If you are really into developing for Apple, $99/year is not that bad. Still, the free-as-in-beer Xcode attracted those curious with the platform. Don't forget those who can't set up a store account (Brazil was on this list until not that long ago) will not be able to even try it.
It's certainly a lot cheaper than ~$3000 /year (MSDN?), or ~$4000 /year (IBM?) or ~$3600 /year (Lispworks?).
In the grand scheme of things, Apple's tools and developer membership schemes are fairly generous. It's still making a big step from free to non-free as others have already said. I'm not going to rush to upgrade.
One guess would be that they didn't want a 3gb app constantly being downloaded by people who wouldn't use it for more than 30 seconds. I realize bandwidth is incredibly cheap, but we are always hearing talking of Apple trying to offset costs, maybe this factored into the thinking?
Seems like a reasonable guess. However, considering how large the update downloads are for even minor upgrades of Apple software I always assumed Steve secretly owned stock in a CDN.
It was at one point worth about 2 billion dollars, but I'm guessing it all got washed out after the dot-com bust because word of it was never mentioned again. :-)
Anyways, they aren't doing this because of CDN costs, it's negligible -- they are Akamai's largest customer and are also building their own network as well.
Makes sense. Perhaps that's why OSX is the only modern Unix (sorry AIX, HP-UX) that has no package management system... ;-)
I am quite sure the number of Mac users who download Xcode is negligible compared to the number of Mac users who download movies from that very same CDN. And the size of Xcode is comparable to HD movies.
You think that Apple are the ones who want to lower the bandwidth? I'm the one who had to download 3.8GB for a whole IDE and development kit when all I wanted was gcc and a linker. If they cared about bandwidth more than making programmers download their own tools, they'd have made the command-line tools their own separate install.
"I don't see the price tag having any impact in the iOS/OSX software ecosystem, so, why are they bothering to charge for it?"
My guess is that the price is low as a way to introduce people to the idea of paying at all. The small price precludes an outcry. Once everyone is used to paying, they can slowly increase the price over time.
If they started by charging $50 or $100 or more, I suspect there would have been a huge outcry. But I also suspect the price will get to that point sooner or later.
Also, now that the platform has been strongly established, Apple can charge a price for the development tools without fear that developers will abandon them.
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.
That is the same problem Ubuntu has, a minor update, download entires packages.
For a diff to work you need to store the original packages, and this will take so much precious disk(for SSD drives on macbooks air) and add complexity.
I do wonder: for how long will Xcode 3 remain available on Apple's site? I also wonder what they may attempt to do to effectively break Xcode 3, or make it where Xcode 4 is necessary for future development? I wouldn't put it past them.
I think we are going to see Xcode 4 bundled with Lion, at that point it will become available to everyone at developer.apple.com, and that the current Xcode 4 stuff is based upon Tax laws just like it was before with the iOS updates.
I would want automatic updates too, but only if they didn't break every existing SDK on your machine. This is currently not the case, so thanks, but no thanks.
Agreed. You don't need to value your time very highly for this to be an excellent value proposition. Apple's developer site is an absolute nightmare to use, hopefully this means I'll never need to figure it out again.
I'm not sure if this applies to Xcode, but at least with Coda, even if you purchase it outside the App Store, it has an 'Installed' label and presumably gets updated through the App Store as well.
The app store can detect I'd apps are installed (through their bundle identifiers) to prevent you from accidentally buying them twice, but it will not update apps that haven't been downloaded through the store.
Updates have always been automatic through Software Update. I have never manually downloaded an update for Xcode.
I have been a staunch Apple supporter for years, but lately their anti-hacker stance has become more and more obvious. If you aren't making them money through their store, then fuck off. This token charge for Xcode isn't for profit; it's a message to a certain group saying "You aren't wanted here anymore."
In over 2 years I've never once seen Xcode update through Software Update - is there a secret setting somewhere to enable it? I'm ready to plunk down the $4.99 just to get the automatic update in the App store. Thanks!
"Xcode is still free, as long as you pay the $99 a year to be a registered Apple developer".
Sort of like the way Visual Studio is free, as long as you pay $800+ to be an MSDN subscriber? That's an odd way to judge something as still being "free".
From where I'm standing Xcode is not free now, it costs 5 bucks or a hundred bucks, though the version that costs a hundred bucks includes some other stuff too.
And gcc is free too. But gcc isn't all of Xcode and VS Express isn't all of Visual Studio.
But... yeah, I'm aware of VS Express Editions. I do some Windows development and I haven't actually owned a copy of a Microsoft's non-Express IDEs in years, there's really no point unless you have a must-use plugin or want deeply integrated source code control.
I was simply pointing out how unfree Xcode is by using another very similar situation where the non-freeness of the tool is made more obvious by the far-higher-than-impulse price of the associated developer registration fee.
FWIW, I think Xcode is easily worth $5 to Apple/iOS developers no matter how you look at it and I don't fault Apple for charging for it, but arguing it is "still free" because you don't have to pay for it on top of the usual $99 developer registration is absurd, IMO.
That $99 fee isn't for Xcode. It's for access to publish in the App Store and for setting up profiles for ad-hoc development (among other things). So yes, Xcode is now free with that registration.
It was always free before. Now its only free for developers who have registered as iOS/Mac App Store developers.
it costs 5 bucks or a hundred bucks, though the version that costs a hundred bucks includes some other stuff too.
