Hacker News Reader

Comment by kylelibra | Hacker News Reader

For the convenience of being able to download Xcode through the mac store and get the updates automatically, I'll gladly pay $4.99.

View on HN

Automatic updates should be obvious standard feature, not a premium.

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.

Don't worry, updates will still be 4GB bundles of everything, last time I updated iTunes to 10.2.1 Apple still hadn't found out about bsdiff.

I would pay $5 just for a diff-patch-update instead of "download 5GB again because of new iOS-version".

That is the same problem Ubuntu has, a minor update, download entires packages.

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.

While I agree it's still quite cheap, I wonder why Apple suddenly decided to start charging almost nothing for something that used to be free.

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?

It's still free, for registered Apple developers who pay the $99 a year.

If you are really into developing for Apple, $99/year is not that bad. Still, the free-as-in-beer Xcode attracted those curious with the platform. Don't forget those who can't set up a store account (Brazil was on this list until not that long ago) will not be able to even try it.

Xcode 3 is still available for free download.

Though I really don't think it's a good idea to make Xcode 4 non-free.

It's certainly a lot cheaper than ~$3000 /year (MSDN?), or ~$4000 /year (IBM?) or ~$3600 /year (Lispworks?).

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.

One guess would be that they didn't want a 3gb app constantly being downloaded by people who wouldn't use it for more than 30 seconds. I realize bandwidth is incredibly cheap, but we are always hearing talking of Apple trying to offset costs, maybe this factored into the thinking?

So make it download by torrent transparently like (IIRC) Starcraft.

Seems like a reasonable guess. However, considering how large the update downloads are for even minor upgrades of Apple software I always assumed Steve secretly owned stock in a CDN.

Steve (Apple) did... in Akamai.

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.

Makes sense. Perhaps that's why OSX is the only modern Unix (sorry AIX, HP-UX) that has no package management system... ;-)

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.

You think that Apple are the ones who want to lower the bandwidth? I'm the one who had to download 3.8GB for a whole IDE and development kit when all I wanted was gcc and a linker. If they cared about bandwidth more than making programmers download their own tools, they'd have made the command-line tools their own separate install.

They want to shove the Mac App Store in developers' faces.

"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?"

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.

Updates have always been automatic through Software Update. I have never manually downloaded an update for Xcode.

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."

In over 2 years I've never once seen Xcode update through Software Update - is there a secret setting somewhere to enable it? I'm ready to plunk down the $4.99 just to get the automatic update in the App store. Thanks!

You're right. Xcode 3 doesn't update automatically.

I'm pretty sure it does. I'll use this as a reference:

http://lists.apple.com/archives/xcode-users/2009/Nov/msg0042...

Debian has been doing nice updates and upgrades over the network for 15 years. It's not that difficult.

I would want automatic updates too, but only if they didn't break every existing SDK on your machine. This is currently not the case, so thanks, but no thanks.

Agreed. You don't need to value your time very highly for this to be an excellent value proposition. Apple's developer site is an absolute nightmare to use, hopefully this means I'll never need to figure it out again.

I'm not sure if this applies to Xcode, but at least with Coda, even if you purchase it outside the App Store, it has an 'Installed' label and presumably gets updated through the App Store as well.

The app store can detect I'd apps are installed (through their bundle identifiers) to prevent you from accidentally buying them twice, but it will not update apps that haven't been downloaded through the store.

I believe that was considered a bug in the App store.

Is there a free option for those who don't mind downloading it outside the app store?

Xcode 3. You can grab it from http://developer.apple.com/

I do wonder: for how long will Xcode 3 remain available on Apple's site? I also wonder what they may attempt to do to effectively break Xcode 3, or make it where Xcode 4 is necessary for future development? I wouldn't put it past them.

Let's rage about things that haven't happened yet.

I think we are going to see Xcode 4 bundled with Lion, at that point it will become available to everyone at developer.apple.com, and that the current Xcode 4 stuff is based upon Tax laws just like it was before with the iOS updates.

IIRC, you can download earlier versions of Xcode for earlier releases of OSX.

What? You would not only pay for that convenience, but pay, per app?

Linux distros could have been making money for a decade now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com