Xcode now costs US$ 4.99
itunes.apple.com
itunes.apple.com
iTMS cards are purchasable at every 7-Eleven and nearly every major supermarket, Wal-Mart, Meijer, Target or what-have-you in the USA. You can buy Xcode with $5 in nickles if you have access to a Coinstar machine.
Let's be realistic, the hardware demands are much more serious than $5 on an iTunes card. The problem here is the message Apple is sending.
Outside the USA, what do you do?
I probably wouldn't working in the field today, that's for sure.
Selling your parents on a single $99 purchase is a lot easier than trying to sell a $5 purchase every week. 'Tis just the way it is.
jarin below mentions he wouldn't hesitate buying his kid Xcode for $5... that only works if the parent is in the field also. How many, say, accountants or lawyers would buy their precocious coder-child a bunch of tools or understand the importance of it?
Today, a teenager would say, "What's a paper route?"
So not only did that lead to me being a programmer for a living, I got some negotiation skills out of it too.
You can get Visa gift cards at the convenience store for $10. If a teenager can't find the motivation to scrounge up 10 bucks, they're going to have a hell of a time learning how to program.
You can get Visa gift cards at the
convenience store for $10.
Many successful hackers were brought up in places where $5 is nothing to be sneezed at, and the dance of getting-that-$5-into-Apple's-pocket can cost you more than that in time and effort alone.
Also, "Many successful hackers were brought up in places where $5 is nothing to be sneezed at".. so fucking what? The revenue they bring to the table is immaterial. They don't matter to a large company.
I also think this is an unnecessary and dumb idea.
Smalltalk companies did this to themselves, but with a smaller userbase and bigger fees. (Which is worse in both dimensions!) With $5000 seats, the friction was hella high. Then Java came along with tools that weren't 100th as cool, but which were frictionless and free.
It's kinda the playbook for being a superior technology with an earned reputation for coolness, then losing anyhow because your userbase doesn't grow as fast.
That's one hell of an understatement...
I just want to relate the experience, not start a flame war. Java tools are pretty darn cool nowadays.
I think the pricing was only one factor of Java's success. Smalltalk, for the C programmer, is pretty alien. No source files, no compiler... That takes some to get used to. Java provides a nice path towards OOP that's more forgiving than C++, yet, it's aesthetically compatible with C.
Envy had a few pathologies, but I think there were pathologies in the projects as well.
You can start from here: http://www.gnustep.org/experience/DeveloperTools.html
I do develop open-source software (SumatraPDF) and give it away for free, but this kind of attitude of entitlement always gets me.
Friction is a good word for the problem. Who knows? Maybe in another life I would have actually used Microsoft's stack. I used their tools in college, and at work when they were provided...
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/ [2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/default.aspx
Of course, it took literally a couple of years to get each of those programs started. I remember spending months just arguing back and forth about whether or not an edition of Office should be in MSDNAA (since it is a development platform, from the point of view of add-ins, Access, etc.) and how much lost revenue it would be.
It's just still too convoluted compared to the OSS options out there. Everyone uses PHP, Python or Ruby.
I realize that Microsoft still has 90% of the personal computer market, but it all reads like the last days of Big Blue to me. The king is still king, but the writing is on the wall.
And this is not a Linux neckbeard saying this.
Even getting XCode for our own use to put on our Mac build server will be difficult now; $4.99 may be a token price, but any price in the academic world means that things have to get charged against a cost centre; policies mean it probably can't be charged as IT overhead (like Mac build servers and operating systems can) because it is specifically for development, so it needs to be justified as part of a grant. For things like that, the University will probably want Apple to go a months long process to become a designated approver (Apple hardware is not normally purchased direct from Apple), and to pay for things like that by purchase order - the administrative cost of which would be greatly more than $4.99.
The end result of all this is that Apple will probably not be a supported platform for our software any more, and users will be asked to use a virtual machine or move to a different platform if they want to use our software.
