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Comment by jamesmp98 | Hacker News Reader

Unless you are a mobile developer and your clients always want iOS apps.

Well, you kinda pegged your fate and future to Apple by choosing to worked into their locked ecosystem right?

It's not like it was an accidental choice, you knew that you'll have to buy whatever Apple serves you in whatever form they want as long as you want to service that platform.

Sounds like he chose to work as a mobile developer, not an iOS developer.

A Mac let's you write for iOS and Android. Windows doesn't.

To be fair, it's Apple that doesn't let you develop for iOS on Windows, not Microsoft.

Yes but Microsoft doesn't let you build on macOS either. With mac, you still have an option of installing windows. I am not saying one is better than the other, but as a developer, I feel macOS gives me best bang for the buck.

It's Apple that doesn't let you install macOS on a VM or other hardware. Microsoft has no control over that.

Microsoft does have control over building a version of Visual Studio that runs on macOS if they really don't discriminate based on the platform. They want their phone apps built on windows and I think it is fair, but they aren't that much different from Apple.

Last I build a windows phone app, which was ~3 years ago, I needed windows running on my Mac. With a mac I can build for iOS, Android and WinPhone. With a Windows box, I cannot build iOS apps. I don't know what is more locked.

That's an interesting way to look at it. Since Microsoft let's you install Windows on whatever hardware you want clearly macos is more locked down but due to Apple's lock down you get more flexibility by using a Mac.

4-5 years ago when I was building AIR mobile apps; you could build iOS apps on Windows.

You can do everything you could do on a Mac except upload the final build to the iOS app store.

To my knowledge there is no way to use native Apple tools to build iOS apps on Windows; but I haven't kept up with the tech.

Yeah, its alright though, its much more enjoyable to web development to me.

this was the opposite of 20 years ago - sure, you can do loads on macs, except build visual basic apps for the windows ecosystem.

shoe's on the other foot now.

if MS had done a better job in mobile, there'd be more reason to target windows for regular joe consumers, but they lost that market (for now anyway?). :(

> except build visual basic apps for the windows ecosystem

Parallels/BootCamp?

asp.net core 1 is cross platform, using visual studio code you can now build lots without visual studio... but not older enterprise projects of course and or visual projects.

> this was the opposite of 20 years ago

perhaps I should have put that other part in quotes. that was the refrain from mac-bashers at the time (well, one of them). Everything revolved around windows ecosystem, it had the developer mindshare and market strength, etc.

It's not the same story today.

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