Figment vs Bohemian Silicon: Mac Hosting Compared

If your CI needs sudo, you want USD monthly billing, or you need a Mac you can keep past a short rental, request Figment's M-series from $95/month at /mac-hosting/start. If you only need a Mac for a short EU-hosted sprint and can work without admin rights, Bohemian Silicon's weekly rates are the published cheaper option — for example €94/week on the Mac mini M6 32 GB per the vendor's pricing. Bohemian Silicon is a small Prague-based Mac rental service offering physical Apple silicon machines by day, week, or 30 days, priced in euros, with non-administrative user accounts only. As of the check on 2026-11-10, every listed machine shows as currently rented on the vendor's site; availability may change.

What Bohemian Silicon Publishes

Bohemian Silicon lists four hardware configurations across five physical units — three Mac Studio M5 Ultra machines (one with 2 TB SSD, two with 4 TB) plus two Mac minis — all hosted in Prague on a symmetric 1 Gbps link, per the vendor's single-page site:

Pricing is in euros (EUR). No USD conversion is published; apply your bank's current EUR→USD rate before budgeting. Taxes or fees apply only as stated in the actual Bohemian Silicon offer at checkout.

Access model: "Your own account without admin or sudo rights." Connection is by SSH through a key-based gateway or a remote desktop tunneled over SSH. The full Xcode IDE is available on request; Xcode Command Line Tools are present by default.

Terms: 24-hour minimum, one complimentary setup hour, advance payment by card, bank transfer, or Bitcoin. The site states no formal SLA is offered; outages exceeding four hours are compensated with one free day of rental.

Why No Admin Access Matters

Most macOS CI and build pipelines assume elevation for at least one step:

# Common operations that need sudo/admin:
sudo installer -pkg /path/to/pkg -target /          # Install a .pkg
sudo security add-trusted-cert -d -r trustRoot \
  -k /Library/Keychains/System.keychain cert.pem    # Trust a custom root CA
sudo xcode-select --switch /Applications/Xcode.app  # Swap default toolchain

If your Fastlane lanes, Bitrise steps, or GitHub Actions self-hosted runners rely on any of these, they will fail on Bohemian Silicon unless you refactor to a user-space-only path. The vendor does not advertise a temporary-sudo escalation path. Figment's M-series and Managed Build Mac plans can be quoted with the access level your CI requires — state it in the request.

What Figment Publishes

Figment also offers a $29/month virtual Intel macOS VM (2 vCPU, 8 GiB RAM, 80 GiB disk) that runs compatible Intel Mac toolchains — including supported Xcode 26-or-earlier releases on compatible macOS — for teams whose builds do not require ARM execution, Metal, or visionOS. It is not an Apple silicon machine and has no GPU acceleration or audio.

Physical plans and the Intel $49 i3 collect requests until supply is confirmed; the M-series $95 entry price does not identify a specific chip generation or RAM tier, and no uptime SLA, benchmark, trial, provisioning time, or guaranteed stock has been published. Request configuration and access level at /mac-hosting/start.

Cost and Commitment Comparison

Bohemian Silicon publishes prices in EUR per period on its pricing page; Figment publishes USD per month. The 30-day and weekly numbers below are the vendor's own figures — no currency conversion is invented.

30-day scenario (M6 / 32 GB / 256 GB):

• Bohemian Silicon Mac mini M6: €143 for 30 days, non-admin, Prague
• Figment M-series: from $95/month, physical Apple silicon, chip/RAM confirmed at quote, USD

These are entry prices, not equivalent hardware. Bohemian Silicon's €143 is a specific M6 with 32 GB and 256 GB; Figment's $95 is the published entry point for the M-series and is not a verified M6 or 32 GB configuration. If you need exactly an M-class chip generation or a RAM floor, state that in the Figment quote.

Short-term (1 week) scenario: Bohemian Silicon's weekly rates are genuinely attractive for temporary work: €94 on the M6, €135 on the M5 Pro, €359 on the Studio. If a one-week sprint without sudo is enough, that is hard to beat with a monthly contract from any provider. Figment does not publish a weekly rate — monthly is the published minimum term.

