Apple started giving away the development environment because they had such an anemic software ecosystem. They had a handful of OpenSTEP developers and a larger

Apple started giving away the development environment because they had such an anemic software ecosystem. They had a handful of OpenSTEP developers and a larger crowd of die-hard Mac people, the successful ones mostly moving away from the platform. Today Apple is taking percentage of every dollar made from application developers who participate in their App store and they are making it increasingly difficult to avoid this with every release. IMHO, they are making far more dollars today than they ever did selling development hardware and SDK licenses.