I haven't used balena but I have worked with other IoT SAAS companies in the past. All these services seem rather expensive for what you get. Other than creating an easy way to push OS updates to field devices what would I get from your service?
You can't ask a founder this and not expect a pitch, so here goes:
Having built a similar bespoke stack in the past, Balena would have been a steal! It gives you the development, provisioning, build & deployment, configuration, management, and even remote debugging workflows out of the box. On top of that, it's built to require web/cloud developer skills, not embedded skills.
To do that, we have created several companies worth of infrastructure, from a cross-architecture container build system, to a bespoke OS supporting many device types, customized docker engine for embedded use cases, container deltas for bandwidth saving, etc. Even simple things like "how do I make sure my device gets DNS in an arbitrary home network" are incredibly tricky, and balenaOS gets it right almost always.
Which brings me to my next point. We are fanatical about support. We take responsibility for our customers succeeding, which means we constantly find and improve sources of friction. Using Balena gets you that backup team, but most importantly gets you hooked up to the flow of improvements we make all the time. Cloud companies charge $15 per server per month for various devops type services. We do very similar things but for devices that are smaller, more diverse, in tougher conditions, with less reliable networking, and ask for just $1 per device per month.
In other words, when I was in the shoes of our customers, producing even a fraction of the value and piece of mind that Balena provides in house took a lot of work, which was money, and that's not accounting for the time and risk of not getting there in the end. If I found myself in that situation again, knowing Balena and not using it would essentially be negligent. Our most fanatical customers are those who have tried to build something like it themselves, because infrastructure is so easy to underestimate.
Note: I am in no way affiliated to balena, only a happy customer.
As a long time customer of balena, I can assure they are a ton for what you pay for.
* faster development times: git push and your code is built and compiled in their cloud (with real ARM servers), and downloaded from your devices. Doing CI/CD for iot is a great experience with balena.
* the support is tremendous: several times I found very specific use cases that failed or wasn't what the balena APIs where expecting, and after contacting the support, they even put me directly with the developers in charge of those areas to discuss if it makes sense to add it as a feature to balena, or if they can provide me a workaround
* again, the support: I have around 10 years of experience with Linux derived systems, but some things still are black magic to me (like debugging problems with aufs partitions). The support of balena goes to the deepest level possible to solve your problem, even if you aren't in the private support tier. You just enable access to your board to support and they get inside and try to find the problem. It's truly amazing. They are even open to discuss how to improve what they are giving you or the tools.
* total control of your fleet: need to set a flag for a client? Just set an environment variable from the api or the dashboard and each device will update its state when they come back online
* amazing tools: the balena dashboard feels as polished as their other projects, like etcher, if not even more. Any kind of need you have (remote access to the device? Proxy to a port in the device? contact the supervisor of the device from a proxy inside their VPN?) they give to you.
For me, repeatability and ease of management - I used to be really demotivated by having to start from scratch with a Raspbian install whenever I built a project but all the prebuilt base images for different languages/OS and configuration as code due to Docker make the Pi so much nicer to use for stuff like this.
Using similar specs, (i7, 16GB ram, 512GB SSD, UHD screen) the MBP is $600 more than the XPS 13. And the XPS gives you the option for a 1080p screen, saving money and increasing But price aside, the real deal breaker for me is the soldered in SSD on the MBP. Being able to upgrade or recover data by removing the SSD is a huge benefit in my opinion.
They typically check for a network interface from a real Mac. Using a Hackintosh you can't spoof some of the NIC details that are detected and cause iCloud/iMessage to not work.
