Comment by Aaargh20318 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aaargh20318 | Hacker News Reader

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> it’s expensive to develop for iOS as you need a semi-recent Mac

I'm so tired of this bullshit argument. No it's not expensive to develop for iOS. You can get an M2 Mac Mini for $599. Upgrade it with more memory and storage and you're still well under $2k. How is that expensive? If you can't afford the $2k for a Mac then you certainly can't afford the developer who has to use it.

There are few professions that require at little investment in tools as a fraction of the salary of the professional using those tools as software development. Go ask a carpenter how much they spent on tools and how much they get paid.

"But what about people who program as a hobby" I hear you say. Again, it's one of the cheapest hobbies you can possibly have. Have you ever talked to anyone who had any kind of hobby? Ask anyone who is a hobby musician how much they spend on instruments. Ask a hobby photographer how much their equipment is worth. Ask anyone who's into arts and crafts what they spend on their hobby. Hobbies cost money, and most cost a lot more than a new Mac every couple of years.

Even 600$ is quite a bit of money for a small open source project, especially outside of first world contries. You cannot except every single open source developer to buy somewhat overpriced hardware just to publish it in one platform.

None of the other desktop/mobile platforms require specific hardware , Windows/Linux/Android can all be virtualized/cross compiled to. The only reason you cannot cross compile/virtualize from other platforms is because Apple doesn't want you to. Its possible, there are projects that allow you to do so, but it violates Apple's license.

https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross

Also its not fair to compare hobbies like photography or music to programming, you don't need any physical hardware other than a computer for majority of the cases, except testing (even that can be done somewhat reliably by virtualization), and when you are artificially forced to buy hardware just to publish to a platform.

> None of the other desktop/mobile platforms require specific hardware

But they still require hardware, and that hardware isn’t free either.

That hardware is something you use for other purposes, so it's free for the hobby. The challenge of specific hardware is that you can't use your non-specific one and have to pay

There are plenty of old laptops and PCs that you can get for free that are still supported.

You also can just virtualize other platforms.

"Hardware" is cheap, easily accessible all around the world, Apple hardware is not.

$2k is roughly six median monthly salaries in my country, which is pretty typical for the world we live in. Maybe even on the larger side. I am fully aware you don't care about most of the world and will advise us to follow some other pursuit, I've heard this many times before. (Which we do, Apple is not really relevant outside the US.)

Sheet music doesn't require me to buy an instrument from a specific manufacturer, nor do the instruments come with EULA that limit how I can use them.

Price is not the point. Some of us simply refuse to buy such products.

Way to move the goalposts there. We went from “it’s too expensive” to “price is not the point”

$2000 is expensive for an open source project where people are contributing in their free time. Are you suggesting that EVERY person that wants to work on the iOS support of python buys themselves a $2000 mac, switches their entire workflow to MacOS etc?

> Again, it's one of the cheapest hobbies you can possibly have.

No, definitly not, ESPECIALLY not for open source development.

> EVERY person that wants to work on the iOS support of python buys themselves a $2000 mac, switches their entire workflow to MacOS etc?

Those who don’t have one already can go work on something else. There’s a world of open source libraries for iOS, and no one has forced you to “want to work on” any of them. What a strange attitude, getting angry that other people (e.g. Russell Keith-Magee and Ned Deily — long time Python committer) want to do work that you can’t.

You sound like you live in a bubble. You must not know many people who have hobbies other than computer programming. Let’s say you buy a $2000 Mac and write it off in 3 years (in practice it’s more like 5, but let’s go for a worst-case scenario). What other hobby only costs $666 a year?

> Have you ever talked to anyone who had any kind of hobby?

Yes, and know plenty that are literally close to $0

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