Apple is already one of the most difficult platforms to develop on, largely because of the way their linker and object loaders work; it is one of the few platforms (I think Irix is another) where objects to be opened with a dlopen like mechanism are in a different format to normal shared objects; making the barriers higher for academic users trying to develop multi-platform software will simply result in academic and other free software being less available on Mac; some academic users like being on Mac, but I expect that as it becomes progressively more of a disadvantage and Apple becomes more of a pariah, this will change.
This was a stock machine: walked into Apple Store to buy it. (No special factory config)
Compiling SBCL and a few items from MacPorts worked fine, so everything seems consistent with what I've seen on other Macs since 2005.
http://www.kegel.com/crosstool/
Basically, you can generate your own binaries and ship them under the GPL. No Apple needed.
I'll ask for more info from someone I know who built an OSX cross-compiler under Linux.
What price, other than $0, would be acceptable for a tool that took years of effort by a team of programmers and cost Apple tens of millions in programmer's salaries to develop?
If you can't see this, I don't really know what to say. Apple literally makes billions of dollars on software, you'd think they'd throw the developers that literally helped build their ecosystem a freaking bone. I suppose that's too much to ask from Apple.
Cue the "vote with your wallet", "no one is forcing you to use it" rabble...
Can you clarify the $5-hurts-FOSS argument? I don't mean to sound crass, but there are people who pay more than $5 for coffee. If a one-time charge of $5 to build OS X versions of your FOSS project is a, as you say, "[sizable] obstacle" to entering FOSS development, that's a genuine surprise to me. Especially since Xcode 3 is still absolutely free. If I were a committer on your project I'd buy it myself and donate it, for crying out loud.
They anticipated this, undoubtedly, and put the button right there: "Looking for Xcode 3 because $5 is too much? Here it is!" You're really only paying for the improved GUI. Does your FOSS project use Xcode as its primary development platform, or is it just using the compiler toolchain?
This revolt to $5 is absolutely stunning. Even more worth thinking about is that all the commenting about it on HN equates to far more than $5 in billable time...how many copies could the revolting have purchased?
All this for what? A paltry $10 million or so for Apple which is already rolling in tens of bilions of cash(partly thanks to developers, you always see Jobs touting the app count). Is it even worth it for Apple?
The company is smacking of greed and squeezing the last dollar these days with all these moves like a forced 30% cut of services and now this, which can damage the ecosystem.
>No, cue the you're assuming you won't get Xcode 4 with Lion rabble.
That makes it even worse, Apple can't be making more than $5 million from this.
There's no real reason to rage about this, other than a self-created illusion that the only thing stopping some hypothetical FOSS developer somewhere in Romania from creating the next Apache is the inability to pay Apple 5 dollars.
It's amusing how any time Apple does something like this the apologists come out of the woodwork falling over each other to defend them.
It's somewhat discouraging that Apple is charging for what used to be provided at no cost. Still, if Apple can't make five bucks on a product that other companies sell for hundreds, what hope do any other developers have?
Wait and see if Lion comes with XCode. Then we can say they are actually charging for it.
There's multiple ways around this, everybody just feels like bitching about $5.
They are trying to drive developers to use the App Store? Sounds ridiculous coming out of my mouth.
They are trying to kill off OSX hobbyist experimentation in favor of iOS? I think I'm getting warmer.
Maybe they're trying to set the precedent that you can charge money for utilities in the app store.
I'm not happy about that, but it's seems ever more likely since Linux is getting a lot more usable and the Apple tax is getting a lot more expensive.
Being a hobbyist and learning to program in the 80s meant my dad shelling out hundreds of dollars for THINK Lightspeed Pascal, and yet, somehow I and many others managed to learn to program and become hobbyists and finally professional programmers.
They'll sell you a full-featured, modern IDE with all the pro features uncrippled for a measly $5. That's not a death blow to hobbyists, that's maybe one of the cheapest hobbies on the planet.
Like many other things in computing, the price to play has gotten steadily cheaper over time. When it gets more expensive we should ask why.
It makes sense for Apple's future of curated computing, but it's definitely another dick move.
