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The hidden cost of macOS minutes
macOS bills at roughly ten times the Linux rate. Most teams run more work on it than they need to.
Tomás Rivera · Performance engineering · 2026-03-04 · 6 min read
If your product ships an iOS app, macOS is probably the largest single line on your CI invoice. It is also where the easiest savings are, because a lot of what runs there does not need to.
Audit what is actually on the Mac
In most iOS pipelines we have looked at, a meaningful share of macOS minutes goes to work that has nothing to do with Xcode: linting, JavaScript bundling, backend tests that happen to live in the same repository, and artifact uploads.
- Move everything that does not require Xcode to Linux
- Persist DerivedData so incremental builds behave incrementally
- Pin simulator runtimes to preinstalled versions
- Run the Android half of a cross-platform build on Linux, not macOS
Your next build could be twice as fast, at half the price
Start free. Migrating away is the same one line, and we publish that diff too.
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