It is absolutely insignificant compared to the cost of developing software.
It’s a tool needed to do a job. Go talk to a carpenter, a builder or a mechanic and ask them how much they spent on tools. Then compare their hourly rates to that of a software engineer.
They are equivalent if not more, where I am.
I can develop software comfortably on a $100 laptop and whatever choice of FOSS operating system. You can get a workable but less comfortable setup with an inexpensive device like the raspberry pi or a used system.
That is part of what makes CS special compared to other fields, the tools and information are available to everyone who has a working computer and internet access instead of being extremely expensive and locked behind gatekeepers like colleges.
Also keep in mind that the free tools and operating systems are not "junky" or whatever you might assume if you aren't familiar with them. GCC and LLVM are examples of extremely high quality FOSS toolchains, Debian and FreeBSD for operating systems.
>PlayStation developers need to cough up £ 12,000 for the full system (which Sony is adamant it doesn’t make money on), although all subsequent software tools and hardware upgrades are free.
https://www.retroreversing.com/official-playStation-devkit
Not to mention other obscene costs that were common, like charging developers to issue a patch for software sold online.
>Double Fine's Tim Schaefer pegged the cost of submitting an Xbox 360 patch at $40,000
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/microsoft-comes-under...
The “largely free” is in contrast with platforms having >$25,000/yr entry costs just for a license.
My personal situation: I wanted to add an iOS client for the game I've been developing in Flutter. I did not have a mac or an iphone already. Fortunately, I've been able to borrow them for builds and occasional testing. But, that's obviously not optimal, and there's zero good reason that Apple couldn't provide their build tools for other platforms. Instead, they leverage their monopoly on the app store to force hardware sales to developers.
How do you figure? Then Apple would have to maintain their build tools for other platforms. Waste of resources for something that ultimately isn't going to make Apple money. It's no different than Microsoft intentionally gimping Excel on Mac.
I've never seen anyone complain that they have to own a Windows computer to develop Windows apps. Or a Playstation to develop Playstation games. I'm not sure why Apple is such an exception in your eyes.
It makes sense on Apple's part, but I still dislike it.
> I've never seen anyone complain that they have to own a Windows computer to develop Windows apps.
Windows can be installed on any computer, whereas macOS requires purchasing Mac hardware. Additionally you can cross-compile Windows apps on Linux (and possibly Mac) using MinGW toolchains (or with great difficulty, MSVC on Wine).
Running Windows natively requires an Intel PC. an Intel Mac via Boot Camp (but I'd advise buying a two-button mouse with a scroll wheel if you do that), or a subset of ARM PCs for which Microsoft provides ARM builds. That's definitely not "any computer" or even "practically any computer."
maybe simply unaware of the alternative ecosystem costs
The iCE40 boards are sub $20 (iCESugar nano) and have an open source toolchains. And things like the ECP5(G) boards are large enough to host full RISC-V/etc environments for less than $50.
So, yah, FPGA's can get outrageously expensive, but there are a lot of low end devices with a lot of capabilities (those ECP5's have highspeed serdes, which can act as PCIe cards for example).