They just plowed thousands of engineering man-hours into significantly overhauling both the infrastructure (huge amount of work around LLVM) and interface of Xcode for the Xcode 4 release, addressing a substantive number of long-standing complaints along the way. This release is by far the biggest overhaul of the product in the last decade. All of those engineers cost a lot of money. They aren't working on this out of charity. That's why.
I simply do not understand why people are hung up on an IDE that is the product of thousands of engineering man-hours costing as much as a single foot long sandwich slapped together by a bored teenager in 60 seconds.
I think people are objecting because they themselves happened into programming as a passion and career - I know I did. They found some tool, probably for free (QBASIC for me) that got their feet wet initially, and that's how they got their start. A beginner who is neither sure nor convinced that programming is a good thing to pursue is unlikely to spend even a footlong's worth of money on it, and we've lost yet more potential future engineers.
Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free. Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free. When the status quo of the industry is free tools (and the few that are for-pay are getting cheaper every year), one can question why Apple is the odd man out in a sudden reversal.
Sure. And Xcode would probably scare them off anyways, because it's decidedly not set up to be friendly to beginners. This is a non-issue. Beginning programmers on the Mac should under no circumstances go grab Xcode unless they want to feel utterly bewildered.
The $5 charge is utterly beside the point, here. One wonders how you imagine anyone ever gets into a hobby with more than a $5 barrier to entry.
> Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free.
They seem to have drastically increased the amount of effort they're putting into it, probably because of the increased iOS dev audience. That extra effort probably justifies the minor $5 price increase.
> Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free.
Which competitors would those be? Microsoft isn't giving their professional tools away for free, just a drastically cut down starter edition. Sun plowed a ton of cash into NetBeans, but following their financial lead seems ill-advised.
Do you mean Eclipse, NetBeans or any other modern, professional IDE is crippled?
This is a death blow to Apple hobbyists who live in parts of the world that don't have access to the Mac App Store.
All three of them, most probably.
And before we hold a eulogy for the vast swaths of poor put upon hobbyist devs who can't raise $5 or access the App store, you might want to establish the existence of these people actually having these problems rather than asking us to be outraged at a scenario in your imagination.
Of course, Emacs is my Lisp (Clojure) IDE of choice.
As for the idiotic pricing of Xcode 4, I am bothered not by the price tag and the restrictions it imposes on some, but by the fact Apple's accountants interpret SOX in unique and singularly stupid ways.
I have't tried the intelliJ IDEA series (pyCharm, phpStorm, etc) but based on the scala plugin, I betcha they're quite solid as well.
http://devnet.jetbrains.net/thread/287853;jsessionid=521D68C...
XCode Pricing: kinda like pinboard.in at $9.26, just enough to deter somebody from buying, for whatever reason.
There is a reason why Eclipse, NetBeans, Emacs, Eric and so many others compare favorably, if not blow their competition out of the water: it's because some of the developers who use them give back and improve them.
If you just need a compiler, install the development tools on the OS X install DVD that came with your computer. If you want to be doing software development for Mac or iOS, the developer fee is worth it for the documentation and prerelease software.
$5 is nearly as bad as $50: the difference between charging nothing and something is way higher than the difference between charging something and something higher.
Is it to defray hosting costs for a 4 gig app on the App Store? Then why host it for free before on their site?
For me, I actually had to get a Mac before I could even think about writing my first iPhone app. Then I found out my 10.5 Mac Mini wasn't compatible with XCode, so I had to fork over a bit to pick up Leopard. Then comes the $100 or whatever for a developer license so you can build on phone.
After all that, $5 doesn't sound so bad.
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5092/5513444433_fd70db527e.jp...
I actually had to get a computer before writing my first apps, but I could get whatever computer I liked. I never had one that was incompatible with these tools. Then came the $0 for a Python/Java/Perl developer license, so I could build on any server I liked.
After all that, $5 plus hooking myself up to Apple's death by a thousand cuts slow drip sounds pretty bad.
I remember when I first switched to OS X as a student. The free developer tools were very impressive to me. I remember telling people "See, this is how it should be done. You shouldn't charge people to develop for your operating system. More applications for your system only helps you sell!"
