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XCode is free and has been for ages. To this day you can develop whatever you like for the Mac and not pay Apple a penny. You don’t even have to use XCode to do it. It’s even free for iPhone development for your own device now, though you have to pay a fee to publish stuff. I’m not sure what you comment about emulators is about to be honest, The iOS emulator for the Mac is free.

True it is all free except the whole having the purchase a 1000 dollar computer part.

And there is the Apple dev annual subscription.

By the way, I have (in the past) managed to run macOS on Vmware successfully, but one needs a pretty strong PC to make this work without having the fans lifting the PC off the groud.

> And there is the Apple dev annual subscription.

Only if you're publishing.

We had to pay $299 for the enterprise license to distribute iOS applications internally to just our staff[1]. This circumvented the App Store entirely and we used MDM tools (AirWatch) to distribute. Was this avoidable? I'm genuinely curious as I am not specifically an iOS/Mac dev.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/programs/enterprise/

No. In order to publish (even just within your organization) you need to establish a trusted relationship, and Apple charges for that. There is plenty of room for argument about how much Apple should be charging for this, but the process does have some costs to Apple, so it is only right that they charge something.

This is a disingenuous argument, you have to buy a PC to develop Windows. And you have to pay $100-300 for windows, AND you have to play $600-$2500 _per year_ for Visual Studio

You can develop for Windows without Visual Studio, and Visual Studio has a free tier that includes some commercial usage. If you own pretty much any desktop computer or laptop, it can run Windows (including Macs). I think you can even get Windows licenses for testing purposes for free, if you prefer to work on macOS or Linux and just test on Windows (EDIT: on reviewing this part, the terms on those test images aren't as clear as one would like, even though they clearly are provided for developers, so count cost for 1 license if you want to be sure).

Visual Studio Community (which is everything you'd need if you aren't a large team) is free. You can use it for up to 5 users for commercial work.

I use Community professionally.

No it's not. You can buy a PC from many different vendors, HP, Lenevo, Dell etc. They compete and the price goes down, and customers get a choice. You can also run linux for free and use VSCode for free which also runs on Linux.

With Apple I have to buy the PC from Apple at it's marked up price since no competition. So it is a fair point.

What do you mean no competition?

Why on earth would you want to develop Mac software without buying a Mac? This argument really does make no sense at all. It’s like complaining that if you want to drive Porsche, you have to buy a Porsche from Porsche. Er, yeah. That’s how that works.

Please quibble about renting and dealerships or something. Please. I dare you. I double dare you! I swear I won’t stop laughing for a week.

Dare accepted. You know that is a false analogy. If you want X you need to get X.

It would be more like a mechanic being required to buy his tools from Porsche to be able to work on a Porsche.

And it's good you bring this up, this too is a problem in the auto industry world. Car manufacturers are pulling these stunts and creating locks for their cars so only approved tools can be used with it.

To continue the analogy, it would be like buying an Epson printer and being force to use Epson ink. Or buying a house and being forced to buy your DIY suppliers from the real estate agent.

We can keep going with analogies all day.

Your personal accusation of disingenuousness distracts from what would otherwise have been a good point. Let's see what a barebones setup costs for developing with a solid IDE on each platform:

macOS:

$800 Mac Mini (Apple's most affordable offering that runs macOS)

$90 Acer SB220Q Monitor

$FREE Xcode

Total: $890

Windows:

$200 Dell Inspiron 11 3000 (Most affordable Dell PC I could find being sold new)

$1200 One time payment for Visual Studio (but you don't get updates)

Total: $1400

So if have to both buy a computer and need a full featured IDE then Visual Studio's license wipes out any savings you get from avoiding the "Apple tax". It gets even worse if you want perpetual updates to Visual Studio which cost $800/year but come free with XCode.

This is counter to what I had expected beforehand myself, I expected the "Apple tax" to make the bar of entry much higher than PC development.

If, on the other hand, you can get by with a less advanced IDE or are developing in a non-proprietary language like Java, Python, or Scala the cost goes way down:

Cheapskate Option:

$200 Windows/Linux laptop

$FREE Eclipse/JetBrains CE IDE/Visual Studio Code

Total: $200

This is certainly more affordable than the $800 macOS alternative. Although one could debate whether the above mentioned IDEs are on equal footing with XCode/Visual Studio.

Visual Studio Community is free. It doesn't have the fancy cloud/devops enterprise-y stuff, but it's not like Xcode does either.

Ah! I didn't know Visual Studio Community was even a thing. Figures though, since I've never used either.

This is incorrect - you can go and buy a used Mac Mini for 250USD.

> Yes they want their cut from Spotify. I don’t understand the Apple exceptionalism about this though.

No Spotify's letter put it very clearly, they want to take their 30% cut from Spotify while putting their own music service on the market undercutting their prices. This is blatantly anticompetitive and is rightly being slammed by Congress.

Apple's response to this has been shrug. I don't think Apple shouldn't be allowed to offer their own music service but they shouldn't use anti-competitive practices in order to stifle competition.