When you buy a vehicle for 20k and the dealer throws in free sunfilm, you aren't buying sunfilm for 20k with some other 'stuff' included.
Oh, I'm sure they will. The only reason Apple's gcc is still the recommended version is that nobody cared enough before to make an alternative one. Now that saving five bucks is involved, people will move mountains to make it happen. :)
Apple's gcc isn't available from Apple in an installable form outside of XCode, though. Their version on opensource.apple.com is just the source, so somebody else would have to host a binary. Definitely doable, but will be a change from the current practice, which is to expect users to have an Apple-supplied compiler binary.
The question in my mind is what they will do with Xcode for OSX Lion. I don't use Xcode itself, but I always install it to get the tools and libraries I need to compile other software.
If Lion requires users to pay $5 to get the necessary dependencies to build other free software tools, this will be a step back from the status quo.
Xcode has normally shipped with OS X install DVDs (though a lot of folks download it anyway, as this gets you the latest version). I'm wondering if they'll ship it with Lion. I'm guessing that they will not.
I've got one of the new Macbook Airs, and they definitely didn't ship any sort of developer tools on the little installer USB that came with it - all I got was an OS X installer. If that's any indication, it sounds like Xcode won't be getting bundled with installation media anymore.
Not to mention that a compiler won't do you much good without a linker. MingW and GNU platform systems like most Linux distributions use ld from binutils, but that doesn't support Mach-O so is useless on OS X.
This is somewhat strange pricing - it seems ridiculously cheap if they're trying to make significant profits off of it, but pricey enough to prevent tinkerers who don't really know about coding but feel like trying it from getting a start in xcode.
Maybe they want to create an incentive for developers to release their software at a low price on the App Store instead of making it free? Transform the freeware into low priced apps on which they get a share.
That's actually a very interesting thought, and quite plausible. Though I'd expect them to charge more for XCode if they wanted to spur thoughts of "I need to recoup these costs" properly.
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, that's maybe one of the cheapest hobbies on the planet.
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.
They just plowed thousands of engineering man-hours into significantly overhauling both the infrastructure (huge amount of work around LLVM) and interface of Xcode for the Xcode 4 release, addressing a substantive number of long-standing complaints along the way. This release is by far the biggest overhaul of the product in the last decade. All of those engineers cost a lot of money. They aren't working on this out of charity. That's why.
I simply do not understand why people are hung up on an IDE that is the product of thousands of engineering man-hours costing as much as a single foot long sandwich slapped together by a bored teenager in 60 seconds.
A single footlong sandwich may be a significant sum for people not in Western, industrialized countries. But that point is secondary to the fact that even $5 is a barrier for beginners.
I think people are objecting because they themselves happened into programming as a passion and career - I know I did. They found some tool, probably for free (QBASIC for me) that got their feet wet initially, and that's how they got their start. A beginner who is neither sure nor convinced that programming is a good thing to pursue is unlikely to spend even a footlong's worth of money on it, and we've lost yet more potential future engineers.
Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free. Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free. When the status quo of the industry is free tools (and the few that are for-pay are getting cheaper every year), one can question why Apple is the odd man out in a sudden reversal.
> A beginner who is neither sure nor convinced that programming is a good thing to pursue is unlikely to spend even a footlong's worth of money on it, and we've lost yet more potential future engineers.
Sure. And Xcode would probably scare them off anyways, because it's decidedly not set up to be friendly to beginners. This is a non-issue. Beginning programmers on the Mac should under no circumstances go grab Xcode unless they want to feel utterly bewildered.
The $5 charge is utterly beside the point, here. One wonders how you imagine anyone ever gets into a hobby with more than a $5 barrier to entry.
> Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free.
They seem to have drastically increased the amount of effort they're putting into it, probably because of the increased iOS dev audience. That extra effort probably justifies the minor $5 price increase.
> Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free.
Which competitors would those be? Microsoft isn't giving their professional tools away for free, just a drastically cut down starter edition. Sun plowed a ton of cash into NetBeans, but following their financial lead seems ill-advised.
Had in mind Visual Studio Express (heavily crippled vs the purchased editions), the commercial Ada and Lisp IDEs whose free versions have onerous limitations, etc. There's a lot out there beyond the java IDEs.
And before we hold a eulogy for the vast swaths of poor put upon hobbyist devs who can't raise $5 or access the App store, you might want to establish the existence of these people actually having these problems rather than asking us to be outraged at a scenario in your imagination.
Neither Eclipse nor NetBeans can be called Java IDEs more than Emacs can be called a Lisp IDE. I develop in Python under Eclipse and I prefer Eclipse for general Java development. I prefer NetBeans for JavaME stuff and I absolutely love Emacs for Python, but there are things that Eclipse + Pydev do better (specially App Engine stuff). For what I know, the support for Roby and Rails in NetBeans is also very good.
Of course, Emacs is my Lisp (Clojure) IDE of choice.
As for the idiotic pricing of Xcode 4, I am bothered not by the price tag and the restrictions it imposes on some, but by the fact Apple's accountants interpret SOX in unique and singularly stupid ways.
python IDE's/text editor/whatevers: komodo Edit (the full $300 version) works very nicely for perl/python/ruby (never tried tcl), if you get somebody to buy if for you (no BizSpark that i can see).
I have't tried the intelliJ IDEA series (pyCharm, phpStorm, etc) but based on the scala plugin, I betcha they're quite solid as well.