I'm sure the free developer tools were also a factor in Microsoft offering a free version of VS. Now, it seems, as Apple is becoming more and more popular, they are moving more and more in the direction that MS did in their hay day.
It appears that a once fairly open system is becoming slowly more and more closed. I sincerely hope that the cynic in me is wrong.
I mean seriously, you're going to spend at least 10 times that amount on programming books, or thousands of times that amount on college classes.
If all you want is to learn programming, there are free alternatives to XCode.
How much have you spent on iPhone apps so far? I have friends who spent several hundred €, one Happy Meal at a time.
Oh wait, you can.
In any case, you need a Mac, and it's gonna cost you.
Getting the proprietary parts for five dollars is certainly not a bad deal. But one has to wonder... why? Is it to cover download costs?
The potential pool of software developers isn't (and shouldn't be) limited to the US and Europe.
This is a step in the wrong direction.
This might be to make that harder and to thwart software piracy up to a point.
Install Instructions for Protools 9
• 0. Make sure you have gdb installed. Test by typing “gdb test” into terminal.
1. Uninstall any versions of Pro Tools that are already installed
2. Install Pro Tools, Complete Production Tookit 2 and HEAT (in the optional installers folder) from the full iso
3. Use the [K]‘ed installer to overwrite the necessary files
4. Launch Pro Tools from the loader and everything should work as expected
This crack requires Xcode to be installed. Xcode can be downloaded for free from developer.apple.com. Also, DO NOT REPLACE THE LOADER. The loader included with the new release (loader version 1.1) was designed for this release as a background process which is what people wanted. It also now breaks on ptrace so there is no need for the anti-ptrace extension posted later in the topic. To use Pro Tools launch the loader and wait a few seconds. Nothing will show while it does some work in the background and then it will launch the main Pro Tools app a few seconds later. Big thanks to unsanity, simblism, and XVX for their respective contributions.
Apple's leveraging the work they put into building the App Store infrastructure (and business deals with credit card companies) to do something a lot of other companies couldn't (make something that was free cost something again without too much fallout).
> it is due to some bizarro accounting rule. xcode4 is sufficiently new that it doesn't count as a free update or something. paid adc members should get free access. yeah, clearly we're trying to monetize it... doh
Same story as with FaceTime except worse. Apple's accountants seem very very weird.
That is certainly the case with Facetime and the 802.11n update.
The real amusement to the law degrees, I'm sure, is that Sarbanes-Oxley doesn't really do anything and it's just a scare word, like Communism.
/s
All kidding aside, just look at that lead-in on Wikipedia. I needed a shot at the end of that, and that's not even a section. I'm curious why this would be the case myself, and I'm still looking, a couple hours later. On a Wednesday night.
If this is all Apple is doing, expect Xcode 4 to be included in Lion. If it's not, they are simply charging for it now.
When you see token $.99 charges for things that should be free, this is the reason Apple does it. It's how they interpret the rules -- and, they are probably right. Since, there is no maintenance yearly charge, they can't keep delivering value to you for the initial price without spreading that money over the lifetime of the value delivery.
It sounds like you might have to first verify your Mac App Store account, though, and if you have no CC, that requires you to email Apple (I just Googled around, and that's what some sites said). So, you'll have to do that first. Just search for "mac app store gift card no credit card" and you'll see what's up.
I really think that what made OSX great was the fact that Xcode was completely free. We are the ones that make a platform a great one because of the app ecosystem that comes with it.
Putting prices -- however small they are -- on these dev tools put a barrier on the accessibility of the platform as a application dev environment.
I'm honestly really happy to have focussed my efforts towards web based apps instead... If its the future of computing -- iOS apps, and on device apps instead of web based -- it sure doesn't look so bright.
The problem here is not the cost of the package in itself -- it is indeed cheap in comparison to the aforementioned computer -- but in the fact that apple chose not to include this cost _in_ the retail price of OSX.
All the bruden is dropped on the devs who then needs to re-sell their apps, generally on the app-store where they are taken another cut.
Apple's strategy seems to give the maximum to the user, while charging the devs that then charge the users. They lock-in their user base, letting the devs deal with prices increases on both sides.
