Revised Mac Developer Program | Hacker News Reader

Revised Mac Developer Program

developer.apple.com

14 pointsprotomyth17 comments

What (exactly) changed between the old and new programs? The link is to the new page. Is there a "list of changes" somewhere?

$99 used to be ADC Student, which came with one, nonrenewable hardware discount (one discount, regardless of how many times you renew) and possibly a WWDC student scholarship (you had to apply for it).

$500 was ADC Select, which had one renewable hardware discount plus a couple dev support tickets, prerelease software and 2 compatibility lab visits/month.

There was also ADC Premiere ($1600?) that had even more dev support tickets, multiple hardware discounts, a WWDC ticket and 3 compatibility lab visits/month.

ADC Select and/or Premiere may have also come with WWDC videos from the previous year(s). I know Student didn't.

Now, there's one program with no hardware discount, some (not sure how much) seed access to prerelease software (although, don't know if its simply y++ in 10.x.y or x++) and two (I believe) support tickets.

The programs had different access to videos, I'm not sure what they did/didn't have access to though, don't remember off-hand.

I do wonder whats going on with their Compatibility Labs though, http://developer.apple.com/labs/. Doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere and the page still mentions select/premier.

Select and Premiere memberships didn't include WWDC videos per se. Premiere included a WWDC ticket, and attendees do get the video for that year's show, which can otherwise be purchased for about $700.

It's a shame about the hardware discounts going away. They had good breaks on the higher-end machines.

I know Select and Premiere had access to more videos than I did with ADC Student. I had thought that it was simply everything. Guess not. Thanks for the correction.

Those were probably the Coding Headstart videos, also not available to free ADC "online" members. I'm not sure what the online tier is called now, but it does still exist:

http://developer.apple.com/programs/register/

Compatibility lab access is mentioned in the updated terms and conditions, if that means anything.

Didn’t students who went to WWDC get access to the videos from that year’s talks afterward?

Yes, but not WWDC from previous years, which is what I was thinking that Select/Premier would have access to.

They still have info here about the Select and Premiere programs: http://developer.apple.com/programs/adcbenefits/, and that is linked to at the bottom of the OP's link. Is it possible that those aren't going away?

All I hope is that Apple doesn't start locking up the resources that used to once be free, such as Xcode, and all the documentation surrounding it.

I doubt it - even the iPhone developer program is free until you want to distribute. This does seem somewhat worrying though, they're practically the only company out there that currently has a "consumer" developer program (MS's dev programs are all entirely free until you get to the extreme enterprise end).

Things like XNA for XBox/Zune cost $99 a year to deploy to a real device. The free versions of visual studio are somewhat limited also but still generally good.

Those are device developer programs, though. XNA for PC is free, and pretty much all major desktop PC development tracks are free. iPhone/XBox/etc are a different story (and my understanding is that $99 is cheap for such a program).

$99 is cheap for pre-release access considering it used to be $500.

I thought $500 was if you wanted a Hardware Credit and $99 was prerelease.

$99 was for a student developer. You got one lifetime hardware credit with that membership type.

And, of course, had to be a student. (You had to send in a copy of your ID, IIRC.)

Had to fax (or email, although, iirc, they stressed that they preferred fax, when I called up about it) a copy of your Student ID + schedule in.

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