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Comment by seanalltogether | Hacker News Reader

The only thing in this blog post I can identify with is the weariness of the Apple update requirement treadmill. If your phone updates to the latest OS, you have to use the latest XCode to build or test an app on it, to use the latest XCode, you have to be on the latest mac OS, to be on the latest mac OS you have to have supported hardware or you can hope that someone has come up with a hacked patcher to get you on the latest OS.

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I hate this as a developer. I feel this is done to force you to buy newer hardware sooner. The SDKs could be decoupled from the Xcode version.

You can work around it a little bit by installing the iOS device support files manually without updating Xcode, but it only allows you to deploy to the device. If you want to build against the newer SDK, you have to update.

Going forward this is one of the reasons I don’t want to personally develop any more apps, as I don’t want to be forced to buy new macs every five years or so.

Not to mention with every new release of Xcode, I seem to be immediately unable to build any (or at least many) of my previous projects without much manual tinkering.

Jumping through hoops to keep (or retrieve) older SDKs etc.

Admittedly I haven't tried this in a year or so, but I imagine the experience hasn't improved.

In no other ecosystem have I found existing projects to break so quickly and reliably with every update to my IDE. I would dread Xcode updates for this reason.

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