MacFTP provides dedicated Apple Silicon physical machines—not virtual machines. You rent an entire Mac mini, not a slice of a shared host. Compare cost, operations and what happens when you’re done before deciding which parts of your workflow to move to the cloud.
From $21.2/day · 3 Mac plans · 4 locations · Pay by the day, week, month or quarter
Who owns the resources?Is unified memory and SSD storage shared with other tenants?
Who handles what?Separate physical infrastructure, system environment and project upkeep.
What happens when work ends?Compare ending a rental, leaving equipment idle and selling an asset.
Running macOS doesn’t make two services equivalent. Resource isolation, provisioning and operational responsibilities can differ significantly. This comparison looks at the service models; for buying, virtualisation and colocation, confirm the actual costs and terms with each provider.
Dedicated resources don’t mean zero operations. Dependency updates, signing assets, access controls, code and build-artifact backups still belong in your team’s delivery process.
Using FTP M4 Plus as the benchmark: M4, 24GB unified memory and a 512GB SSD. The monthly rate is a rental cost, not hardware instalments, and ownership of the hardware does not transfer. For short projects and flexible capacity, it often makes more sense to match spending to the length of the work.
FTP M4 Plus costs $39.7/day on a daily plan. The $21.2/day starting price is for FTP M4 Core and should not be used to budget for Plus.
Rent FTP M4 PlusA purchase budget should include the device, power, networking, remote access and time spent troubleshooting. If your team already has the hardware, a reliable network and dedicated operations staff, you may have these covered. Starting from scratch means comparing more than the purchase price with one month’s rent.
Hardware + power over time + network and access + operational time − resale value at end of use
A rental budget should reflect the chosen model, rental term and any add-ons you actually need. +1TB SSD, +2TB SSD and Thunderbolt 5 daisy chaining are charged separately; daisy chaining is billed per machine. Don’t treat the base model price as the final price for every configuration.
For a one-off compatibility check, choose a rental term that matches the task. If your build queue is consistently busy, compare ongoing rental with owning a device. We don’t use unverified purchase prices, electricity rates or resale values, or claim there’s a universal break-even month for every team.
All prices are charged in USD. Payment methods: USDT-TRC20 and Visa / Mastercard / Amex via Stripe. Available payment gateways are confirmed by the backend.
Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong each offer all 3 Mac plans. A location near you may still be far from your code repository, dependency sources or artifact destination. For remote desktop work, look at round-trip responsiveness; for CI builds, also test the paths used to download dependencies and upload artifacts.
We don’t convert geographic distance into latency or present invented millisecond figures as test results. City-to-location round-trip numbers aren’t published yet, so this page doesn’t show an empty table. Availability is whatever the console returns when you order.
Planned sampling method: ICMP pings from residential broadband in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Bangkok and Sydney, using the median of evening-peak samples over one week. Published results should include the sampling period, ISP, sample size and packet loss. This sampling hasn’t been completed, so no measured latency is claimed.
For sustained work in a graphical interface, latency variation and packet loss are more useful than a single best ping. Test on the network and at the time you’ll actually work; one speed test can’t represent the experience over time.
Check: SSH and graphical interactionRecord how long it takes to fetch code, download dependencies, create the archive and upload artifacts. If the bottleneck is a dependency source, moving to a location closer to your office may not speed up the pipeline.
Check: total time from commit to artifactAll four locations operate year-round, 365 days a year. Service availability, remote network reachability and successful project builds are three different things. Dependency outages and test failures shouldn’t be confused with a physical location being unavailable.
Monthly availability target
This uses the same definition as the “Availability” row in the comparison table above. It’s a monthly service target, not historical measurement shown on this page or a promise of pipeline success for any project.
Verifiable monitoring records aren’t available yet, so we don’t show daily uptime or claim past compliance. If you have connection issues, note the location, time, error and troubleshooting steps taken to help identify whether the issue is on the client network or service side.
Your unified memory and SSD aren’t shared with other tenants, so you don’t compete for resources with workloads running on the same host. Your own parallel tasks, cache state, toolchain versions and project changes still affect build times; dedicated hardware doesn’t make every archive take the same amount of time.
Choose a configuration based on your project’s peak memory use and the number of parallel tasks. Memory pressure affects builds and inference workloads. Don’t judge capacity by chip name alone, or assume multiple Runners have the same requirements as a single task.
Track: memory pressure, swap use and parallelismYour project workspace, DerivedData and build artifacts use the dedicated location. Keep an eye on free space and remove old artifacts. Distinguish cache hits from first builds so you don’t mistake a cache benefit for a hardware difference.
Track: free space, cache state and artifact sizeThe full macOS graphical interface and command line are available. Pin your Xcode version, SDK, dependency lockfiles and build settings before evaluating hardware. Results from different toolchains aren’t directly comparable.
Track: versions, lockfiles and build logsThe synthetic example below demonstrates a comparison method; it isn’t a performance test of MacFTP or any other provider.
| Example group | Run 1 | Run 2 | Run 3 | Max − min |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A: less variation | 600 s | 612 s | 606 s | 12 s |
| B: more variation | 600 s | 720 s | 660 s | 120 s |
For a meaningful comparison, use the same commit, Xcode version, dependencies and parallelism. Keep cache conditions consistent—cold or warm—and record three complete runs. Variation is a reason to investigate further, not proof of resource contention. Three timings can’t establish that one type of service is always faster.
A dedicated cloud Mac lets you rent a compute environment for a specific workload, but it won’t replace every hardware purchase. Confirm architecture, location and ownership requirements first; trying a daily plan or choosing a longer term is usually easier than ordering first and migrating later.
The current catalogue offers only M4 and M4 Pro models, both with Apple Silicon. If acceptance criteria specifically require Intel hardware, these 3 configurations aren’t a substitute.
Check hardware architecture firstThe four available locations are Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong. If your organisation’s policy requires deployment elsewhere, resolve the location requirement first. Similar latency isn’t a substitute for compliance approval.
Check deployment and data requirementsA rental gives you the right to use the device; ownership doesn’t transfer. If asset registration, offline use or long-term on-site access is essential, buying hardware may suit your team’s workflow better.
Check asset and on-site requirementsBefore migrating, list your project files, signing assets, dependencies, environment variables and artifact export paths. Back everything up before the rental term ends. Read the service terms for renewals, end-of-term handling and refunds.
3 Mac plans and 4 rental terms. Review the full pricing before ordering. For team purchases, deployment requirements or migration questions, submit a support ticket by email or through the console.