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> Apple is shooting themselves in the foot. How is that exactly? A huge majority of developers in your situation go out and buy a Mac; another hardware purchas

> Apple is shooting themselves in the foot. How is that exactly? A huge majority of developers in your situation go out and buy a Mac; another hardware purchase in their pocket. This is part of their business strategy: developers are forced to participate, and by and large they do just that. It hurts you far more than it does Apple by refusing to participate. If you believe you're "hurting Apple" by not developing for their platform, think again. Even if your software is free to download, it's not Apple that suffers - it's your (potential) users; and they will blame you, not Apple, for the lack of support. Apple wins this battle every time. Welcome to the ecosystem. :)

kxyvr 10y ago
So I'm one of those developers that got forced into buying a Mac Mini in order to test my software on MacOS. On one hand, you're correct that Apple "won" because I was pushed into spending $500 on their hardware. On the other hand, the parent is very much correct. Candidly, I'm still angry at Apple for making their ecosystem a pain in the ass to work with. Hell, I would have paid good money to buy a MacOS virtualization license because it screws up my work flow. Every other OS I work with I can virtualize on my laptop, which means that I can work remotely without internet such as on airplanes or in cheap hotels. For MacOS, I have to ssh into the box, but even that is a royal pain in the ass because there's a lot of the ecosystem that flat out doesn't work without the desktop open. Environment variables are set differently. Some programs like MATLAB will not run (Yes, you can run MATLAB on the console through an ssh session, but you have to VNC into the box first to make sure the desktop is running.) I hate it, which means that I flat out tell my customers not to use Apple hardware if at all possible. So, yes, they got $500 out of me, but I actively work to ensure they get less business in the long run because their ecosystem is a wreck. Just letting us virtualize MacOS would go a long way to fixing that problem.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Mac OS X is mainly a desktop OS and those of us that know Apple since the Mac Classic days don't have any issue with their desktop culture, which wasn't any different from the Atari and Amiga ones. I never sshed into them.
  - kxyvr 10y ago
    That's the point. I don't want to have to ssh into it. However, since I can't legally virtualize MacOS on my laptop I'm forced to in order to make sure that my software works fine on MacOS. That's why I'm resentful toward Apple. They make it really difficult for people to develop cross platform applications that work on MacOS and the only response I tend to get is a smug, "Eh, just buy a Mac Book."
    - mbreese 10y ago
      I'm just guessing here, but I don't think that Apple is all that interested in making it easier to develop cross-platform applications. From their point of view, the best applications are OS-specific ones. So if you want a Mac application, you're best coding on a Mac, with Mac tools, and within that hardware eco-system. From this point of view, the same argument applies with Windows, Linux, etc... (albeit with the caveat that hardware is more varied). Apple isn't trying to make that way of working easier... they are trying to make life easier for macOS-specific devs. Apple is looking for well integrated applications, and as I'm sure you know, that's really hard to do well cross-platform as you often end up coding to the lowest-common interface. Again, that's from the Apple point of view...
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        Not only Apple, that was the culture in the 80 and 90's home computers, as you mention. Which again is hardly different from UNIX culture, which doesn't matter what the hardware is capable of, as long as, it runs UNIX and given that the UNIX culture never cared for the desktop experience (Xlib and Motif really?!) that gives a clash of cultures.
