Glad to see it's back to free. Now I wish I didn't waste that $5...
Now, didn't Apple (or at least its fanboys army) said something like they couldn't legally make Xcode free to justify those 5 bucks? I'm perplexed...
(An extremely low price point like $5 is generally a tip-off that Apple is just charging a nominal fee to satisfy accounting rules.)
But the precise bar for when they feel like they need to charge is something only Apple could tell you, and maybe not even them. Like I said, their interpretation of the law is idiosyncratic.
This would apparently set things up for providing new features (ostensibly iCloud) without having to charge small increments and still adhere to their conservative SOX interpretation.
edit: found it. http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/07/19/apple_to_incre...
Compared to Xcode 3, it lacks significant functionality that is quite likely to cause you problems immediately: no scripts menu, no disassembly window, no search'n'replace in selection, no remote OS X debugging, no Interface Builder plugins. Adding new functionality is nice, but if you've done without it so far, you can keep doing without it. Taking functionality away, on the other hand...
Whilst I've no doubt that Xcode 4 will eventually become better than Xcode 3 in all respects (not that Xcode 3 was all that great to start with...), at the moment it is not. So you're paying $5 for something that could easily end up worse for you than something that is free!
I think "waste" is a reasonable way of putting it. Perhaps a touch over-dramatic for my taste, but reasonable nonetheless.
(DISCLAIMER: if you don't mind what's not in Xcode 4, $5 might not seem like a waste. Unfortunately people can only argue from their own experience. This argument is made from mine. I'm sure yours was more fun, but mine is all I've got.)
if you paid $5 for a pencil, to be told a few days later that the same pencil was being offered freely, would wish you had waited for the free pencil?
I am reminded of the good ol' days of selling Linux by the pound...
Would you feel the same way if you were renting a house, and had been saving away money for years, so decided to buy it off your landlord so that you would be a homeowner rather than renting all your life. Then a week later the same landlord, who owns all the houses on the street, decides to give the houses away to the tenants. Are you seriously going to be sat there, having spent six figures on the house, and say "I was willing to pay the price, I don't care about them now being given away free"?
Even on a less extreme example, if you spend $1000 on an iPad, and the next week an iPad 2 is announced and your iPad is in shops for $500, are you seriously not going to think "fuck, wish I waited to buy it"?
Would you choose to buy an item for $X or for $0?
It isn't that you perceive the item as being worth less, it's just that you could have the item AND the $X.
I’m not crying over the purchase of my 64MB, 350MHz and 4GB PC in 1998 because if I were to remove the time component the price I paid for it was way, way, way too high. That’s absurd, you don’t do that.
The amount of regret changes with the time span, largely because of the utility you gain in the interim, but the key is the incomplete information - if you had perfect knowledge, would you still make the same decision?
If you knew in 1998 that 10 years later, your computer would be virtually worthless, would you still have bought it? Sure. In fact, you did know the value would approach zero over time, so there's little need for regret beyond nostalgia.
Here's one example from 2007: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/01/15/apple_to_impos...
Here's another more recent, longer in-depth article: http://blog.phirephoenix.com/1463/hey-apple-stop-hiding-behi...