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Comment by bluescrn | Hacker News Reader

And with rumours of Apple moving to ARM chips for their laptops, they could well try to take the opportunity to lock out unsigned code entirely...

Before long they could even choose to make you buy an expensive Mac Pro or iMac Pro, or even require an 'iOS dev kit' if you want to develop for their platform.

And if Microsoft had succeeded in the mobile/tablet space, they'd be doing exactly the same...

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>Before long they could even choose to make you buy an expensive Mac Pro or iMac Pro, or even require an 'iOS dev kit' if you want to develop for their platform.

Hopefully this was sarcasm, since this is literally what is required right now to develop for iOS - you need a Mac (windows is not allowed) and a $99 developer account.

FWIW, this has gotten better. It used to be that you could only use the Xcode simulator when developing iOS apps and had to have the $99 developer account to put apps on real provisioned devices. Now you only need to pay to put the app on the store.

> And with rumours of Apple moving to ARM chips for their laptops, they could well try to take the opportunity to lock out unsigned code entirely...

Why do these two things have any relationship to each other? They can and do lock down x86-64 machines, you're just able to "opt-out" right now[1].

[1] https://it.nmu.edu/docs/allowing-third-party-applications-in...

My MB Pro cost 2.5k, and I use it primarily to develop for iOS, so there you have your expensive dev kit.

Another 1k for the iPhone X for debugging.

Isn't that counter-productive though? I'll just take my business elsewhere and develop for competing environments.

Not if the majority of your customers are in that environment. You want to sell an app to 50 or 5,000 people? Just look at Linux games (which is WAY better nowadays, its incredible what you can play).

I'm an android/*nix user. I'd love it if more devs had your mindset but they typically don't.

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