      - flukus 10y ago
        Apples interest in making cross platform applications easier waxes and wanes with their market share. If I remember correctly, they were quite keen on java and making it work well at one point.
        10y ago
- macco 10y ago
  Why don't you use a virtual machine, if it is just for testing? You find a lot of tutorials on the web, how to install macOS. It is not much harder than to install Ubuntu.
  - swozey 10y ago
    Yeah, sure, it's possible. It's also against their EULA and they could break it (just like Hackintoshing) at any point in time and then bam; half of your customer base is receiving untested software because you no longer have access to your virtualized OSX until you fix it (just like every time an OSX/xcode update is rolled out). Is that worth saving the $500? For most of us, it's not. Sure you can mitigate it by not doing updates, having a test machine to receive the updates and verify that it still works, yadda yadda. I managed CI infrastructures for IOS/Android developers a few years ago and the hoops we had to jump through with xcode / EULA-breaking virtualization, etc was something I'd never experienced before. Hopefully it's different now, but we used to have to run farms of mac minis because we couldn't have jenkins/bamboo trigger more than one xcode test/build run at a time. So we'd have these $1500 mac minis sitting around doing ONE job at a time whilst the Android builds could easily do 1-10 things simultaneously. Everything felt like Apple was fighting our developer experience. It was even worse for our business model as we developed 3rd party applications for other companies which brought it's own headaches with signing, testflight, getting demo/beta apps to clients before release to app store, etc.
    - fizzbatter 10y ago
      > but we used to have to run farms of mac minis because we couldn't have jenkins/bamboo trigger more than one xcode test/build run at a time. As someone who is interested in OSX testing like this - ie, not arguing with you - would it be possible to have a mac mini use virtualbox with real OSX installations running in parallel? From what i've heard in this thread, Virtualbox/etc support OSX just fine, on OSX machines. Hypothetically, you could parallel-ize on a single machine via virtualbox, no? I understand Apple is still making it a PITA though. Not disagreeing, just learning why you were only running a single instance per box. :)
djsumdog 10y ago
Everything you said is very true. I think the only way it hurts Apple is that no one runs OSX Server anywhere. I'm willing to bet Apple doesn't have data centres filled with MacPros, but instead has proprietary internal hardware for servers running OSX. OSX is terrible to run your services on compared to any other Linux/BSD variant out there with build-in package management. Apple is not tapping into that particular market, but considering how much they make off their consumer hardware I doubt it matters.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Or simply use one of the BSDs on commodity hardware for internal server needs. At this point in time OSX/MacOS/iOS and Android/ChromeOS is pretty much the same thing. A basically proprietary platform (yeah yeah, i know about AOSP. But good luck using most apps without having Google's services installed) living on top of a vestigial _nix.
  - zeveb 10y ago
    > At this point in time OSX/MacOS/iOS and Android/ChromeOS is pretty much the same thing. A basically proprietary platform (yeah yeah, i know about AOSP. But good luck using most apps without having Google's services installed) living on top of a vestigial _nix. At least Google's stuff generally works from a Linux desktop; Apple's just refuses (including iCloud: apparently I am required to use a Mac or Windows machine to view pictures my mom posts; Apple seem to think that Linux browsers are incapable of displaying pictures and text).
lloeki 10y ago
> How is that exactly? A huge majority of developers in your situation go out and buy a Mac CI. You have to jump through inordinate hoops to have a CI system that tests on OS X. In the cloud there's Travis CI that supports OS X, or there's the GitLab runner that can drive Parallels or VirtualBox (incl. snapshot and rollback).
