9 ms·

This is somewhat strange pricing - it seems ridiculously cheap if they're trying to make significant profits off of it, but pricey enough to prevent tinkerers w

by ori_b 16y ago

This is somewhat strange pricing - it seems ridiculously cheap if they're trying to make significant profits off of it, but pricey enough to prevent tinkerers who don't really know about coding but feel like trying it from getting a start in xcode.

msg 16y ago
It is the difference between free and not free. They are trying to drive developers to use the App Store? Sounds ridiculous coming out of my mouth. They are trying to kill off OSX hobbyist experimentation in favor of iOS? I think I'm getting warmer.
- krschultz 16y ago
  So you can afford a $1500 Macbook for your hobby but not $5 for XCode? Maybe they're trying to set the precedent that you can charge money for utilities in the app store.
- igrekel 16y ago
  Maybe they want to create an incentive for developers to release their software at a low price on the App Store instead of making it free? Transform the freeware into low priced apps on which they get a share.
  - yllus 16y ago
    That's actually a very interesting thought, and quite plausible. Though I'd expect them to charge more for XCode if they wanted to spur thoughts of "I need to recoup these costs" properly.
- stuhacking 16y ago
  Apple are really driving me to put Linux on both my machines. I'm not happy about that, but it's seems ever more likely since Linux is getting a lot more usable and the Apple tax is getting a lot more expensive.
- msbarnett 16y ago
  Is this supposed to be satire? Being a hobbyist and learning to program in the 80s meant my dad shelling out hundreds of dollars for THINK Lightspeed Pascal, and yet, somehow I and many others managed to learn to program and become hobbyists and finally professional programmers. They'll sell you a full-featured, modern IDE with all the pro features uncrippled for a measly $5. That's not a death blow to hobbyists, that's maybe one of the cheapest hobbies on the planet.
  - msg 16y ago
    It was free, so I don't how you can call it anything but erecting a barrier to entry to developing POSIX apps on the Mac. You don't just need $5, you need a credit card number. Like many other things in computing, the price to play has gotten steadily cheaper over time. When it gets more expensive we should ask why. It makes sense for Apple's future of curated computing, but it's definitely another dick move.
    - msbarnett 16y ago
      > When it gets more expensive we should ask why. They just plowed thousands of engineering man-hours into significantly overhauling both the infrastructure (huge amount of work around LLVM) and interface of Xcode for the Xcode 4 release, addressing a substantive number of long-standing complaints along the way. This release is by far the biggest overhaul of the product in the last decade. All of those engineers cost a lot of money. They aren't working on this out of charity. That's why. I simply do not understand why people are hung up on an IDE that is the product of thousands of engineering man-hours costing as much as a single foot long sandwich slapped together by a bored teenager in 60 seconds.
      - potatolicious 16y ago
        A single footlong sandwich may be a significant sum for people not in Western, industrialized countries. But that point is secondary to the fact that even $5 is a barrier for beginners. I think people are objecting because they themselves happened into programming as a passion and career - I know I did. They found some tool, probably for free (QBASIC for me) that got their feet wet initially, and that's how they got their start. A beginner who is neither sure nor convinced that programming is a good thing to pursue is unlikely to spend even a footlong's worth of money on it, and we've lost yet more potential future engineers. Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free. Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free. When the status quo of the industry is free tools (and the few that are for-pay are getting cheaper every year), one can question why Apple is the odd man out in a sudden reversal.
- loire280 16y ago
  It's probably an incentive to get people to become paid developer members. You already need to be enrolled to submit apps to the Mac and iOS app stores. If you just need a compiler, install the development tools on the OS X install DVD that came with your computer. If you want to be doing software development for Mac or iOS, the developer fee is worth it for the documentation and prerelease software.
randrews 16y ago
Yes, the more I think about it the less sense it makes. Putting it on the App Store seems perfectly normal, but charging money for something that used to be free, even a token amount, is a really stupid thing to do. $5 is nearly as bad as $50: the difference between charging nothing and something is way higher than the difference between charging something and something higher. Is it to defray hosting costs for a 4 gig app on the App Store? Then why host it for free before on their site?
- taylorbuley 16y ago
  My opinion is that it's just another "hidden fee" for OS X development. (A fee I'm happy to pay, for what it's worth.) For me, I actually had to get a Mac before I could even think about writing my first iPhone app. Then I found out my 10.5 Mac Mini wasn't compatible with XCode, so I had to fork over a bit to pick up Leopard. Then comes the $100 or whatever for a developer license so you can build on phone. After all that, $5 doesn't sound so bad.
  - Tichy 16y ago
    Seems the conditioning they put you through worked well. In fact seen in that light, the new fee makes sense. They just want to dull your resistance against paying through the nose.
    - taylorbuley 16y ago
      Must.. pay.. another... $100 http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5092/5513444433_fd70db527e.jpg http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5092/5513444433_fd70db527e.jp...
  - SiVal 16y ago