You do realize it is hard to find a list of IDEs to compete in favorable terms with the free (as in speech) ones, don't you?
There is a reason why Eclipse, NetBeans, Emacs, Eric and so many others compare favorably, if not blow their competition out of the water: it's because some of the developers who use them give back and improve them.
It's probably an incentive to get people to become paid developer members. You already need to be enrolled to submit apps to the Mac and iOS app stores.
If you just need a compiler, install the development tools on the OS X install DVD that came with your computer. If you want to be doing software development for Mac or iOS, the developer fee is worth it for the documentation and prerelease software.
Yes, the more I think about it the less sense it makes. Putting it on the App Store seems perfectly normal, but charging money for something that used to be free, even a token amount, is a really stupid thing to do.
$5 is nearly as bad as $50: the difference between charging nothing and something is way higher than the difference between charging something and something higher.
Is it to defray hosting costs for a 4 gig app on the App Store? Then why host it for free before on their site?
My opinion is that it's just another "hidden fee" for OS X development. (A fee I'm happy to pay, for what it's worth.)
For me, I actually had to get a Mac before I could even think about writing my first iPhone app. Then I found out my 10.5 Mac Mini wasn't compatible with XCode, so I had to fork over a bit to pick up Leopard. Then comes the $100 or whatever for a developer license so you can build on phone.
Seems the conditioning they put you through worked well. In fact seen in that light, the new fee makes sense. They just want to dull your resistance against paying through the nose.
I had to pay zero for Python and Java and Perl development (a fee I've been happy to pay, for what it's worth).
I actually had to get a computer before writing my first apps, but I could get whatever computer I liked. I never had one that was incompatible with these tools. Then came the $0 for a Python/Java/Perl developer license, so I could build on any server I liked.
After all that, $5 plus hooking myself up to Apple's death by a thousand cuts slow drip sounds pretty bad.
The cynic in me thinks that it's $10 this year, $15 the next, and pretty soon Apple will be doing what Microsoft used to do. If so, it's a real shame.
I remember when I first switched to OS X as a student. The free developer tools were very impressive to me. I remember telling people "See, this is how it should be done. You shouldn't charge people to develop for your operating system. More applications for your system only helps you sell!"
I'm sure the free developer tools were also a factor in Microsoft offering a free version of VS. Now, it seems, as Apple is becoming more and more popular, they are moving more and more in the direction that MS did in their hay day.
It appears that a once fairly open system is becoming slowly more and more closed. I sincerely hope that the cynic in me is wrong.
The entire thing is built on open source. I certainly won't be paying and this shift in culture at apple is turning me off. I probably won't be buying another product from them for a while.
Built on open source... an important part of which they invested in (LLVM). One can as well easily install LLVM/clang via MacPorts, or wait until Lion (under the assumption that XCode will still be included on the download media).
Getting the proprietary parts for five dollars is certainly not a bad deal. But one has to wonder... why? Is it to cover download costs?
The whole IDE portion isn't open source, just the compilers. Thats like saying IntelliJ shouldn't charge for their IDE because the java compiler is free.
Kids in places where the App Store doesn't reach still can buy Macs from channels other than Apple, they can buy and borrow books and teach each other. They can't download Xcode 4 unless they have an account with Apple, a valid credit card (issued in the right country) or a couple of iTunes gift cards.
Some pirated software and cracking patches rely on gdb. So a user has to have xcode installed in order for the cracks to work. At least, it's often a requirement.
This might be to make that harder and to thwart software piracy up to a point.
Well, I'll just paste instructions from a crack a friend of mine needed me to help him with:
Install Instructions for Protools 9
• 0. Make sure you have gdb installed. Test by typing “gdb test” into terminal.
1. Uninstall any versions of Pro Tools that are already installed
2. Install Pro Tools, Complete Production Tookit 2 and HEAT (in the optional installers folder) from the full iso
3. Use the [K]‘ed installer to overwrite the necessary files
4. Launch Pro Tools from the loader and everything should work as expected
This crack requires Xcode to be installed. Xcode can be downloaded for free from developer.apple.com. Also, DO NOT REPLACE THE LOADER. The loader included with the new release (loader version 1.1) was designed for this release as a background process which is what people wanted. It also now breaks on ptrace so there is no need for the anti-ptrace extension posted later in the topic. To use Pro Tools launch the loader and wait a few seconds. Nothing will show while it does some work in the background and then it will launch the main Pro Tools app a few seconds later. Big thanks to unsanity, simblism, and XVX for their respective contributions.
It's probably a part of a longer term pricing strategy. It's hard to start charging "real" money (even $40/$50) for an application you were formerly giving away for free. People feel like you've taken something away. By charging a micro-payment disposable price of $5 (Happy Meal, Latte, etc.) they deflect a lot of that criticism and avoid some of the negative publicity. Over the next 10 years they can slowly raise the price, each time keeping is reasonable.
Apple's leveraging the work they put into building the App Store infrastructure (and business deals with credit card companies) to do something a lot of other companies couldn't (make something that was free cost something again without too much fallout).
According to the LLVM lead dev (Chris Lattner on IRC), this is due to Apple's accountant's interpretation of SOX (Xcode 4 is too different from Xcode 3 to be considered an update, they see it as a new product):
> it is due to some bizarro accounting rule. xcode4 is sufficiently new that it doesn't count as a free update or something. paid adc members should get free access. yeah, clearly we're trying to monetize it... doh
Same story as with FaceTime except worse. Apple's accountants seem very very weird.
