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Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

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Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#221

Post by msg »

msbarnett wrote: post #154
msg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the difference between free and not free. They are trying to drive developers to use the App Store? Sounds ridiculous coming out of my mouth. They are trying to kill off OSX hobbyist experimentation in favor of iOS? I think I'm getting warmer.

Is this supposed to be satire? Being a hobbyist and learning to program in the 80s meant my dad shelling out hundreds of dollars for THINK Lightspeed Pascal, and yet, somehow I and many others managed to learn to program and become hobbyists and finally professional programmers. They'll sell you a full-featured, modern IDE with all the pro features uncrippled for a measly $5 . That's not a death blow to hobbyists, th…

It was free, so I don't how you can call it anything but erecting a barrier to entry to developing POSIX apps on the Mac. You don't just need $5, you need a credit card number.

Like many other things in computing, the price to play has gotten steadily cheaper over time. When it gets more expensive we should ask why.

It makes sense for Apple's future of curated computing, but it's definitely another dick move.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#222

Post by merijnv »

rbarooah wrote: post #188

Based on the general sentiment in this thread, I guess the HN community doesn't want people to be able to charge money for software. For some reason I am experiencing cognitive dissonance...

Well, HN seems to also attract a lot of people like me who just want to hack, entrepreneurial nonsense be damned. And I will gladly make my software free and "throw away" all the profit I could make, because I believe I am contributing to a better world.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#223

Post by glesperance »

Jgrubb wrote: post #166
glesperance wrote: post #46

With this and the huge margins apple are already taking over the developers' revenue I really feel like we as developers are getting less and less respect from Apple. I really think that what made OSX great was the fact that Xcode was completely free. We are the ones that make a platform a great one because of the app ecosystem that comes with it. Putting prices -- however small they are -- on these dev tools put a b…

What got me into programming in the first place was that XCode was free. I just don't get why you'd charge this small an amount for something that you have to buy a thousand dollar computer from them to run it on. It's hard to see this as anything but a tiny little insult.

I guess your comparison between the Xcode price and the one of the apple computer on which it runs is legitimate.

The problem here is not the cost of the package in itself -- it is indeed cheap in comparison to the aforementioned computer -- but in the fact that apple chose not to include this cost _in_ the retail price of OSX.

All the bruden is dropped on the devs who then needs to re-sell their apps, generally on the app-store where they are taken another cut.

Apple's strategy seems to give the maximum to the user, while charging the devs that then charge the users. They lock-in their user base, letting the devs deal with prices increases on both sides.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#224

Post by josso »

pornel wrote: post #10
kylelibra wrote: post #2

For the convenience of being able to download Xcode through the mac store and get the updates automatically, I'll gladly pay $4.99.

Automatic updates should be obvious standard feature, not a premium. I don't like paying Apple for solving problem they've created themselves by putting download behind pointless registration and releasing minor updates as 4GB bundle of everything.

I would pay $5 just for a diff-patch-update instead of "download 5GB again because of new iOS-version".

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#225

Post by sstrudeau »

ptomato wrote: post #120
rbanffy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why not US$ 0.99?

Possible theory: Cost of bandwidth for downloading 4.2GB is > .99? Honestly, I have no idea, though.

Amazon S3 transfer costs are (worst case) $0.14/GB, or < $0.60 for 4.2GB. Apple certainly pays a lot less than that per bit.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#226

Post by jarin »

stcredzero wrote: post #98
joshfraser wrote: post #58

Seeing this reminded me of a Microsoft focus group I was invited to be a part of a few years ago. As a CTO who had decided to build everyone on top of free software, they wanted to know what it take to make me to switch to a Microsoft stack. I told them they were 10 years too late. You see, I made the decision to use LAMP stack not because it was cheaper, but because it's what I knew. And the reason I knew LAMP stack…

And while, $5 is still well within the average teenagers reach, it's still a lot more friction than free. Smalltalk companies did this to themselves, but with a smaller userbase and bigger fees. (Which is worse in both dimensions!) With $5000 seats, the friction was hella high. Then Java came along with tools that weren't 100th as cool, but which were frictionless and free. It's kinda the playbook for being a superio…

Great, so all someone needs to do is make a decent Cocoa IDE (don't forget Instruments and an iOS simulator!) and give it away for free. Problem solved.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#227

Post by rbanffy »

tedunangst wrote: post #189
rbanffy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why not US$ 0.99?

$0.99 is too cheap to convince a regulator that it's the true value of the software?

Seriously, whatever magic their accountants may have to do to make a free add-on to an OS they sell remain free, it's worth to reduce the friction for new OSX developers.

Remember what Visual Basic did for Windows: it killed DOS development in a couple months. Having a very simple IDE any corporate drone can use to make good-looking applications would drive a lot of acceptance for Mac in medium businesses.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#228

Post by eneveu »

rbanffy wrote: post #111
jarin wrote: post #96

Visual Studio: $549.00 Flash Builder: $699.00 TextMate: $56.00 Coda: $99.00 BBedit: $99.99 Xcode 4: $4.99

Eclipse: $0 NetBeans: $0 DevShed C++: $0 Emacs: $0 The complete GNU compiler collection: $0 Xcode 3: $0

IntelliJ IDEA 10 (personal license): 220€

Yes, I finally decided to take the plunge and buy it in December, after a few years using Eclipse. Never going back.

I used to be a big Eclipse proponent, but I must say I don't understand the "I want free tooling" mentality anymore. If it's a tool you are going to use every day, the cost is nothing compared to the productivity gains.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#229

Post by madlep »

$5 is super cheap and affordable.

My time isn't though.

And I'll waste a lot of it now because I'll have to hunt out a corporate credit card and/or fill out an expense claim to install it on the (company owned) macs we use at work for dev.

$5 may as well be $1000 dollars for the effort I'll have to go through to get it now.

And all so I can get GCC installed so I can use homebrew to build the open source libs I need for doing web / backend dev.

Hoping Apple releases a "lite" version that contains the bare minimum needed to do that without all the extra IDE fluff I never use.

Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99

#230

Post by jarin »

potatolicious wrote: post #218
jonursenbach wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree with you, having grown up on free tools, but $5 is a lot easier to ask a parent for than $99/year to get access to this kind of stuff.

The $99/year thing is not terrible . I remember saving money from my paper route to buy tools/lib licenses to some specialized things I really wanted. Selling your parents on a single $99 purchase is a lot easier than trying to sell a $5 purchase every week. 'Tis just the way it is. jarin below mentions he wouldn't hesitate buying his kid Xcode for $5... that only works if the parent is in the field also. How many, s…

All the hypothetical teenager would have to do is point them to one of the many news articles about other teenagers making millions on the App Store.
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