The nice thing about the former is that that cost is shared across all consumers, whereas the latter would be incurred for every user. The latter approach may still cost less for now (or forever), but it's something to keep in mind.

It may still be too expensive for devs in (very) developing countries or whatever, but I'm pretty sure there are (paid) remote desktop solutions for this. Also you can snag an old mac mini for well under $600, where I am. Like $200-300. It won't be good but that's probably better for testing anyway.

I offer a service that provides you with your own macOS VM, running on real Mac hardware. https://zeromac.com It's billed by the hour, so if you just need to quickly test something, it's pretty cheap. Buying an older mac may be more economical though if you need to develop software long term.

This is super interesting. Is it your full time job? What level of success are you having with your idea?

I run it alongside my regular consulting work, so I suppose it's not my full time job. It's also a fairly new business so I'm not too sure how successful it will be yet.

While your point is taken... I write and contribute to free/open source tools. I can afford a Mac, but will not buy one because there's zero incentive to me. While I'm not sure this project would help, if a free or very low cost proper emulation existed, I'd use it.

The logical option c is just to not support mac unless your target market is one disproportionately likely to use macs like developers or artists in the US.

It may also be a matter of principle. I won't buy macs even though they are sexy and I have the money for it because I don't agree with its practices. My theoretical customers shouldn't suffer from it though

Or use one of the CI providers that will test your stuff on macOS (alongside Windows, FreeBSD, ...). Possibly for free, if your stuff is open source. I use that for Windows, which I don't personally use at all, and it finds bugs and problems all the time. I wish someone would provide free (!) CI for some rarer OSes and CPU architectures too, but I can dream.

You can't fully test things this way. Not enough to make a serious release anyway. You can easily pass all tests while not being able to even start the app. You need at least one person with the real hardware to do testing.

True. But in context of: "tests in a CI environment which costs you less than a MacBook", I don't believe anyone would go to the level that avoids those issues. It would take a lot of work and resources to replicate a "real run in clean, real environment".

Again, this depends on the tests you’re running and how you’ve set up your CI environment.

Unfortunately MacOS testing is usually extremely slow due to limited numbers of machines to run tests on.