    I had to pay zero for Python and Java and Perl development (a fee I've been happy to pay, for what it's worth). I actually had to get a computer before writing my first apps, but I could get whatever computer I liked. I never had one that was incompatible with these tools. Then came the $0 for a Python/Java/Perl developer license, so I could build on any server I liked. After all that, $5 plus hooking myself up to Apple's death by a thousand cuts slow drip sounds pretty bad.
jarin 16y ago
I can understand how the cost of a Happy Meal might deter someone who wants to try their hand at coding. I mean seriously, you're going to spend at least 10 times that amount on programming books, or thousands of times that amount on college classes.
- Tichy 16y ago
  It all adds up. As you say, there are a zillion of things you need. Not the least a Mac (>= 1000 bucks). If all you want is to learn programming, there are free alternatives to XCode. How much have you spent on iPhone apps so far? I have friends who spent several hundred €, one Happy Meal at a time.
  - Bud 16y ago
    It's required that you buy a new Mac? That's news. I thought you could pick one up used on Craigslist for a few hundred bucks. Oh wait, you can.
    - Tichy 16y ago
      Would you say these Craigslist Macs are a good deal? I just found a 500€ plastic MacBook. I don't think that is a good deal. In any case, you need a Mac, and it's gonna cost you.
- goalieca 16y ago
  The entire thing is built on open source. I certainly won't be paying and this shift in culture at apple is turning me off. I probably won't be buying another product from them for a while.
  - danieldk 16y ago
    Built on open source... an important part of which they invested in (LLVM). One can as well easily install LLVM/clang via MacPorts, or wait until Lion (under the assumption that XCode will still be included on the download media). Getting the proprietary parts for five dollars is certainly not a bad deal. But one has to wonder... why? Is it to cover download costs?
arnorhs 16y ago
Some pirated software and cracking patches rely on gdb. So a user has to have xcode installed in order for the cracks to work. At least, it's often a requirement. This might be to make that harder and to thwart software piracy up to a point.
- kalleboo 16y ago
  But what's keeping them from pirating Xcode?
  - goalieca 16y ago
    And GBD/clang/gcc are all open source technologies.
  - uxp 16y ago
    Probably the requirement of trying pirate a 50MB app is a 4.2GB crack.
- lawnchair_larry 16y ago
  Cracked software is pre-patched. Otherwise, they just distribute keys, and use the software unmodified. Xcode and gdb aren't a factor in piracy.
  - arnorhs 16y ago
    Well, I'll just paste instructions from a crack a friend of mine needed me to help him with: Install Instructions for Protools 9 • 0. Make sure you have gdb installed. Test by typing “gdb test” into terminal. 1. Uninstall any versions of Pro Tools that are already installed 2. Install Pro Tools, Complete Production Tookit 2 and HEAT (in the optional installers folder) from the full iso 3. Use the [K]‘ed installer to overwrite the necessary files 4. Launch Pro Tools from the loader and everything should work as expected This crack requires Xcode to be installed. Xcode can be downloaded for free from developer.apple.com. Also, DO NOT REPLACE THE LOADER. The loader included with the new release (loader version 1.1) was designed for this release as a background process which is what people wanted. It also now breaks on ptrace so there is no need for the anti-ptrace extension posted later in the topic. To use Pro Tools launch the loader and wait a few seconds. Nothing will show while it does some work in the background and then it will launch the main Pro Tools app a few seconds later. Big thanks to unsanity, simblism, and XVX for their respective contributions.
alanstorm 16y ago
It's probably a part of a longer term pricing strategy. It's hard to start charging "real" money (even $40/$50) for an application you were formerly giving away for free. People feel like you've taken something away. By charging a micro-payment disposable price of $5 (Happy Meal, Latte, etc.) they deflect a lot of that criticism and avoid some of the negative publicity. Over the next 10 years they can slowly raise the price, each time keeping is reasonable. Apple's leveraging the work they put into building the App Store infrastructure (and business deals with credit card companies) to do something a lot of other companies couldn't (make something that was free cost something again without too much fallout).
masklinn 16y ago
According to the LLVM lead dev (Chris Lattner on IRC), this is due to Apple's accountant's interpretation of SOX (Xcode 4 is too different from Xcode 3 to be considered an update, they see it as a new product): > it is due to some bizarro accounting rule. xcode4 is sufficiently new that it doesn't count as a free update or something. paid adc members should get free access. yeah, clearly we're trying to monetize it... doh Same story as with FaceTime except worse. Apple's accountants seem very very weird.
- uxp 16y ago
  Here is the Wikipedia article on SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) for anyone that needs a refresher: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act
- mbateman 16y ago
  It's SOX that's "weird", to put it mildly. I don't blame Apple for being paranoid about it.
- mambodog 16y ago
  If this is true then I wonder if buying a new Mac or a boxed copy of Mac OS entitles one to XCode 4 and all updates until XCode 5 (which will be years away)? That is certainly the case with Facetime and the 802.11n update.
  - masklinn 16y ago
    I'm guessing it'll be Lion doing that, as with Facetime. And depending on the release time of Xcode 5 (and its synchronicity with OSX 10.8 or 10.9) and whatnot, Xcode 5 may very well be as "free" as 2.0 and 3.0 were.
- albertsun 16y ago
  Which part of SOX requires this?
  - jedsmith 16y ago
HSO 16y ago
It's not about the money; it's about getting your credit card number hooked up to to an Apple account.