If this turns into a "real issue", such that XCode 3 was rescinded and XCode 4 remained paid only - as opposed to some stupid accounting problem which might mean it would be bundled free with Lion, with XC3 hanging around for (Snow) Leopard - then I suspect we'll soon see MacPorts or their kin come up with a downloadable toolchain based on this existing Apple open source work that would allow them to continue virtually unchanged.
It would be "neat" as in clean. No drama on Apple's behalf. Just put a price tag on the only real compiler, and it's over. Unless someone solves that issue.
I love my mac, I have since OS X was mature enough to be useful, and I've converted tons of people, and I have lots of credit cards.. it's not about the money - Apple is seriously making me think about ditching them.
Isn't this like saying that you'd really like the new version of the dev environment on CD because you don't like DVDs? I doubt anyone would be complaining if it was 2003 and Apple was charging a $5 shipping and handling charge to ship you a DVD.
Apple: you stand to make more with us than without us. Your dollars spend the same as the ones from Android's marketplaces. Be careful when you tread on free. Free makes us friends, pals, maybe even lovers. When I have to pull out the wallet, I stop to ask myself "how much is this relationship worth to me?" Give me XCode and I'll come help you move a couch one day, sell me XCode and you go on a balance sheet where the most cost-effective option wins.
You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put
gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it.
[1] http://developer.apple.com/xcode/index.php
(The comment was edited, as others have noted that they can't download from the ADC site with a free ADC account.)
I don't know what's worse: Making Xcode cost $5, or offering an app for $5 in the app store and free for download.
However, I know that the first thing I'm going to do when I get home is come back here and click that link before they revoke that link.
Note, Xcode 3 is still available for download from connect.apple.com or by following the link on the Xcode 4 websites on developer.apple.com, http://imgur.com/8LHXW was updated on Monday!
You must be an iOS or Mac Developer Program member to download Xcode 4 or you can purchase Xcode 4 from the Mac App Store.
I have an account in the Brazilian store since the day it opened. In order to download (free, mind you) podcasts directly from the iPod, I needed an account in the US store paid for with gift cards.
I also don't see the spin as it represents accurately the cost of Xcode 4 - US$ 5 if you download it (assuming you can) and US$ 99 if bundled with other services.
Alas, this is incorrect. Try to log in with a free developer account and it will tell you to go buy it on the AppStore you dirty hippie.
$5 is not offsetting costs.
It will also cover every machine authorized with your Mac's app store account.
I have 3 boxes. If we assume 5 point releases before the next paid upgrade, that's 63 gigs transferred. At your rate, that's $11.34.
That is ridiculous. Netflix would be making a loss just on the bandwidth if you stream more than 10 movies/month on the $8.99 plan.
And it's not as if Apple's hurting for money, they're rolling around in tens of billions in cash, max this will make them is about $20 million bucks.
gcc is obviously still free, if you get it from anyone other than Apple.
Hopefully solid non-apple gcc packages come out. I don't like the idea of paying $5 to apple to develop generic unix applications on OS X.
If Lion requires users to pay $5 to get the necessary dependencies to build other free software tools, this will be a step back from the status quo.
Imagine if all OS X and iOS apps disappeared today? How many would still buy Apple hardware?
Remember what Visual Basic did for Windows: it killed DOS development in a couple months. Having a very simple IDE any corporate drone can use to make good-looking applications would drive a lot of acceptance for Mac in medium businesses.
ETA: Also does anyone seriously think that the $4.99 is going to remotely even slightly come anywhere within a few orders of magnitude of paying for the development costs? I mean, really?
Gotta pick, guys.
How about: $5 is essentially free for something that is a major piece of software. It's a venti latte at SBUX. It's not going to represent a real obstacle to anyone actually interested in learning to code for the OS (any more than a $25 O'Reilly book would probably be, or $10 used one) and it's also not going to keep anyone locked in because they spent a bunch on the tool.
(If $5 is not an inconsequential amount of money for someone, then yes, they should go use Linux and gcc / java / whatever. Or maybe they should concentrate one making a few bucks mowing lawns or something, assuming they're in the developed world.)
