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achompas

"Wow, I'd love to develop for Mac! Let's see...where's Xcode..."

Dev navigates to the App Store.

"Ah! Here we are. Now I can make splendid apps for Mac and iOS like I've always want--"

He notices the $5 fee...jaw drops, eyes bug out.

"What is THIS?! A price for DEV TOOLS?! Confound it all, now I can't develop for the platforms I love!"

Buries head in hands, then looks to the heavens.

"JOOOOOOOOOOOBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBS!!!"

End scene.

Working title of this play: "The Story of a Developer That Doesn't Exist."

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I know you're being tongue-in-cheek, but it seems like a lot of others aren't.

This is only five dollars folks. You get a hell of a lot of value for that five bucks. I don't think Apple will even recoup their development and distribution costs with that. I'm guessing the main reason for the price is to deter every man and his dog from downloading it - anyone who cares can part with five bucks.

It is a puzzle. At one time, developer tools were priced to extract money from developers. Then, when third-party free tools came along, platform owners realized that market share and lock-in was much more valuable and started giving their tools away for free. But now Apple is neither charging to recoup development costs nor giving tools away. It is strange that the cost should be so close to free yet not actually be free.

My working assumption is that Apple is charging to ensure that each developer must experience the App Store purchasing process at least once, thereby encouraging them to write apps for it.

But, if you pay for the Mac Developer Program, you can download it from the website. So either $5 or $99/year. But you need to pay $99/year to submit apps to the app store—at least iOS app store, I assume the same for Mac App Store. So developers don't have to experience the app store.

I think it is to deter everyone from installing XCode just because they can. That 4+ GB download isn't free on their side. It is just enough of a pain point to make sure the user is sure they want it, but not so bad that people have to save up for it.

Well, each time a single app sells on the app store, they get 30%. If we assume it costs $5 to host XCode, then if each developer averages 17 downloads, they'll make a few cents off of each one. If we assume that one developer in a thousand gets 17,000 downloads, they'll still make money.

The argument for covering their hosting costs seems hollow to me, even if we assume it actually costs $5.

Does it matter in the slightest if every man and his dog does download this set of tools?

The more people (or dogs) who download this framework, the greater the potential revenue for Apple.

I understand that it is "only $5". But Apple makes $billions, so why the heck do they need to make $5 off someone who may want to code for their platform?

It's not about making money. It's about detering those that have no interest in downloading 4-5GB in software they'll never use. There are LOADS of people out there that do that. I know many people like this. The kind that download every Ubuntu release in ISO format, yet run Windows.

Anyone that is revenue potential for Apple is going to pay. Actually, many of them are already paying $99/year anyway, so they get it gratis.

And you're mistaken about the assumption that anyone who downloads this, at any price, represents greater potential revenue. Charging a tiny nominal sum for something of value is common practice to deter time-wasters. Not just in the software industry, either. There is a psychological effect as well - if you pay for something, you are more likely to ascribe value to it, and more likely to investment time into it.

What's the bet that this comes free on the Lion disc, anyway.

Won't Apple recoup their costs through selling a platform strengthened by everything Xcode-using developers create?

Won't developers recoup their costs by selling software through a platform strengthened by Apple's massive infrastructure and marketing?

How much do Microsoft's dev tools cost? (honest question)

There are free (Express) versions of Visual Studio but they lack those awesome Visual Studio Professional features AND Visual Studio Professional costs 1500 bucks.

My experience: they're free, but they cost a piece of your sanity. [0]

I wanted to set up Visual Studio Express on my Windows partition just so I could screw around with Silverlight. Two hours, about 12 forum threads, and three beers later, I vowed to never develop anything for Microsoft.

[0] http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-ed...

The SDKs are free, and ship with compilers. The Express GUI development environments are free, but limited.

There are third party tools like sharpdevelop which are generally better than the express tools.

What about someone who isn't in love with the platform, just curious?

Act two:

-----

"Hey, everyone's always talking about iOS...maybe I should check out it's dev tools."

Dev navigates to the App Store.

"Ah! Here we are. Now I can find out more about making apps for--"

He notices the $5 fee...jaw drops, eyes bug out.

"What is THIS?! $5?! Now I can't have my BURNT STARBUCKS TOMORROW!"

Buries head in hands, then looks to the heavens.

"JOOOOOOOOOOOBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBS!!!"

End scene.

-----

On a serious note, I was a curious developer. Couldn't grab Xcode 4 because I didn't have Snow Leopard, so I actually went and paid $29 so I could try developing for iOS. Very happy with my purchase.

I think people are forgetting that it's $5 AND the additional hassle of entering your credit card information and so on. The cost could be a dime and Apple would still be raising a non-trivial barrier to entry.

Further, it seems like a pretty big "fuck you" to anyone under 18 and/or living in a country, like Brazil, where you can't pay for it.

What credit card info? You're telling me someone would want to develop for Apple after owning a Mac but having never bought something from iTunes before?

Everyone under 18 can buy a iTunes gift card. (It’s a hassle but it’s not impossible.)

Okay, you've got me.

I hope there is some core distribution of basic build tools available for free in the future though, the first step to building anything on OSX is "go download/install xcode". The community could work around it since all these build tools are freely available, but it's nice to have an official bundle available from upstream.

It sure does look like very petty nickel and diming. My guess is they put a nominal price so they keep out the undesirable riff-raff.

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