- rleigh 10y ago
  This is a big pain point for me right now. Due to the licensing we have two mac minis in the datacentre running VMware fusion with a few VMs on each. But the hardware is not suited to the role, performs abysmally and is a pain to manage. We're currently moving our Linux, BSD and Windows CI from VMs and bare metal to openstack. It would be great if openstack could (legally) run MacOS X on the Linux hosts, or if we could have it use the openstack API to interact with the VMs via vmware, so we can use ansible to maintain the VMs across the board.
jiiam 10y ago
> Apple wins this battle every time. Welcome to the ecosystem. :) Yes, that's true, but we can also start being sincere about the fact that the whole story is BS. I've been recently assigned a mac by my university (never used one before) and I have to say that the ecosystem is at least unhealthy. Maybe mac users don't really care, but having to install a third party software for common tasks like reverse scrolling, keeping the system from going to sleep, writing to NTFS, are symptoms, in my opinion, of a too much strong top down interaction between the os and the user. Same goes for the whole "OSX only on Apple hardware" story. So no, Apple isn't shooting temselves in the foot, but surely they are disrespecting the end user. You can excuse that by saying that it is business, but I would reply that it is still true and by avoiding to talk about it we are implicitly doing Apple a favor by hiding the issues with what would otherwise be a great piece of software. We should say more often that these practices are bad for the consumer.
- AlexeyBrin 10y ago
  > writing to NTFS Ever tried to write to HFS+ or to EXT3 from Windows ? Did it work without installing a third party tool ? > reverse scrolling, keeping the system from going to sleep You can change the way the scroll works from your Mac Settings, same goes for the power options.
  - laurentdc 10y ago
    > You can change the way the scroll works from your Mac Settings, same goes for the power options. It only works for a single device. So if you want to keep natural scrolling on the trackpad and use regular scrolling on a external mouse, you can't. For some reasons the two checkboxes for this (even under different panes) are linked. https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/ https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/
- pjmlp 10y ago
  It is that market of small utilities that puts money in the pockets of developers that care about the desktop experience, and that isn't exclusive of Apple systems.
tokenizerrr 10y ago
> A huge majority of developers in your situation go out and buy a Mac; another hardware purchase in their pocket Yeah, not happening. I have some users who sometimes complain about something broken in iOS on Safari, I google, and it turns out to be a known Safari bug. I just tell them that it is their device which is broken, which they agree with because it works fine on their computers. And it works fine for other users with Android phones. The people who this hurts, are the Apple end users. There are a few bugs they just have to deal with because it's impossible for me to test a fix. Tough luck for them. This is however for a free product. Anyone is of course welcome to buy me Apple hardware, but I don't see that happening either.
paulddraper 10y ago
Then I wonder why I can't find games for Mac...
crdoconnor 10y ago
This behavior kind of legitimizes pirating their software. If we had a properly functioning DoJ they'd crack down on this anti-competiive behavior. But we don't.
sangnoir 10y ago
> Apple wins this battle every time. Welcome to the ecosystem. :) Haha, joke's on them - I simply won't test[1] my web apps against Safari! 1. But our QA does :(, so I guess they won. Fortunately Apple decided to create 1st-party webdriver support as of Safari 10, so they at least recognize that assisting developers test on Safari is important. Hopefully someday we'll get macOS disk images to test Safari à la modern.ie

