i recently had to be the middle-man for a pc user with an iphone that paid someone a few hundred dollars to have his idea transformed into an actual iphone app.

i recently had to be the middle-man for a pc user with an iphone that paid someone a few hundred dollars to have his idea transformed into an actual iphone app. i had to do all of the work as far as generating the certificates, managing all the stuff on apple's iphone developer site, building new releases, and e-mailing him binaries so he could try them on his phone. the entire process is laborious enough with a mac and xcode, i can't imagine how any of it could be done on windows. if nothing else, you will need xcode just to be able to cross-compile and sign your app with the necessary certificates to be able to transfer and run the app on your phone. however, the integrated debugging with gdb that xcode offers is invaluable. being able to use your computer to step through the code running on your iphone while it's running is very useful and was required to fix some problems with this app i was dealing with. without it, all you get is your iphone closing the app with no error or warning. xcode also allows you to watch the console of the iphone and see errors/debugging info that is being printed that you wouldn't normally be able to access from the phone. that said, you don't really have to switch to a mac to do this. buy a used macbook or mac mini just to do your development on it, while still using your pc to do everything else.