by ori_b 16y ago

msg 16y ago

It is the difference between free and not free. They are trying to drive developers to use the App Store? Sounds ridiculous coming out of my mouth. They are trying to kill off OSX hobbyist experimentation in favor of iOS? I think I'm getting warmer.

krschultz 16y ago
So you can afford a $1500 Macbook for your hobby but not $5 for XCode? Maybe they're trying to set the precedent that you can charge money for utilities in the app store.
igrekel 16y ago
Maybe they want to create an incentive for developers to release their software at a low price on the App Store instead of making it free? Transform the freeware into low priced apps on which they get a share.
- yllus 16y ago
  That's actually a very interesting thought, and quite plausible. Though I'd expect them to charge more for XCode if they wanted to spur thoughts of "I need to recoup these costs" properly.
stuhacking 16y ago
Apple are really driving me to put Linux on both my machines. I'm not happy about that, but it's seems ever more likely since Linux is getting a lot more usable and the Apple tax is getting a lot more expensive.
msbarnett 16y ago
Is this supposed to be satire? Being a hobbyist and learning to program in the 80s meant my dad shelling out hundreds of dollars for THINK Lightspeed Pascal, and yet, somehow I and many others managed to learn to program and become hobbyists and finally professional programmers. They'll sell you a full-featured, modern IDE with all the pro features uncrippled for a measly $5. That's not a death blow to hobbyists, that's maybe one of the cheapest hobbies on the planet.
- msg 16y ago
  It was free, so I don't how you can call it anything but erecting a barrier to entry to developing POSIX apps on the Mac. You don't just need $5, you need a credit card number. Like many other things in computing, the price to play has gotten steadily cheaper over time. When it gets more expensive we should ask why. It makes sense for Apple's future of curated computing, but it's definitely another dick move.
  - msbarnett 16y ago
    > When it gets more expensive we should ask why. They just plowed thousands of engineering man-hours into significantly overhauling both the infrastructure (huge amount of work around LLVM) and interface of Xcode for the Xcode 4 release, addressing a substantive number of long-standing complaints along the way. This release is by far the biggest overhaul of the product in the last decade. All of those engineers cost a lot of money. They aren't working on this out of charity. That's why. I simply do not understand why people are hung up on an IDE that is the product of thousands of engineering man-hours costing as much as a single foot long sandwich slapped together by a bored teenager in 60 seconds.
    - potatolicious 16y ago
      A single footlong sandwich may be a significant sum for people not in Western, industrialized countries. But that point is secondary to the fact that even $5 is a barrier for beginners. I think people are objecting because they themselves happened into programming as a passion and career - I know I did. They found some tool, probably for free (QBASIC for me) that got their feet wet initially, and that's how they got their start. A beginner who is neither sure nor convinced that programming is a good thing to pursue is unlikely to spend even a footlong's worth of money on it, and we've lost yet more potential future engineers. Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free. Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free. When the status quo of the industry is free tools (and the few that are for-pay are getting cheaper every year), one can question why Apple is the odd man out in a sudden reversal.
loire280 16y ago
It's probably an incentive to get people to become paid developer members. You already need to be enrolled to submit apps to the Mac and iOS app stores. If you just need a compiler, install the development tools on the OS X install DVD that came with your computer. If you want to be doing software development for Mac or iOS, the developer fee is worth it for the documentation and prerelease software.

