS hadn’t updated its list of EC2 instance types to include the new M3 instances, so we can’t tell you what they’ll cost or if the cloud giant has departed from its past practice of renting bare metal machines rather than macOS VMs.

Apple allows users to create and run macOS virtual machines, but only on Apple hardware and allows just two VMs per host. Cupertino also restricts use of VMs to four purposes: software development; testing during software development; using macOS Server; and personal, non-commercial use.

AWS recommends its cloudy Macs as an ideal platform to build and test apps for all of Apple’s operating systems – even the visionOS that powers its unloved Vision Pro VR goggles.

Amazon’s M3 Ultra Mac Studios only made it into two regions – US East and US West (Oregon) – so users elsewhere who fancy a cloudy Mac but need lower latency will have to endure the very on-prem experience of waiting for hardware to show up. ®