If this is true then I wonder if buying a new Mac or a boxed copy of Mac OS entitles one to XCode 4 and all updates until XCode 5 (which will be years away)?
That is certainly the case with Facetime and the 802.11n update.
I'm guessing it'll be Lion doing that, as with Facetime. And depending on the release time of Xcode 5 (and its synchronicity with OSX 10.8 or 10.9) and whatnot, Xcode 5 may very well be as "free" as 2.0 and 3.0 were.
The great thing about Sarbanes-Oxley is that it is large enough to get away with blaming everything on it. Oh, you can say, my accounting team says Sarbanes-Oxley requires this 40% markup. Then if anybody actually calls you on it, you can refer them to their lawyer, who will charge them $15,000 to research the question. Since they can't read it either, they'll give you a maybe.
The real amusement to the law degrees, I'm sure, is that Sarbanes-Oxley doesn't really do anything and it's just a scare word, like Communism.
/s
All kidding aside, just look at that lead-in on Wikipedia. I needed a shot at the end of that, and that's not even a section. I'm curious why this would be the case myself, and I'm still looking, a couple hours later. On a Wednesday night.
I am not an Accountant and this isn't really an answer, but I will try to explain. Basically, it has to do with how you recognize money that you were paid. If I buy a MacBook for $999 and it comes with Xcode 3, and two years later, I get free major upgrades to the software, then the $999 I paid can't be recognized as revenue in the first year. It has to be spread out over the period of time that I will get free upgrades. If they charge me something for the upgrade, then they recongnize the $999 in year one, and the $4.99 two years later.
If this is all Apple is doing, expect Xcode 4 to be included in Lion. If it's not, they are simply charging for it now.
When you see token $.99 charges for things that should be free, this is the reason Apple does it. It's how they interpret the rules -- and, they are probably right. Since, there is no maintenance yearly charge, they can't keep delivering value to you for the initial price without spreading that money over the lifetime of the value delivery.
I wonder why they charge for the tools to develop on their platform.
Charging for the forums/bug tracker is probably a good way to keep people out who aren't that serious about development, but I don't get why they charge for XCode. It's not like they'd make any relevant amount of money off XCode.
gcc/clang are completely open source. In fact, the ones online are far more recent versions than what apple has been shipping. I believe apple still ships gcc42 as of the last free xcode.
I'm with you. When you give software away instead of charging for it, while simultaneously making your money off an associated product, you are required to do all sorts of backflips over how you account for revenue.
This is why certain updates for the iPod Touch cost money while they are free for iPhones: It is entirely driven by how Apple writes up iPod Touch vs. iPhone revenue.
Apple reports iPhone revenues over a 24 month period, this is called subscription accounting. Since an iPhone is sold as a subscription, Apple can write off services associated with providing that subscription on an ongoing basis, i.e. give all upgrades away for free.
iPod Touch and Mac revenues do not use subscription accounting, therefore Apple is not allowed to give away major OS upgrades for these products, it must treat upgrades as separate products that make or lose money for themselves. Apple is not allowed to give away a major iPod Touch upgrade and apply the costs of writing the upgrade to its iPod Touch business.
I am certain of the rules around subscription accounting and its effect on requiring Apple to charge for iPod Touch and Mac OS upgrades (and Apple is happy to charge for OS X upgrades any ways).
Whether the $4.99 for XCode is a byproduct of these rules is conjecture. I think so, but I've looked all over and I can find neither my Apple Employee badge nor my Chartered Accountant diploma, so it's more than fair to doubt me on this.
p.s. Another clue to the reasons for the charge is contained in the fact that XCode is still free for ADC developers. Since ADC revenue is subscription-based, Apple can give away whatever it wants to ADC subscribers.
"Apple has for the first time made this full iOS upgrade free to all of its iPod touch customers, rather than charging the customary $10 fee that provoked groans in the past."
This leads me to believe that the whole accounting rules canard was just a way to make more money. Why did they start charging for XCode? Because you'll pay it.
I wouldn't be so quick to call it an accounting rules canard, there was a ton of analysis of the rule when the iPod Touch upgrade fee was first announced and there was very little doubt this was the case. And while I can be critical of Apple policies, I stop well short of suggesting that they would lie about an accounting rule. That's the kind of thing that gets people sent to jail, and certainly Microsoft would have held a press conference the next day explaining that Apple was lying.
That being said, they haven't said that the XCode charge is a subscription accounting thing, so there's certainly no logical reason why you may not be correct in saying that they are charging for XCode because they can. I'm guessing otherwise, but this is armchair speculation.
UPDATE: I was wrong about subscription-based accounting affecting how Apple accounts for expenses. Here's a link I found:
So said accounting rule changed then? Honest question. And in any case, if that were really true, why not charge a penny? Or the download cost? I don't buy it.
Or Apple's accountants changed. They seem to be very strange people, and I say that in a bad way.
> And in any case, if that were really true, why not charge a penny? Or the download cost? I don't buy it.
If they think they need to charge for Xcode 4, they probably think amounts under that would be seen as non-compliant. Facetime was $.99 and shipped with new macs.
