This is correct, and a huge impetus for our use of Apple hardware. We simply cannot risk our business on saving some money at the expense of violating Apple's EULA.
> We simply cannot risk our business on saving some money at the expense of violating Apple's EULA.
I believe people are questioning that Apple hardware/software is a requirement of your business (and that it's not "some money", but a lot of money you'd be saving).
It's difficult to fathom Apple hardware/software being a hard requirement to operate any business (as-in you can't operate without it). Both Windows and Linux have a plethora of image utilities, audio, etc...
Sure, OSX might have some optimized image processing stuff, but couldn't the massive savings be used to scale wider with more generic hardware and still come out ahead?
Not at the moment. The cost overhead to OS X is minimized by my approach to datacenter design and operation, and the benefit of OS X's image processing software stack is maximized by the imaging engineers on staff at imgix who are making the most of it.
The math may not work out this way forever, and when it doesn't, we'll make a change.
Apple gave up on the server market. They don't care about number-crunching or scientific computing. To build a server-side based business around OS X doesn't make sense to me. Did you try writing your image processing code for Linux and CUDA / OpenCL? Is there anything specific about the OS X frameworks which means you can't develop a non-OS X solution?