I'm ok with a 0.7% price increase (if I wasn't a registered developer, that is).
[1] http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page [2] http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2010/04/iboot-multibeast-inst...
This is why certain updates for the iPod Touch cost money while they are free for iPhones: It is entirely driven by how Apple writes up iPod Touch vs. iPhone revenue.
Apple reports iPhone revenues over a 24 month period, this is called subscription accounting. Since an iPhone is sold as a subscription, Apple can write off services associated with providing that subscription on an ongoing basis, i.e. give all upgrades away for free.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/tag/subscription-accounting/
iPod Touch and Mac revenues do not use subscription accounting, therefore Apple is not allowed to give away major OS upgrades for these products, it must treat upgrades as separate products that make or lose money for themselves. Apple is not allowed to give away a major iPod Touch upgrade and apply the costs of writing the upgrade to its iPod Touch business.
I am certain of the rules around subscription accounting and its effect on requiring Apple to charge for iPod Touch and Mac OS upgrades (and Apple is happy to charge for OS X upgrades any ways).
Whether the $4.99 for XCode is a byproduct of these rules is conjecture. I think so, but I've looked all over and I can find neither my Apple Employee badge nor my Chartered Accountant diploma, so it's more than fair to doubt me on this.
p.s. Another clue to the reasons for the charge is contained in the fact that XCode is still free for ADC developers. Since ADC revenue is subscription-based, Apple can give away whatever it wants to ADC subscribers.
"Apple has for the first time made this full iOS upgrade free to all of its iPod touch customers, rather than charging the customary $10 fee that provoked groans in the past."
(http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/reviews/entry/apple-ios-4.0...)
This leads me to believe that the whole accounting rules canard was just a way to make more money. Why did they start charging for XCode? Because you'll pay it.
That being said, they haven't said that the XCode charge is a subscription accounting thing, so there's certainly no logical reason why you may not be correct in saying that they are charging for XCode because they can. I'm guessing otherwise, but this is armchair speculation.
UPDATE: I was wrong about subscription-based accounting affecting how Apple accounts for expenses. Here's a link I found:
http://www.macrumors.com/2009/09/23/standards-board-approves...
Or Apple's accountants changed. They seem to be very strange people, and I say that in a bad way.
> And in any case, if that were really true, why not charge a penny? Or the download cost? I don't buy it.
If they think they need to charge for Xcode 4, they probably think amounts under that would be seen as non-compliant. Facetime was $.99 and shipped with new macs.
The law is not particularly concerned with whether the major version number or the minor version number changed. It's all about what features changed.
First I found out Homebrew and macports needed Xcode. I downloaded the 3GB+ monster that is Xcode. Ran the installer, only to find out my OS is outdated. I need to upgrade to 10.6 which costs $30. Checked online to find links to older Xcode versions but the only link available was the most recent Xcode version which doesn't work on 10.5.
And I'm not even a Mac developer, I'm just trying to install Ruby. I tried to install Xcode from my OS X CD, but I really couldn't find it. I installed the utilities pack and it turns out Xcode wasn't there. I got fed up with Apple and switched back to Ubuntu.
I honestly think Apple is driving hackers away from their platform. I don't like the idea of paying for something I don't need. My OSX 10.5 works great, I don't need to upgrade. Why won't Apple put a download link to older Xcode versions and let the OSX upgrade and Xcode 4 sell on their own merits.
I know the link to Xcode 3.2 is still up but it doesn't work on OSX 10.5
My time isn't though.
And I'll waste a lot of it now because I'll have to hunt out a corporate credit card and/or fill out an expense claim to install it on the (company owned) macs we use at work for dev.
$5 may as well be $1000 dollars for the effort I'll have to go through to get it now.
And all so I can get GCC installed so I can use homebrew to build the open source libs I need for doing web / backend dev.
Hoping Apple releases a "lite" version that contains the bare minimum needed to do that without all the extra IDE fluff I never use.
I don't see the price tag having any impact in the iOS/OSX software ecosystem, so, why are they bothering to charge for it?