Once the old free Xcode 3 has vanished, this neatly puts an end to stuff like Homebrew or MacPorts. I really don't care about paying the $4, but for many people without credit cards or unwilling to use iTunes/the app store, OSX just has become a lot less useful.
You can compile, but you can't link with the standard GNU toolchain to get a usable library (at least last I heard), because binutils simply doesn't support the Mach-O format (see http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2009-09/msg00121.html).
I believe Apple's version of binutils is cctools, which is at http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/cctools/cctools-782/ . It includes ld and as. As you mention, the standard GNU source for binutils won't build, as it doesn't understand Mach-O, but MacPorts would seem to be free to use cctools for linking/assembling.
If this turns into a "real issue", such that XCode 3 was rescinded and XCode 4 remained paid only - as opposed to some stupid accounting problem which might mean it would be bundled free with Lion, with XC3 hanging around for (Snow) Leopard - then I suspect we'll soon see MacPorts or their kin come up with a downloadable toolchain based on this existing Apple open source work that would allow them to continue virtually unchanged.
Why do they even need to compile on your system? They should be shipping binaries for 99.99999% of the users out there and an easy way to recompile for that last gentoo holdout ^W^WHPC system.
OS X without Xcode installed doesn't have a compiler - if you can't compile, you can't use macports or homebrew.
It would be "neat" as in clean. No drama on Apple's behalf. Just put a price tag on the only real compiler, and it's over. Unless someone solves that issue.
It's packaging and bundling that's the problem. There is enough people out there that don't want to have to manually install compilers etc versus just installing Xcode.
Uh...OSX just uses gcc as a C compiler and all the Apple specific changes are open source as well (GPL license and all that), so what's stopping me from just distributing a binary (Apple patched) gcc?
That doesn't address the part about those of us who don't want to use the App Store on our macs... we like them how they are.
I love my mac, I have since OS X was mature enough to be useful, and I've converted tons of people, and I have lots of credit cards.. it's not about the money - Apple is seriously making me think about ditching them.
I understand the sentiment, but it's just a method of distribution for the SDK. XCode 4 doesn't keep you from distributing your apps any way you'd like.
Isn't this like saying that you'd really like the new version of the dev environment on CD because you don't like DVDs? I doubt anyone would be complaining if it was 2003 and Apple was charging a $5 shipping and handling charge to ship you a DVD.
But what about updates? Now handled by the mac app store, for apps bought by the mac app store. And the iPhone SDK may or may not be distributed with the mac, which may be out of date from the current iOS.
Could you share some more info on the hackintoah. The amount of info I have read about hardware compatibility fickleness and dsmos security code has terrified me.
I recently put together a Hackintosh, and it went much more smoothly than anticipated. Just get any Intel processor, and make sure your motherboard and graphics card, or a closely related model, are on one of the recent OSx86 hardware compatibility lists[1]. Then, just follow TonyMacx86's install guide[2]. Post-install, you'll probably want to install a few additional kexts (for example, the sleep-enabler kext). If one of the kexts causes your box to kernel panic on boot, then just boot off of the install DVD again, and use the Terminal (under the "Utilities" menu) to remove the kext(s) in question. If you get stuck, use your google-fu–there's a pretty healthy hackintosh community, so chances are somebody else has encountered the same problem as you.
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 barrier on the accessibility of the platform as a application dev environment.
I'm honestly really happy to have focussed my efforts towards web based apps instead... If its the future of computing -- iOS apps, and on device apps instead of web based -- it sure doesn't look so bright.
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.
Come on. Let's not assume too much here. If what is said is correct, that this pricing is because of the accounting rules, then the cost of OS X 10.5 and 10.6 includes XCode 3. XCode 4 will be included in the cost of OS X 10.7.
I have to wonder if the cost isn't somehow related to the ginormous file size. I have to imagine that millions of people downloading a file this big constantly is expensive in terms of bandwidth.
Maybe they want those downloading to truly have an interest in doing something with the toolkit and not just downloading it to look at/tinker with. A $4.99 hurdle is probably just enough to cull out a significant amount of downloads by people who probably wouldn't actually use it anyways.
Is Apple a cash strapped startup or what? They easily get a lot of value via hardware sales from apps being made for their platforms to start worrying about bandwidth costs.
Imagine if all OS X and iOS apps disappeared today? How many would still buy Apple hardware?
It's not just the initial download, but the multi-GB updates that are shipped out every few months. I swear I've downloaded 100GB of XCode related material in the last two years.
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.
Support for this theory can be seen in the pattern of past Xcode major releases: to date, they've been released included w/ a new version of OS X and have not run on any previous version of OS X, while minor updates have been available for free.
ETA: Also does anyone seriously think that the $4.99 is going to remotely even slightly come anywhere within a few orders of magnitude of paying for the development costs? I mean, really?
This is probably due to Apple's interpretation of tax laws or at least that tends to be what comes out when Apple charges a token amount for something.
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 was because that's all I could afford when I was 15. The question for Apple isn't whether businesses or experienced developers can afford their development tools, it's the teenagers they should care about. And while, $5 is still well within the average teenagers reach, it's still a lot more friction than free. This decision seems short sighted to me even if the effects of it aren't immediately apparent.
They're a lot more abundant than the Mac you need to run Xcode on, though.
iTMS cards are purchasable at every 7-Eleven and nearly every major supermarket, Wal-Mart, Meijer, Target or what-have-you in the USA. You can buy Xcode with $5 in nickles if you have access to a Coinstar machine.
