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2026 DevOps Survey

Mac Infrastructure in the AI Era

How DevOps leaders are scaling Mac CI/CD as AI reshapes build demand

AI isn't just changing how code gets written. It's changing how much Mac infrastructure it takes to ship it.

Teams building for Apple platforms are running an average of 81 physical Macs for CI/CD and employ around 20 engineers, yet the way they host, provision, and scale that hardware is fragmented, and the ground is shifting fast beneath them.

The accelerant is AI. Nearly nine in ten teams say pull-request and commit volume has risen since adopting AI coding tools, and over 80% say AI adoption has driven up their Mac infrastructure costs. AI is generating more code, more builds, and more pressure on the constrained Mac capacity that teams are already struggling to scale — turning an operational nuisance into a budget-line problem.

We asked 300 US-based DevOps, platform, infrastructure, and SRE engineers and leaders working at mid-market and enterprise organizations how their dev teams are building apps for iOS and macOS. 

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are using or exploring AI for dev workloads
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have seen an increase in pull requests with AI
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have seen an increase in infrastructure costs
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anticipate Mac infra budget increase

Today's Mac build landscape

The typical respondent runs a meaningful Mac fleet for a compact Apple engineering team.

Apple platform engineers
Teams building for the Apple ecosystem are fairly small: 80% sit between 5 and 50 engineers.

Approximately how many software engineers at your organization build for Apple (iOS, macOS, etc.)?

Physical Macs for CI/CD
A slight majority of the teams surveyed run their CI pipelines on 26 or more Macs, with 3% building on 500+ machines.
26+ Macs · 55%
9%
36%
40%
12%
3%
<55–2526–100101–500501+

How many physical Apple Mac machines does your team currently use for CI/CD?

How Mac CI is hosted and deployed

Most teams already use cloud-hosted, managed-service, or hybrid Mac CI, with only 1 in 6 remaining purely on-premises. GitHub Actions is running in nearly a third of dev pipelines, with builds averaging between 20-40 minutes.  

Mac CI hosting
Cloud is not the future; it is the present. Most teams (84%) already use cloud-hosted, managed-service, or hybrid Mac CI.
Cloud-hosted30%
Managed service29%
Hybrid25%
On-premises only16%

How is your Mac CI infrastructure currently hosted?

Environment provisioning
A near four-way split means there is no default way to provision a Mac build environment. Every team is solving this from scratch.
Fully managed CI-as-a-service — 30%Hybrid physical / virtual — 27%Dedicated hardware — 26%VMs on shared hardware — 17%

How does your team provision Mac environments for CI/CD?

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The Mac dev toolkit
There is a lot of variety in Mac CI. Teams reported using everything from orchestration tools like Orka and Anka to CI-as-a-service platforms like Bitrise and CircleCI. GitHub Actions leads the top five.
Cloud-hosted30%
Managed service29%
Hybrid25%
On-premises only16%

Which tool(s) does your team use to build and manage Mac CI pipelines?

Build times
The majority of teams surveyed wait longer than 20 minutes for a build. Only 8% finish inside ten.
Over 20 min · 60%
8%
32%
39%
18%
3%
Under 10 min10–20 min21–40 min41–60 minOver 60 min

What is your average Mac CI build time, end-to-end (commit to completed run)?

The real challenges of Mac infrastructure

Teams aren’t drowning in build queues — only 6% report queues frequently impacting development. The burden is operational: procurement lead times, tool integration, security, fleet management.

Build capacity vs. demand
Only 6% say build queues frequently impact development, and 21% report excess capacity. The constraint teams feel is not the number of Macs.
Capacity generally meets demand — 41%We occasionally experience build bottlenecks — 30%We consistently have excess capacity — 21%Long build queues frequently impact development — 6%We have challenges managing our capacity — 2%

Which statement best describes your current Mac build capacity?

Infrastructure challenges
A slight majority of the teams surveyed run their CI pipelines on 26 or more Macs, with 3% building on 500+ machines.
26+ Macs · 55%
9%
36%
40%
12%
3%
<55–2526–100101–500501+

How many physical Apple Mac machines does your team currently use for CI/CD?

Developer productivity
Teams building for the Apple ecosystem are fairly small: 80% sit between 5 and 50 engineers.

Approximately how many software engineers at your organization build for Apple (iOS, macOS, etc.)?

Time lost to Mac build issues
A slight majority of the teams surveyed run their CI pipelines on 26 or more Macs, with 3% building on 500+ machines.
26+ Macs · 55%
9%
36%
40%
12%
3%
<55–2526–100101–500501+

How many physical Apple Mac machines does your team currently use for CI/CD?