Though I really don't think it's a good idea to make Xcode 4 non-free.
In the grand scheme of things, Apple's tools and developer membership schemes are fairly generous. It's still making a big step from free to non-free as others have already said. I'm not going to rush to upgrade.
http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/1999/press_0...
It was at one point worth about 2 billion dollars, but I'm guessing it all got washed out after the dot-com bust because word of it was never mentioned again. :-)
Anyways, they aren't doing this because of CDN costs, it's negligible -- they are Akamai's largest customer and are also building their own network as well.
I am quite sure the number of Mac users who download Xcode is negligible compared to the number of Mac users who download movies from that very same CDN. And the size of Xcode is comparable to HD movies.
My guess is that the price is low as a way to introduce people to the idea of paying at all. The small price precludes an outcry. Once everyone is used to paying, they can slowly increase the price over time.
If they started by charging $50 or $100 or more, I suspect there would have been a huge outcry. But I also suspect the price will get to that point sooner or later.
Also, now that the platform has been strongly established, Apple can charge a price for the development tools without fear that developers will abandon them.
I don't like paying Apple for solving problem they've created themselves by putting download behind pointless registration and releasing minor updates as 4GB bundle of everything.
For a diff to work you need to store the original packages, and this will take so much precious disk(for SSD drives on macbooks air) and add complexity.
Linux distros could have been making money for a decade now.
I have been a staunch Apple supporter for years, but lately their anti-hacker stance has become more and more obvious. If you aren't making them money through their store, then fuck off. This token charge for Xcode isn't for profit; it's a message to a certain group saying "You aren't wanted here anymore."
http://lists.apple.com/archives/xcode-users/2009/Nov/msg0042...
Flash Builder: $699.00
TextMate: $56.00
Coda: $99.00
BBedit: $99.99
Xcode 4: $4.99
NetBeans: $0
DevShed C++: $0
Emacs: $0
The complete GNU compiler collection: $0
Xcode 3: $0
http://imgur.com/cWRp6 http://imgur.com/8LHXW
This isn't the end of the world, it is not like now you no longer have access to the development tools. I wonder like a lot of people if this has to do with tax laws.
> it is not like now you no longer have access
> to the development tools
If it just slowly dies, then this is a very shrewd move by Apple because the pain (i.e. "I have to pay to get any dev tools") comes some time in the future and the people can dismiss the nay-sayers right now with, "but you can still get X Code 3 for free!" If Apple were to immediately pull XCode 3, and all access to dev tools was pay-only, then it would be a lot easier for more people to side with the people decrying this move.
I don't know what the future holds, I don't work at Apple, and if I did I am pretty sure I wouldn't be allowed to tell you.
Sure we can speculate at this point, honestly I think that Xcode 3 has run its course and that Xcode 4 is the future.
Xcode 4 being priced the way it is may be for tax reasons, Xcode 4 may be shipped with OS X Lion, Xcode 4 may later on be offered as a $50 package on the Mac App Store. We don't know. For now I hope, and tend to agree with people that Xcode 4 will be bundled with OS X Lion and at that point will be free once more.
I have to periodically check whether my version is out of date. When it is, I have to find the download URL, click on it, remember to come back when the package has downloaded, and run the installer. I have to do this on all of my machines.
Sure, this isn't all that much work. But $4.99 isn't that much money, either.
If paying for the software were easy for everyone who has a Mac everywhere, I would feel a little bit uncomfortable, but that would be all. My point is that this move may effectively shut off parts of the world that have no access to the Mac App Store.
Don't get me wrong: I like Apple and used Apple computers since my early days as an Apple II developer. My main computers run Linux, but I like to keep a Mac around. What worries me is that this move actually hurts Apple a lot more than we may realize at first.
It's, of course, next to impossible to develop Mac software without a Mac and, since we are talking about Xcode, access to a modern Mac is a necessary condition.
Now, if I want to update anything I type the following in the command line:
sudo apt-get udpdate sudo apt-get upgrade
... And that is all. Unless you meant some other kind of pain and suffering?
Yes, I finally decided to take the plunge and buy it in December, after a few years using Eclipse. Never going back.