Let's be realistic, the hardware demands are much more serious than $5 on an iTunes card. The problem here is the message Apple is sending.
Plus until recently you couldn't use a gift card in Canada to purchase anything in the AppStore. Or an American paypal balance, or a canadaian checking account through a verified American paypal account.
I'm trying to think of what would've happened if I had to ask my parents for their credit card every time I had to download some tool when I was a kid just messing around with programming.
I probably wouldn't working in the field today, that's for sure.
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.
It's doubtful that today's parents need to be convinced of such things. Not only is $99 cheaper than that piano of yesteryear, it also has a significantly higher rate of return.
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, say, accountants or lawyers would buy their precocious coder-child a bunch of tools or understand the importance of it?
It's not about money it is about investment. $5 dollars means you have to invest into the system. Free means that you just spend a bit of time downloading and installing. If you stop using it after a half hour who cares. Money though has a higher barrier of entry.
You can get Visa gift cards at the convenience store for $10. If a teenager can't find the motivation to scrounge up 10 bucks, they're going to have a hell of a time learning how to program.
That is cruel and incorrect. People pirate software everywhere.
Many successful hackers were brought up in places where $5 is nothing to be sneezed at, and the dance of getting-that-$5-into-Apple's-pocket can cost you more than that in time and effort alone.
How is that cruel? When talking about revenue generated by software firms only people in certain countries matter. How much money do you think apple makes from the entire african subcontinent, for example? Why should apple give a crap about making it easier for that group of people to purchase their developer kit?
You and I obviously have different definitions of cruel.
Also, "Many successful hackers were brought up in places where $5 is nothing to be sneezed at".. so fucking what? The revenue they bring to the table is immaterial. They don't matter to a large company.
If we're arguing about imaginary teenage hackers to fit whatever argument we need...nobody, they're running a hackintosh on a $200 netbook and they're pirating XCode anyways.
I imagine this will be like xcode for iphone only working on intel macs. You could develop (but not release) on PowerPC mac by changing a couple plist keys, and apple still sold a lot more macs anyway.
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 superior technology with an earned reputation for coolness, then losing anyhow because your userbase doesn't grow as fast.
I think the pricing was only one factor of Java's success. Smalltalk, for the C programmer, is pretty alien. No source files, no compiler... That takes some to get used to. Java provides a nice path towards OOP that's more forgiving than C++, yet, it's aesthetically compatible with C.
Version control also seemed an issue - commercial Smalltalks had tools like Envy - but all the projects I observed in the telecoms world seemed to have a senior developer doing nothing but merging images for the duration of the project.
Indeed. Having source files helps a lot. Smalltalk images suffer from Amish Bread Syndrome. Not being able to build your image from sources and sources alone is disturbing for me and I learned OOP with Smalltalk (later moved to Actor on Windows, but, still, without source code as text files).
The Googles lead me to Amish Friendship Bread, which requires a starter that you have to get from someone else. Thus, without the starter you can't compile your bread from sources. At least, that's the best I can come up with in three minutes. :)
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.
Yes, the solution to you not willing to pay $5 is for someone else to invest hundrends of thousands of dollars (at programmer's market pay) to re-implement XCode.
I do develop open-source software (SumatraPDF) and give it away for free, but this kind of attitude of entitlement always gets me.
if someone can afford an apple pc, he for sure can also afford 5$ for a good software!
if anything, this should teach the teens that good software can also have a price.
Yep, that's why I avoid commercial operating systems like the plague. It's why I initially became a gcc based C++ engineer. It's why I then became a Tomcat/Java engineer. And it's why I'm currently messing around with Android.
Friction is a good word for the problem. Who knows? Maybe in another life I would have actually used Microsoft's stack. I used their tools in college, and at work when they were provided...
If you look at Facetime on the Mac App Store, it costs $0.99. If you get a new Mac, though, it's free (included). Xcode has historically been included on the install media for OS X (e.g., with Snow Leopard). It's still a separate install, of course. I expect Xcode 4 will still be available on the OS X Lion install media. Buy OS X 10.7 and the media will most likely include Xcode 4. This is a normal Apple pattern.
Which is one of the biggest reasons why Microsoft's Developer Division created and gives away the Visual Studio Express product line[1], and supplements it with websites like the Beginner Developer Learning Center[2].
Right -- and providing dev tools and server platforms for free to students at the high school and college levels is why the MSDNAA and DreamSpark exist on the MSFT side of things.
Of course, it took literally a couple of years to get each of those programs started. I remember spending months just arguing back and forth about whether or not an edition of Office should be in MSDNAA (since it is a development platform, from the point of view of add-ins, Access, etc.) and how much lost revenue it would be.
And how popular is DreamSpark? I signed our organization up for it, did all the hard work and provided easy download instructions & serial keys. I had exactly 0 (zero) takers.
It's just still too convoluted compared to the OSS options out there. Everyone uses PHP, Python or Ruby.
I realize that Microsoft still has 90% of the personal computer market, but it all reads like the last days of Big Blue to me. The king is still king, but the writing is on the wall.
As a current uni student, I have access to both DreamSpark and academic alliance, I probably wouldn't even have windows on my dev computer otherwise, let alone any of the dev tools and the being able to access free quality software from Microsoft really improved my opinion of them and it's important to get that mindshare of new developers if they want to stay such a huge force.