Worked EUR→USD worksheet (no rate invented):

Enter today's EUR→USD rate ............ R  (e.g., check ECB reference rate)

Bohemian Silicon M6 (30 days) ......... 143 × R  USD
Bohemian Silicon M5 Pro (30 days) ..... 226 × R  USD
Bohemian Silicon M5 Ultra (30 days) ... 1399 × R USD

Figment M-series (1 month, entry) ..... 95       USD
Figment Managed Build Mac (1 month) ... 249      USD

Fill R from your bank or a central-bank reference at the time of purchase, not from this page.

Hardware and Toolchain Fit

Both providers ship physical Apple silicon Macs, so both give you ARM64 execution and Metal GPU. Apple's published Xcode system requirements state that "developing for visionOS requires a Mac with Apple silicon," and each Xcode version pins a specific minimum macOS — do not assume one macOS floor across the whole 26.x or 27.x line. Check the exact Xcode/macOS pair you plan to deploy and ask the vendor to confirm it.

The "no published SLA" rows are not a statement that either provider is unreliable — only that neither source publishes one. If uptime commitment matters, ask for it in writing before you order.

Performance: Run Your Own Build Test

Neither provider publishes independently verified build benchmarks, and the script below is an unexecuted example, not a reported result. Before committing, clone your own project onto the candidate machine and time a clean build:

set -euo pipefail

git clone "$YOUR_REPO_URL" app && cd app
xcodebuild -list                 # find the real scheme name; do not guess

SCHEME="$YOUR_SCHEME"
SIM="platform=iOS Simulator,name=$YOUR_SIM_NAME,OS=$YOUR_SIM_OS"
time xcodebuild clean build \
  -scheme "$SCHEME" \
  -destination "$SIM" \
  CODE_SIGNING_ALLOWED=NO

sysctl hw.model hw.logicalcpu hw.memsize
vm_stat | head -4

set -euo pipefail stops the script on the first failure, so a build that errors out cannot be mistaken for a fast run. If Bohemian Silicon has availability, a single paid day (€16 for the M6) is cheaper than a sight-unseen 30-day commitment.

Migration Checklist: Bohemian Silicon to Figment

A sequence that works within Bohemian Silicon's no-admin constraint:

• Identify sudo dependencies. grep -R "sudo" ./fastlane ./scripts ./.github — list each elevation point so the Figment quote covers the access level you need.
• Archive user-space tooling. brew bundle dump --file=Brewfile and gem list > gems.txt run without admin.
• Push project state; list required secret names. Push all branches and tags. Write down the names of required environment variables and API tokens; do not dump the entire environment to a plaintext file. Restore the values through your own secret manager on the new host.
• Export signing certificates with their private keys. In Keychain Access, select the signing certificate and its private key and export together as an encrypted .p12. Copy provisioning profiles as files from ~/Library/MobileDevice/Provisioning Profiles/ — profiles are files, not keychain exports.
• Request Figment M-series. At /mac-hosting/start, state required chip class, RAM floor, disk, and the admin level your CI needs.
• Reinstall the toolchain on Figment. brew bundle install --file=Brewfile; gem install bundler && bundle install; install Xcode from the App Store or Apple's developer downloads.
• Import certificates. Import the .p12 into the login keychain with its private key. If the Figment quote includes admin, run sudo security add-trusted-cert for any custom CAs.
• Update your own allowlists. Update known_hosts and any customer-controlled firewall or artifact-store allowlists that pinned the Prague IP. Do not fabricate an App Store Connect or TestFlight webhook IP allowlist — Apple does not publish one for this purpose.
• Rerun the previously failing steps. Verify each script that failed on Bohemian Silicon succeeds with the quoted access level before you let the Prague rental expire.

Choose the Right Plan

Reserve your Figment Mac at /mac-hosting/start. Physical plans are fulfilled on request and availability is confirmed when you place the order.

Related reading:

• Figment vs Casbay: Mac Hosting Compared
• Figment vs CloudMac: Mac Hosting Compared
• Hourly vs Monthly Mac Hosting: Which Saves More?