I used to be a big Eclipse proponent, but I must say I don't understand the "I want free tooling" mentality anymore. If it's a tool you are going to use every day, the cost is nothing compared to the productivity gains.
Yes. Because Xcode has been free for 10 years it's taken for granted that Xcode is free, and because OSX's base install does contain any C compilers, it's in the Xcode install.
I think you ment to say "Doesn't" instead of does. This nullifies any argument that GCC and the Gnu Toolchain are free to download, if in a year from now the OS you buy doesn't contain GCC in the base install in order to download and compile GCC.
(This is tongue-in-cheek! I use Vim!)
The bottom line is that many vendors learnt that to make tools available at a low price point for at least some audiences to capture mindshare.
This is the first time Apple has offered a major XCode upgrade midstream between OS releases, so there isn't really any precedence for how they should handle it.
As for me, I'm sticking with XCode 3 for the time being. XCode 4 just isn't ready for prime time, in my experience. It is, however, a great leap in usability, so I'm sure anyone who found XCode difficult to learn will appreciate XCode 4. Those of us who are comfortable in XCode 3 are less enthusiastic.
This is going to be included on the Lion disc, and we're only paying for it separately this spring due to an accounting rule.
I'll bet $4.99 of my own money on it.
Apple has sometimes been infamous for charging for updates typically expected for free. The most frequent example has been major iPod touch firmware upgrades, which cost a small fee up until iOS 4. In 2007, the company went so far as charging $2 to enable 802.11n Wi-Fi on some Macs.
Read more: http://www.macnn.com/articles/11/02/24/may.be.trying.to.avoi...
I'm so tired of Apple.
For some reason I am experiencing cognitive dissonance...
May I ask how you fund your activities?
I plan on starting on a PhD when I'm done, and basically continue like this. How I continue to fund this after the protective bubble of academia I haven't really considered yet, but that's a few years of for now anyway.
It would be a lot easier to do this if people were generally willing to give a few dollars for things that were arguably far more valuable to them than a cup of coffee, but sadly the 'software should be free' meme undermines that.
I think that a general acceptance that software is worth a little bit rather than free would allow more people to hack for the benefit of the world. I think the free model benefits those who are well funded from other sources, further concentrating power in the hands of the well off.
Obviously I'd like a unicorn as well, but maybe two wishes is too much to ask for.
This is just a small part of the plan. Just wait until you have to be in a Apple approved facility, wearing apple approved developer uniforms to independently program anything for Apple.
MOOOOOAAAR!!!
1. Xcode is 4.2GB in size. 2. Bandwidth costs about $0.10/GB, so that's $0.42 per download. 3. Every update requires re-downloading. 4. We'll update more than 10 times before Xcode 5 comes out. 5. So let's charge $4.99!
(Of course they pay less than $0.10/GB for bandwidth at their scale. Don't panic about the exact number.)
Charging for the forums/bug tracker is probably a good way to keep people out who aren't that serious about development, but I don't get why they charge for XCode. It's not like they'd make any relevant amount of money off XCode.
Stupid tax for both platforms.
With that in mind, they've replaced gcc with clang in XCode 4, didn't they?
Maybe they want those downloading to truly have an interest in doing something with the toolkit and not just downloading it to look at/tinker with. A $4.99 hurdle is probably just enough to cull out a significant amount of downloads by people who probably wouldn't actually use it anyways.
Perhaps it sets up an expectation for the consumer - a small utility should cost about $0.99 and that a larger application should be about $4.99.
This gets consumers in the habit of paying for software they might expect to be free, motivating developers to use the Mac App store and builds up an ecosystem to match the iOS app store.
- from the Xcode download page.
Slightly annoying that it costs money now, but $4.99 for a full featured IDE (even one that used to be free) is still a pretty good deal.
...or actually, $1,999.99
i think i will pass.
I can't post values that aren't mine. But i can say that none made much more than others ...from what they tell me.
one would probably compile on a friends mac and sell on the apple store, but since he would have all the hassle of also setting up a bank account in the US he never bothered.
;-)