I suspect Apple is trying to build up the Mac App Store. I doubt they care about the money they get from Xcode or Facetime ($0.99).
Perhaps it sets up an expectation for the consumer - a small utility should cost about $0.99 and that a larger application should be about $4.99.
This gets consumers in the habit of paying for software they might expect to be free, motivating developers to use the Mac App store and builds up an ecosystem to match the iOS app store.
I'm sure Steve Jobs is going to reply to one of the hundreds of emails he'll be getting on this subject, hopefully his answer won't be "Because. - Sent from my iPhone"
If Xcode isn't worth $4.99, then how outrageous is Textmate's $56 license? I use neither, since free tools are available for what I do, and they get the job done quite well.
This is just the beginning. Apple is in the position of "Your going to take it, and your going to LOVE IT." What are you going to do? Not develop for iOS/OSX with Xcode? Bwahahaha. Don't forget apple is a large public corp. I don't think making less money is in the plans.
This is just a small part of the plan. Just wait until you have to be in a Apple approved facility, wearing apple approved developer uniforms to independently program anything for Apple.
Actually you could download Xcode (and the iOS SDKs) for free from Apple's website. It would only run on your $129/$29 OS, but technically you didn't have to use the shipped copy ever.
You can download download Xcode 3.x free if you log in at connect.apple.com, or on the xcode page on developer.apple.com you click on the "Looking for Xcode 3" link:
This isn't the end of the world, it is not like now you no longer have access to the development tools. I wonder like a lot of people if this has to do with tax laws.
> it is not like now you no longer have access
> to the development tools
XCode 3 may still work now, but what does the future hold? Will it get updates? Or will it slowly become obsolete?
If it just slowly dies, then this is a very shrewd move by Apple because the pain (i.e. "I have to pay to get any dev tools") comes some time in the future and the people can dismiss the nay-sayers right now with, "but you can still get X Code 3 for free!" If Apple were to immediately pull XCode 3, and all access to dev tools was pay-only, then it would be a lot easier for more people to side with the people decrying this move.
Many other people are also suggesting, and I would agree with them that come OS X Lion time Xcode will once again be shipped on the media that the OS comes on.
I don't know what the future holds, I don't work at Apple, and if I did I am pretty sure I wouldn't be allowed to tell you.
Sure we can speculate at this point, honestly I think that Xcode 3 has run its course and that Xcode 4 is the future.
Xcode 4 being priced the way it is may be for tax reasons, Xcode 4 may be shipped with OS X Lion, Xcode 4 may later on be offered as a $50 package on the Mac App Store. We don't know. For now I hope, and tend to agree with people that Xcode 4 will be bundled with OS X Lion and at that point will be free once more.
I love emacs and use it every day. And I'm glad that it's free software. But if Apple offered to keep my Mac's emacs install up to date for $4.99 I would pay in a heartbeat.
I have to periodically check whether my version is out of date. When it is, I have to find the download URL, click on it, remember to come back when the package has downloaded, and run the installer. I have to do this on all of my machines.
Sure, this isn't all that much work. But $4.99 isn't that much money, either.
If paying for the software were easy for everyone who has a Mac everywhere, I would feel a little bit uncomfortable, but that would be all. My point is that this move may effectively shut off parts of the world that have no access to the Mac App Store.
Don't get me wrong: I like Apple and used Apple computers since my early days as an Apple II developer. My main computers run Linux, but I like to keep a Mac around. What worries me is that this move actually hurts Apple a lot more than we may realize at first.
Just as a side note that nicely illustrates how politics may interfere with this, when I got my first Apple II (a II+) it was actually a clone (http://orbita.starmedia.com/~cobit2/propagandas/exato_ago85....). At that time, importing computers to Brazil was prohibited. If I wanted to travel abroad, law mandated strict limits on how much money I could carry and buying an Apple II directly would be impossible. There were alternatives, smugglers that could bring almost anything you wanted, but then it would be a crime...
Just curious, I'm assuming that switching to Linux to get automatic updates for all packages would cost you more than $5 in pain in other areas. Is that assumption correct?
I use both Linux and Mac and I can assure you the Mac side is not completely painless. I prefer Linux for work, but, then, I don't develop for Macs.
It's, of course, next to impossible to develop Mac software without a Mac and, since we are talking about Xcode, access to a modern Mac is a necessary condition.
I switched from windows to linux as my main OS a little while back. Currently, I run only linux, but I have previously run a dual boot setup with windows 7. That was just a speedbump.
Now, if I want to update anything I type the following in the command line:
sudo apt-get udpdate
sudo apt-get upgrade
... And that is all. Unless you meant some other kind of pain and suffering?
I was referring to the pleasure (in the utilitarian sense) of apt-get being offset by the pain of not having MacOS-specific software and features. I am a Linux user myself, but recognize that not everyone's computing needs are met by it (just as my needs are not met by Windows or MacOS).
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.
Yes. Because Xcode has been free for 10 years it's taken for granted that Xcode is free, and because OSX's base install does contain any C compilers, it's in the Xcode install.
> OSX's base install does contain any C compilers, it's in the Xcode install.
I think you ment to say "Doesn't" instead of does. This nullifies any argument that GCC and the Gnu Toolchain are free to download, if in a year from now the OS you buy doesn't contain GCC in the base install in order to download and compile GCC.
