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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Given how hard they're trying to get people to care about Mac dev again - as with for example the directx to metal converter they want gangbusters on - it's a sensible & good move.

They also have a public beta in July.

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If they want people to care about mac dev they should get rid of the fee entirely and supply build tools for Linux/Windows. At the very least CLI tools that can perform the actual compilation. Cross platform compilation should be possible, especially for CI but also to reduce friction of onboarding new devs.

It's absolutely ridiculous that you have to pay to add value to a platform.

Thankfully osxcross[0] is already a thing and does already work fairly well.

[0] https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross

I was going to post this. osxcross is a fantastic project.

This plus the unexpected price decrease on the Macbook Air - feels like they're struggling a little bit in the Mac category. That's fantastic. Apple is at their best when they are struggling.

There's of course also this from the latest quarterly report (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/FY23_Q2_Consolidated_Fin...):

Net sales for the Mac category:

Q1 '23: $7,618M

Q1 '22: $10,435M

Yes, and more broadly $Company is at their best when they are struggling.

Twitter fails this test.

I don't think this is an axiom. Apple having a business unit performing under expectations though still profitable may be a win for buyers because they're well capitalized to shave margins to move more units.

A struggling business that isn't well capitalized can't do the same thing, and that is way more typical

Maybe a better way to generalize would be "when not at the top of the world"

Apple, being a functional organization, doesn't have P&Ls or business units. It does have product lines.

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