Did apple music price below spotify/ not familiar with the pricing history.

They used shady tactics to force them to bill through the Apple's marketplace so they could get the 30% cut, forcing Spotify to raise prices by 30% so they could maintain their revenue position. Then they released Apple Music at the $9.99 price point that Spotify was at previously.

The shady tactics resumed when Spotify stopped using the App Store to bill and reduced the price to compete with Apple Music. Apple isn't interested in competing with Spotify, only with freezing them out of the market.

Why does the value of Apple's App Store infrastructure and network effects always get zeroed out in the equation here? Spotify is welcome to build their own app distribution infrastructure on their own mobile hardware and charge whoever whatever they want for it and keep all the profits themselves.

Apple does not offer a legitimate way for developers to release apps for their hardware other than the App Store. I suppose you could go even further and say that Spotify should make and market their own phones, but luckily American commerce doesn't work that way.

Shady tactics like lowering the cut to 15% after 1 year.

Historically the console manufacturers sold their consoles at a loss and only made profit on games sales. This might have influenced our perspective on the sales model.

Not always. Nintendo was making a profit in each Wii sold, as a unit, from day one.

XCode may cost you 0$, but you have to buy a Mac to use it. And those things are >0$ in most cases.

You need a Mac anyway, and the costs of a Mac is peanuts compared to the costs of a developer.

While I understand your point, I would gently argue that to develop a truly great macOS or iOS app, you somewhat need to live in the Apple ecosystem to understand the design guidelines and quality that Apple customers have come to expect.

I bet the most downloaded apps these days are ground up cross platform and identical on every platform, e.g. steam, spotify, and web browsers. Relying on proprietary apple features that you have to clumsily port over to another OS would waste a lot of your time as a dev. You'd probably do your best troubleshooting on a cheap, under powered hackintosh than a model year macbook pro, to be honest.

Fair point. I tend to not like those cross-platform apps because of their generally-degraded performance so my previous comment showed a bit of my underlying bias.

Yes. But parent didn't contest that. They rather made the point that you have to pay to "live" in that ecosystem. MacOS is officially only supported on Apple hardware ... So it's not free and the fact that XCode is is therefore a moot point to that line of reasoning.

Instead of having Xcode be available on PCs, which we all know are free to own.

Yeah, right.

I guess the point is you might already own a PC, and you could use that for developing Android apps, for example. But if you also want to use Xcode and develop iOS apps as well then you have to buy a Mac.

If that is the point it's not a very good one.

> you might already own a PC [...] if you also want to use Xcode and develop iOS apps as well then you have to buy a Mac.

You might already own a Mac.

And if you own a Mac it costs $0 to develop for any other platform. See the imbalance here?

No, it costs 100 euros to get a proper Windows license.

No, you don't need a Windows license to develop for Windows. That's the whole point here. You can code and compile binaries for Windows, Linux, Android, etc. from many IDEs and virtually any platform under the sun. You can code and compile binaries for Apple products from exactly one IDE and exactly one platform: Apple's.

Of course you need Windows to develop Win32 and now UWP apps.

If you mean cross compiling from other OSes into Windows, good luck creating anything beyond CLI apps based on POSIX.

Ah but there is Wine! Not really, there are tons of Windows features that it doesn't support, and probably never will.

And if you mean Web apps, then I also develop Webapps for Mac without having one around.

>Just listen to the wailing and gnashing of teeth by Macbook owners having to give up proprietary MagSafe for USB-C charging on their laptops.

For me personally and I think for a lot of people that is less about a love for MagSafe than it is an aversion to USB-C.

The difference in the way the USB-C cable and Magsafe handle an off angle tug seals the debate for me.

For every time MagSafe saved me from an errant tug there were 100,000 times it inconvenienced me by disconnecting with the slightest movement.

Apple publishes an iOS simulator, not an emulator, which is a totally different thing.

Yes, it is different. But how is that important in this conversation. Here the important bit is: have a tool that enables you to test your iOS code on your development machine. Emulation vs. simulation is not generally important in that.

Side note undercutting my point: there are places, like OpenGL where the underlying hardware is significantly better/different and the iOS simulation is not representative of the real environment. Mostly these only matter to high-end games, and there you better be checking regularly on a list of hardware.

You’re absolutely right that it’s not important to the conversation; I’m just being pedantic and going on a tangent :) But I have seen enough real bugs due to people not understanding the limitations of iOS simulator realism that I would really like it if more people understood the issue.

It also matters in more than high-performance GPU rendering. It’s easy to miss bog-standard CPU performance or memory leak bugs when you’re running software designed for a 1GB Ram, dual core CPU machine on a 32GB, 8 core machine

Nobody rages on HN about Sony’s monopoly over games development for the PlayStation

Might be because the App Store is the sole channel. Also, apps are easier to substitute than games, making anti-competitive behavior possible.

And even if you buy a physical game for the Playststion, the game still has to be approved by Sony.