this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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You could also just only use Macs. In theory ARM Macs let you build and test for macOS (host or vm), Linux (containers or vm), Windows (vm), iOS (simulator or connected device), and Android (multiple options), both ARM and x86-64.
At least in theory. I think in practice I’d go mad. Not from the Linux part though. That part just works because podman on ARM Macs will transparently use emulation for x86 containers by default. (You can get the same thing on Linux too with qemu-user-static btw., for a lot more architectures too.)
I actually don't know what the current requirement is. Back in the day, Apple used to build some of the OS
like QuickDraw
into the ROMs, so unless you had a physical Mac, not just a purchased copy of MacOS, you couldn't legally run MacOS, since the ROM contents were copyrighted, and doing so would require infringing on the ROM copyright. Apple obviously doesn't care about this most of the time, but I imagine that if it becomes institutionalized at places that make real money, they might.
But I don't know if that's still the case today. I'm vaguely recalling that there was some period where part of Apple's EULA for MacOS prohibited running MacOS on non-Apple hardware, which would have been a different method of trying to tie it to the hardware.
searches
This is from 2019, and it sounds like at that point, Apple was leveraging the EULAs.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250646417?sortBy=rank
They switched to ARM in 2020, so unless their legal position changed around ARM, I'd guess that they're probably still relying on the EULA restrictions. That being said, EULAs have also been thrown out for various reasons, so...shrugs
goes looking for the actual license text.
Yeah, this is Tahoe's EULA, the most-recent release:
https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSTahoe.pdf
Page 2 (of 895 pages):
They allow only on Apple-branded hardware for individual purchases unless you buy from the Mac Store. For Mac Store purchases, they allow up to two virtual instances of MacOS to be executed on Apple-branded hardware that is also running the OS, and only under certain conditions (like for software development). And for volume purchase contracts, they say that the terms are whatever the purchaser negotiated. I'm assuming that there's no chance that Apple is going to grant some "go use it as much as you want whenever you want to do CI tests or builds for open-source projects targeting MacOS" license.
So for the general case, the EULA prohibits you from running MacOS wherever on non-Apple hardware.
Yeah, it’s a major pain at my work because our cloud doesn’t support Macs (like e.g. AWS would), so we run a server room with a bunch of Macs that we wouldn’t otherwise need.