kxyvr 10y ago

So I'm one of those developers that got forced into buying a Mac Mini in order to test my software on MacOS. On one hand, you're correct that Apple "won" because I was pushed into spending $500 on their hardware. On the other hand, the parent is very much correct. Candidly, I'm still angry at Apple for making their ecosystem a pain in the ass to work with. Hell, I would have paid good money to buy a MacOS virtualization license because it screws up my work flow. Every other OS I work with I can virtualize on my laptop, which means that I can work remotely without internet such as on airplanes or in cheap hotels. For MacOS, I have to ssh into the box, but even that is a royal pain in the ass because there's a lot of the ecosystem that flat out doesn't work without the desktop open. Environment variables are set differently. Some programs like MATLAB will not run (Yes, you can run MATLAB on the console through an ssh session, but you have to VNC into the box first to make sure the desktop is running.) I hate it, which means that I flat out tell my customers not to use Apple hardware if at all possible. So, yes, they got $500 out of me, but I actively work to ensure they get less business in the long run because their ecosystem is a wreck. Just letting us virtualize MacOS would go a long way to fixing that problem.

pjmlp 10y ago
Mac OS X is mainly a desktop OS and those of us that know Apple since the Mac Classic days don't have any issue with their desktop culture, which wasn't any different from the Atari and Amiga ones. I never sshed into them.
- kxyvr 10y ago
  That's the point. I don't want to have to ssh into it. However, since I can't legally virtualize MacOS on my laptop I'm forced to in order to make sure that my software works fine on MacOS. That's why I'm resentful toward Apple. They make it really difficult for people to develop cross platform applications that work on MacOS and the only response I tend to get is a smug, "Eh, just buy a Mac Book."
  - mbreese 10y ago
    I'm just guessing here, but I don't think that Apple is all that interested in making it easier to develop cross-platform applications. From their point of view, the best applications are OS-specific ones. So if you want a Mac application, you're best coding on a Mac, with Mac tools, and within that hardware eco-system. From this point of view, the same argument applies with Windows, Linux, etc... (albeit with the caveat that hardware is more varied). Apple isn't trying to make that way of working easier... they are trying to make life easier for macOS-specific devs. Apple is looking for well integrated applications, and as I'm sure you know, that's really hard to do well cross-platform as you often end up coding to the lowest-common interface. Again, that's from the Apple point of view...
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Not only Apple, that was the culture in the 80 and 90's home computers, as you mention. Which again is hardly different from UNIX culture, which doesn't matter what the hardware is capable of, as long as, it runs UNIX and given that the UNIX culture never cared for the desktop experience (Xlib and Motif really?!) that gives a clash of cultures.
    - flukus 10y ago
      Apples interest in making cross platform applications easier waxes and wanes with their market share. If I remember correctly, they were quite keen on java and making it work well at one point.
      - 10y ago
macco 10y ago
Why don't you use a virtual machine, if it is just for testing? You find a lot of tutorials on the web, how to install macOS. It is not much harder than to install Ubuntu.
- swozey 10y ago
  Yeah, sure, it's possible. It's also against their EULA and they could break it (just like Hackintoshing) at any point in time and then bam; half of your customer base is receiving untested software because you no longer have access to your virtualized OSX until you fix it (just like every time an OSX/xcode update is rolled out). Is that worth saving the $500? For most of us, it's not. Sure you can mitigate it by not doing updates, having a test machine to receive the updates and verify that it still works, yadda yadda. I managed CI infrastructures for IOS/Android developers a few years ago and the hoops we had to jump through with xcode / EULA-breaking virtualization, etc was something I'd never experienced before. Hopefully it's different now, but we used to have to run farms of mac minis because we couldn't have jenkins/bamboo trigger more than one xcode test/build run at a time. So we'd have these $1500 mac minis sitting around doing ONE job at a time whilst the Android builds could easily do 1-10 things simultaneously. Everything felt like Apple was fighting our developer experience. It was even worse for our business model as we developed 3rd party applications for other companies which brought it's own headaches with signing, testflight, getting demo/beta apps to clients before release to app store, etc.
  - fizzbatter 10y ago
    > but we used to have to run farms of mac minis because we couldn't have jenkins/bamboo trigger more than one xcode test/build run at a time. As someone who is interested in OSX testing like this - ie, not arguing with you - would it be possible to have a mac mini use virtualbox with real OSX installations running in parallel? From what i've heard in this thread, Virtualbox/etc support OSX just fine, on OSX machines. Hypothetically, you could parallel-ize on a single machine via virtualbox, no? I understand Apple is still making it a PITA though. Not disagreeing, just learning why you were only running a single instance per box. :)

djsumdog 10y ago

Everything you said is very true. I think the only way it hurts Apple is that no one runs OSX Server anywhere. I'm willing to bet Apple doesn't have data centres filled with MacPros, but instead has proprietary internal hardware for servers running OSX. OSX is terrible to run your services on compared to any other Linux/BSD variant out there with build-in package management. Apple is not tapping into that particular market, but considering how much they make off their consumer hardware I doubt it matters.

digi_owl 10y ago
Or simply use one of the BSDs on commodity hardware for internal server needs. At this point in time OSX/MacOS/iOS and Android/ChromeOS is pretty much the same thing. A basically proprietary platform (yeah yeah, i know about AOSP. But good luck using most apps without having Google's services installed) living on top of a vestigial _nix.
- zeveb 10y ago
  > At this point in time OSX/MacOS/iOS and Android/ChromeOS is pretty much the same thing. A basically proprietary platform (yeah yeah, i know about AOSP. But good luck using most apps without having Google's services installed) living on top of a vestigial _nix. At least Google's stuff generally works from a Linux desktop; Apple's just refuses (including iCloud: apparently I am required to use a Mac or Windows machine to view pictures my mom posts; Apple seem to think that Linux browsers are incapable of displaying pictures and text).

