Figment vs Mac Compute Rentals: Mac Hosting Compared

Mac Compute Rentals and Figment solve different problems. Mac Compute Rentals sells short bursts on a single Mac Studio M3 Ultra with 512 GB unified memory, aimed at running large local models. Figment rents Macs for ongoing iOS/macOS development and CI from $95 per month. If your workload is continuous Apple-platform engineering, Figment is the right starting point. If you need 512 GB unified memory for a one-off LLM job, Mac Compute Rentals is purpose-built for exactly that.

The Verdict

For ongoing Xcode builds, iOS test runs and CI, start on Figment's M-series Mac from $95/month or Managed Build Mac at $249/month (one M-series Mac, CI setup, backups, monitoring, 30 minutes of monthly support). Open a request at /mac-hosting/start; the exact chip, RAM and disk come back on the quote.

For a one-week model evaluation on a 512 GB Mac Studio M3 Ultra, Mac Compute Rentals' $489 seven-day rental does the job without a monthly relationship.

Published Prices and Terms

Mac Compute Rentals publishes a single hardware tier and rents it by duration (maccomputerentals.com):

The $129 trial is credited toward a 3-day booking if made within 14 days. A full refund is available if you cancel 48 or more hours before your start. No annual term, team plan or managed-CI tier is listed on the site at the time of writing.

Figment's retail offers:

• Virtual Intel macOS VM: $29/month (2 vCPU, 8 GiB RAM, 80 GiB disk; browser-console access; no GPU/audio).
• i3 Mac: $49/month (collecting requests).
• M-series Mac: from $95/month (specific chip, RAM and disk confirmed on the quote).
• Managed Build Mac: $249/month (one M-series Mac, CI setup, backups, monitoring, 30 minutes monthly support).
• Managed Mac Team: $999/month (two M-series Macs, two CI runners, team setup, backups, monitoring, one hour monthly support).

Taxes and any fees are as stated in the actual offer. Physical Intel and M-series plans collect requests until supply is confirmed.

Hardware, Access and Toolchain

Mac Compute Rentals runs two Mac Studio M3 Ultra units in New England. Each has a 32-core CPU, 80-core GPU, 512 GB unified memory, 2 TB SSD, and a business line measured at roughly 1.4–2.3 Gb/s down. Machines are physically dedicated per booking — no sharing, no virtualisation.

• Studio A has MiniMax-M2.5 (9-bit MLX) pre-loaded and serving an OpenAI-compatible API, leaving "about 270GB" for your work.
• Studio B gives the full machine with "about 469GB usable by the GPU."

Access is a private Tailscale share with SSH into your own macOS user; no public ports. Each booking gets a fresh account that is sealed at term end. The site states uptime is best effort with no formal SLA, and offers extra time or a pro-rated refund for outages.

Figment's $95 M-series tier is an Apple-silicon Mac confirmed on quote. The $29 VM is a virtual Intel macOS instance: it runs supported Intel Mac toolchains, including Xcode 26 or earlier per Apple's porting guidance, and compiles iOS apps against simulators that match that toolchain. It cannot run Xcode 27 (Apple-silicon only) and has no GPU or audio, so it is not suitable for Metal, Core ML on GPU or visionOS work. For ARM-only targets, GPU inference or visionOS, choose the M-series plan. Confirm the exact Xcode/macOS pair you need against Apple's Xcode system requirements.

Cost Illustration: Ongoing Development

If someone is paying the 30-day Mac Compute Rentals rate every month for general development (not ML inference), the running cost diverges fast. This is an entry-price comparison; a Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512 GB is not the same hardware as Figment's M-series entry quote.

The point is not that Figment matches a 512 GB Mac Studio — it does not. The point is that paying burst-rental prices for routine Xcode work is a mismatch of plan to workload.

Provider-Specific Switch Plan

If Mac Compute Rentals has been your default for continuous development and you want a monthly M-series Mac instead:

Before the term ends on Mac Compute Rentals

• Back up everything from ~ and any project working directories; the account is sealed at term expiry.
• Export signing identities from Keychain Access as encrypted .p12 files with their private keys.
• Download the .mobileprovision provisioning profiles you need from the Apple Developer portal (profiles are files, not Keychain exports).
• Capture the list of secret names your builds reference; restore the values on the new machine through your CI service's secret vault, not a plaintext env dump.
• Run brew bundle dump --file=Brewfile and commit it alongside your Fastfile, CI YAML and scripts.

On Figment

• Request a configuration at /mac-hosting/start. Confirm chip, RAM, disk, macOS version and any CI runner needs in writing before purchase.
• brew bundle install --file=Brewfile, install Xcode from the Mac App Store or the Apple developer downloads, and sign in to your Apple Developer account.
• Import .p12 certificates into the login keychain and install provisioning profiles via Xcode.
• Add secrets to your CI service's vault and update only the allowlists you control (your artifact store, your VPN, your CI runner pool). There is no public Apple IP range to allowlist for App Store Connect or TestFlight.
• Trigger your real workflow against a known-good commit and confirm the archive and upload steps succeed end to end before cutting traffic over.

Choose the Figment Plan

If 512 GB unified memory on a Mac Studio M3 Ultra is a genuine workload requirement, book Mac Compute Rentals for the burst. For everything else in Apple-platform engineering, start Figment Mac hosting at /mac-hosting/start.

See also: Figment vs MacBuild, Figment vs macOSabc, US or Europe Mac Hosting.

Sources checked 2026-11-10: maccomputerentals.com; Apple Xcode system requirements; Apple porting to Apple silicon.