randrews 16y ago

Yes, the more I think about it the less sense it makes. Putting it on the App Store seems perfectly normal, but charging money for something that used to be free, even a token amount, is a really stupid thing to do. $5 is nearly as bad as $50: the difference between charging nothing and something is way higher than the difference between charging something and something higher. Is it to defray hosting costs for a 4 gig app on the App Store? Then why host it for free before on their site?

taylorbuley 16y ago
My opinion is that it's just another "hidden fee" for OS X development. (A fee I'm happy to pay, for what it's worth.) For me, I actually had to get a Mac before I could even think about writing my first iPhone app. Then I found out my 10.5 Mac Mini wasn't compatible with XCode, so I had to fork over a bit to pick up Leopard. Then comes the $100 or whatever for a developer license so you can build on phone. After all that, $5 doesn't sound so bad.
- Tichy 16y ago
  Seems the conditioning they put you through worked well. In fact seen in that light, the new fee makes sense. They just want to dull your resistance against paying through the nose.
  - taylorbuley 16y ago
    Must.. pay.. another... $100 http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5092/5513444433_fd70db527e.jpg http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5092/5513444433_fd70db527e.jp...
- SiVal 16y ago
  I had to pay zero for Python and Java and Perl development (a fee I've been happy to pay, for what it's worth). I actually had to get a computer before writing my first apps, but I could get whatever computer I liked. I never had one that was incompatible with these tools. Then came the $0 for a Python/Java/Perl developer license, so I could build on any server I liked. After all that, $5 plus hooking myself up to Apple's death by a thousand cuts slow drip sounds pretty bad.

jarin 16y ago

I can understand how the cost of a Happy Meal might deter someone who wants to try their hand at coding. I mean seriously, you're going to spend at least 10 times that amount on programming books, or thousands of times that amount on college classes.

Tichy 16y ago
It all adds up. As you say, there are a zillion of things you need. Not the least a Mac (>= 1000 bucks). If all you want is to learn programming, there are free alternatives to XCode. How much have you spent on iPhone apps so far? I have friends who spent several hundred €, one Happy Meal at a time.
- Bud 16y ago
  It's required that you buy a new Mac? That's news. I thought you could pick one up used on Craigslist for a few hundred bucks. Oh wait, you can.
  - Tichy 16y ago
    Would you say these Craigslist Macs are a good deal? I just found a 500€ plastic MacBook. I don't think that is a good deal. In any case, you need a Mac, and it's gonna cost you.
goalieca 16y ago
The entire thing is built on open source. I certainly won't be paying and this shift in culture at apple is turning me off. I probably won't be buying another product from them for a while.
- danieldk 16y ago
  Built on open source... an important part of which they invested in (LLVM). One can as well easily install LLVM/clang via MacPorts, or wait until Lion (under the assumption that XCode will still be included on the download media). Getting the proprietary parts for five dollars is certainly not a bad deal. But one has to wonder... why? Is it to cover download costs?