lloeki 10y ago

> How is that exactly? A huge majority of developers in your situation go out and buy a Mac CI. You have to jump through inordinate hoops to have a CI system that tests on OS X. In the cloud there's Travis CI that supports OS X, or there's the GitLab runner that can drive Parallels or VirtualBox (incl. snapshot and rollback).

rleigh 10y ago
This is a big pain point for me right now. Due to the licensing we have two mac minis in the datacentre running VMware fusion with a few VMs on each. But the hardware is not suited to the role, performs abysmally and is a pain to manage. We're currently moving our Linux, BSD and Windows CI from VMs and bare metal to openstack. It would be great if openstack could (legally) run MacOS X on the Linux hosts, or if we could have it use the openstack API to interact with the VMs via vmware, so we can use ansible to maintain the VMs across the board.

jiiam 10y ago

> Apple wins this battle every time. Welcome to the ecosystem. :) Yes, that's true, but we can also start being sincere about the fact that the whole story is BS. I've been recently assigned a mac by my university (never used one before) and I have to say that the ecosystem is at least unhealthy. Maybe mac users don't really care, but having to install a third party software for common tasks like reverse scrolling, keeping the system from going to sleep, writing to NTFS, are symptoms, in my opinion, of a too much strong top down interaction between the os and the user. Same goes for the whole "OSX only on Apple hardware" story. So no, Apple isn't shooting temselves in the foot, but surely they are disrespecting the end user. You can excuse that by saying that it is business, but I would reply that it is still true and by avoiding to talk about it we are implicitly doing Apple a favor by hiding the issues with what would otherwise be a great piece of software. We should say more often that these practices are bad for the consumer.

AlexeyBrin 10y ago
> writing to NTFS Ever tried to write to HFS+ or to EXT3 from Windows ? Did it work without installing a third party tool ? > reverse scrolling, keeping the system from going to sleep You can change the way the scroll works from your Mac Settings, same goes for the power options.
- laurentdc 10y ago
  > You can change the way the scroll works from your Mac Settings, same goes for the power options. It only works for a single device. So if you want to keep natural scrolling on the trackpad and use regular scrolling on a external mouse, you can't. For some reasons the two checkboxes for this (even under different panes) are linked. https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/ https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/
pjmlp 10y ago
It is that market of small utilities that puts money in the pockets of developers that care about the desktop experience, and that isn't exclusive of Apple systems.

tokenizerrr 10y ago

> A huge majority of developers in your situation go out and buy a Mac; another hardware purchase in their pocket Yeah, not happening. I have some users who sometimes complain about something broken in iOS on Safari, I google, and it turns out to be a known Safari bug. I just tell them that it is their device which is broken, which they agree with because it works fine on their computers. And it works fine for other users with Android phones. The people who this hurts, are the Apple end users. There are a few bugs they just have to deal with because it's impossible for me to test a fix. Tough luck for them. This is however for a free product. Anyone is of course welcome to buy me Apple hardware, but I don't see that happening either.

paulddraper 10y ago

Then I wonder why I can't find games for Mac...

crdoconnor 10y ago

This behavior kind of legitimizes pirating their software. If we had a properly functioning DoJ they'd crack down on this anti-competiive behavior. But we don't.

sangnoir 10y ago

> Apple wins this battle every time. Welcome to the ecosystem. :) Haha, joke's on them - I simply won't test[1] my web apps against Safari! 1. But our QA does :(, so I guess they won. Fortunately Apple decided to create 1st-party webdriver support as of Safari 10, so they at least recognize that assisting developers test on Safari is important. Hopefully someday we'll get macOS disk images to test Safari à la modern.ie