6 ms·

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 t

by 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.

by msg 16y ago

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.