arnorhs 16y ago

Some pirated software and cracking patches rely on gdb. So a user has to have xcode installed in order for the cracks to work. At least, it's often a requirement. This might be to make that harder and to thwart software piracy up to a point.

kalleboo 16y ago
But what's keeping them from pirating Xcode?
- goalieca 16y ago
  And GBD/clang/gcc are all open source technologies.
- uxp 16y ago
  Probably the requirement of trying pirate a 50MB app is a 4.2GB crack.
lawnchair_larry 16y ago
Cracked software is pre-patched. Otherwise, they just distribute keys, and use the software unmodified. Xcode and gdb aren't a factor in piracy.
- arnorhs 16y ago
  Well, I'll just paste instructions from a crack a friend of mine needed me to help him with: Install Instructions for Protools 9 • 0. Make sure you have gdb installed. Test by typing “gdb test” into terminal. 1. Uninstall any versions of Pro Tools that are already installed 2. Install Pro Tools, Complete Production Tookit 2 and HEAT (in the optional installers folder) from the full iso 3. Use the [K]‘ed installer to overwrite the necessary files 4. Launch Pro Tools from the loader and everything should work as expected This crack requires Xcode to be installed. Xcode can be downloaded for free from developer.apple.com. Also, DO NOT REPLACE THE LOADER. The loader included with the new release (loader version 1.1) was designed for this release as a background process which is what people wanted. It also now breaks on ptrace so there is no need for the anti-ptrace extension posted later in the topic. To use Pro Tools launch the loader and wait a few seconds. Nothing will show while it does some work in the background and then it will launch the main Pro Tools app a few seconds later. Big thanks to unsanity, simblism, and XVX for their respective contributions.

alanstorm 16y ago

It's probably a part of a longer term pricing strategy. It's hard to start charging "real" money (even $40/$50) for an application you were formerly giving away for free. People feel like you've taken something away. By charging a micro-payment disposable price of $5 (Happy Meal, Latte, etc.) they deflect a lot of that criticism and avoid some of the negative publicity. Over the next 10 years they can slowly raise the price, each time keeping is reasonable. Apple's leveraging the work they put into building the App Store infrastructure (and business deals with credit card companies) to do something a lot of other companies couldn't (make something that was free cost something again without too much fallout).

masklinn 16y ago

According to the LLVM lead dev (Chris Lattner on IRC), this is due to Apple's accountant's interpretation of SOX (Xcode 4 is too different from Xcode 3 to be considered an update, they see it as a new product): > it is due to some bizarro accounting rule. xcode4 is sufficiently new that it doesn't count as a free update or something. paid adc members should get free access. yeah, clearly we're trying to monetize it... doh Same story as with FaceTime except worse. Apple's accountants seem very very weird.

uxp 16y ago
Here is the Wikipedia article on SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) for anyone that needs a refresher: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act
mbateman 16y ago
It's SOX that's "weird", to put it mildly. I don't blame Apple for being paranoid about it.
mambodog 16y ago
If this is true then I wonder if buying a new Mac or a boxed copy of Mac OS entitles one to XCode 4 and all updates until XCode 5 (which will be years away)? That is certainly the case with Facetime and the 802.11n update.
- masklinn 16y ago
  I'm guessing it'll be Lion doing that, as with Facetime. And depending on the release time of Xcode 5 (and its synchronicity with OSX 10.8 or 10.9) and whatnot, Xcode 5 may very well be as "free" as 2.0 and 3.0 were.
albertsun 16y ago
Which part of SOX requires this?
- jedsmith 16y ago

HSO 16y ago

It's not about the money; it's about getting your credit card number hooked up to to an Apple account.