Hi guys. I’m curious what you think about renting vs. buying a Mac Mini for iOS/macOS dev work.
Do remote setups work well in practice, or is having local hardware always worth it? Thank you so much for your attention and participation.
I’m sorry, but at the thought of renting a computer, I just found myself reflexively making this face 
“You will own nothing, and you’ll be happy” I guess.
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What are you developing? I’m hard-pressed to understand the point of renting Mac hardware outside big enterprise setups that need a ton of nodes and don’t want to manage them themselves.
For just making an iOS/macOS app and publishing it, literally any M-Chip mac will be fine. The older and/or 8GB ones will be slower to compile, but that’s it. You can score older ones for a very good price. Unless you’re somehow going to develop an iOS app, but not need to maintain/update it regularly, and the rental service only charges for hours used on the device (and no fee to retain access), it’d be cheaper to just get an M2-M3 generation Mac, M4 if you can swing it, off the used market. Or if you have enough $ just get a brand new one.
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From someone who’s worked at a place where they rented Mac for a short period of time just buy a Mac mini you’ll end up paying the same amount just over for a longer period of time but if you buy it, you can actually use it for other stuff with it or to sell it afterwards if you really don’t need it for a long time.
And honestly, with current prices, owning it would be better because prices are not gonna go down and I’m assuming rent prices for hardware have went up
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FWIW Apple have pretty good credit terms. You could “rent” the mac and also end up with a mac at the end.
That makes sense! For a solo dev, buying a used Mac Mini is definitely the cheapest option long-term.
From what I’ve seen, people usually rent cloud Macs for:
24/7 Build Runners: Running background CI/CD tasks without heating up their main laptop.
Windows/Linux Devs: Cross-platform teams who just need an always-on remote node for iOS code-signing.
Flat Rates: Avoiding expensive per-minute cloud fees on big build pipelines.
Appreciate the insight!
Thank you for your opinion
True! Financing is a great option if the end goal is to own the hardware locally.
Cloud rentals are usually for a different use case altogether—like hosting the machine in a data center for 24/7 CI/CD build runners, high-speed fiber connectivity, and not having to manage local office power or network setups.
It makes sense sometimes. I don’t have a good home internet connection, so I have a VPS I keep my website and git repos and such on. Same with the other VPS I run a minecraft server for my friends on.
Renting a Mac I just don’t see the appeal of… since you kinda need the Mac to test on anyways, and remote desktop stuff is always laggy and a bit jank (I use it semi-regularly when offsite) so you couldn’t attribute the app stuttering to the app itself or the inherent remote lag.
Yeah pretty much. Though most companies with an office building will have a very high uptime business internet (the spectrum we have at work has a bunch of gaurantees for 99.99% uptime, and they start crediting us back our monthly bill if it’s down for more than a few hours, so they’re well motivated to keep it running as seamlessly as possible) with static IPs, so you can just run stuff 24/7 at the office.
I guess if you’ve got a home office, but do need things running always, and don’t have good internet or want to faff about with tailscale or zerotier, then it could make sense. From what I’ve seen of the marketing (I don’t pay too close attention to these things), they’re also very popular for overseas developers where the cost of a new Mac (and computers in general) is insanely high vs renting one.
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I would recommend considering what upgrades will benefit your use and / or what features you will utilize. Apple’ pricing structure is kinda annoying where an up spec Mac mini almost runs into a Mac Studio price (especially if buying an older generation Studio, or getting a deal at Microcenter, BestBuy, Apple Edu or Apple direct refurbished)
A base M5 Studio in the US is $2,499 ($2,299 through Apple Edu, order it to your house if you are a student) the base M5 Max chip in it has a theoretical max around 460GB/s memory bandwidth. The base M5 non-pro chip in the Mac Mini is around 153GB/s memory bandwidth. Any local AI stuff greatly benefits from that, plus the improved CPU/ GPU. M5 Pro is 307GB/s. You also get a bump in SSD performance from 6GB/s on the M5 to around 14GB/s on the M5 Pro/ Max, though total capacity can impact this some since there are more NAND chips.
The base Studio also gets 36GB unified memory, 4x Thunder Bolt 5 ports on the back, 10 gigabit ethernet built in (it’s reliable and very power efficient compared to every single dongle option), up to 5 displays, ect…
I use a base M2 Max Studio still as a daily driver, really great to have 32GB unified memory on that machine otherwise it would have been sold on. I also have a base M4 Mac Mini from back when they were super cheap at Microcenter, really wish I had bought an up spec one but it’s just a secondary computer on my Sim Rig so it’s not too bad, but it frequently runs into “memory pressure” issues with 16GB. Wouldn’t recommend below 24GB unified memory for power user tasks, coding or longterm use, get 24GB or 32GB+
Just carefully consider what you need now, and what you will need to keep it a usable device after a year or two of use, because you can’t upgrade CPU/ GPU/ unified memory, though you can sorta upgrade the SSD if you have a 2nd Mac and buy a special 3rd party socketed NAND drive (unless they closed off that option).
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I have no idea. Don’t know how much you use it, what you would pay for rent, and what buying would cost you. But I am sure you can calculate that as a dev 
Reason to rent or lease for bigger companies is simple: taxes.
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Buy. If you can’t afford to pay for it all at once, use credit card points + BF/CM sales to get Apple gift cards on sale until your Apple account balance hits the required purchase price or use Apple’s 12-month payment plan.
The good news is Macs retain their value very well so you can recover the residual value from selling it when you’re done with it.
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Okay thank you, for your explanation
Okay2
Thank you for your suggestion and opinion, later I will think about it.
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