I don't know a ton about gcc internals, but I imagine it probably wouldn't be overly difficult to create an installer that puts a precompiled gcc into /usr/bin.
Apple seems to be adopting an attitude that "you stand to make more with us than without" towards developers and I suppose this makes them feel entitled to tax us. The amount of money they will make out of this will be peanuts, far less than they will need to spend in marketing to developers to keep them off new and rising platforms. As a professional developer, the price doesn't bother me, just the attitude. When I decided whether to try iOS or Android first, the decision was a close one. Things like how they treat the developer community actually mattered.
Apple: you stand to make more with us than without us. Your dollars spend the same as the ones from Android's marketplaces. Be careful when you tread on free. Free makes us friends, pals, maybe even lovers. When I have to pull out the wallet, I stop to ask myself "how much is this relationship worth to me?" Give me XCode and I'll come help you move a couch one day, sell me XCode and you go on a balance sheet where the most cost-effective option wins.
The only reason I install Xcode is so I can compile macports. Now maybe it will be worthwhile to package a free standalone compiler so I won't even need to do that.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadI don't see the price tag having any impact in the iOS/OSX software ecosystem, so, why are they bothering to charge for it?
Though I really don't think it's a good idea to make Xcode 4 non-free.
In the grand scheme of things, Apple's tools and developer membership schemes are fairly generous. It's still making a big step from free to non-free as others have already said. I'm not going to rush to upgrade.
http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/1999/press_0...
It was at one point worth about 2 billion dollars, but I'm guessing it all got washed out after the dot-com bust because word of it was never mentioned again. :-)
Anyways, they aren't doing this because of CDN costs, it's negligible -- they are Akamai's largest customer and are also building their own network as well.
I am quite sure the number of Mac users who download Xcode is negligible compared to the number of Mac users who download movies from that very same CDN. And the size of Xcode is comparable to HD movies.
My guess is that the price is low as a way to introduce people to the idea of paying at all. The small price precludes an outcry. Once everyone is used to paying, they can slowly increase the price over time.
If they started by charging $50 or $100 or more, I suspect there would have been a huge outcry. But I also suspect the price will get to that point sooner or later.
Also, now that the platform has been strongly established, Apple can charge a price for the development tools without fear that developers will abandon them.
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.
For a diff to work you need to store the original packages, and this will take so much precious disk(for SSD drives on macbooks air) and add complexity.
Linux distros could have been making money for a decade now.
I have been a staunch Apple supporter for years, but lately their anti-hacker stance has become more and more obvious. If you aren't making them money through their store, then fuck off. This token charge for Xcode isn't for profit; it's a message to a certain group saying "You aren't wanted here anymore."
http://lists.apple.com/archives/xcode-users/2009/Nov/msg0042...
Sort of like the way Visual Studio is free, as long as you pay $800+ to be an MSDN subscriber? That's an odd way to judge something as still being "free".
From where I'm standing Xcode is not free now, it costs 5 bucks or a hundred bucks, though the version that costs a hundred bucks includes some other stuff too.
But... yeah, I'm aware of VS Express Editions. I do some Windows development and I haven't actually owned a copy of a Microsoft's non-Express IDEs in years, there's really no point unless you have a must-use plugin or want deeply integrated source code control.
I was simply pointing out how unfree Xcode is by using another very similar situation where the non-freeness of the tool is made more obvious by the far-higher-than-impulse price of the associated developer registration fee.
FWIW, I think Xcode is easily worth $5 to Apple/iOS developers no matter how you look at it and I don't fault Apple for charging for it, but arguing it is "still free" because you don't have to pay for it on top of the usual $99 developer registration is absurd, IMO.
That $99 fee isn't for Xcode. It's for access to publish in the App Store and for setting up profiles for ad-hoc development (among other things). So yes, Xcode is now free with that registration.
It was always free before. Now its only free for developers who have registered as iOS/Mac App Store developers.
it costs 5 bucks or a hundred bucks, though the version that costs a hundred bucks includes some other stuff too.
When you buy a vehicle for 20k and the dealer throws in free sunfilm, you aren't buying sunfilm for 20k with some other 'stuff' included.
gcc is obviously still free, if you get it from anyone other than Apple.
Hopefully solid non-apple gcc packages come out. I don't like the idea of paying $5 to apple to develop generic unix applications on OS X.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/
If Lion requires users to pay $5 to get the necessary dependencies to build other free software tools, this will be a step back from the status quo.
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.
Maybe they're trying to set the precedent that you can charge money for utilities in the app store.
I'm not happy about that, but it's seems ever more likely since Linux is getting a lot more usable and the Apple tax is getting a lot more expensive.
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, that's maybe one of the cheapest hobbies on the planet.
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.
They just plowed thousands of engineering man-hours into significantly overhauling both the infrastructure (huge amount of work around LLVM) and interface of Xcode for the Xcode 4 release, addressing a substantive number of long-standing complaints along the way. This release is by far the biggest overhaul of the product in the last decade. All of those engineers cost a lot of money. They aren't working on this out of charity. That's why.
I simply do not understand why people are hung up on an IDE that is the product of thousands of engineering man-hours costing as much as a single foot long sandwich slapped together by a bored teenager in 60 seconds.
I think people are objecting because they themselves happened into programming as a passion and career - I know I did. They found some tool, probably for free (QBASIC for me) that got their feet wet initially, and that's how they got their start. A beginner who is neither sure nor convinced that programming is a good thing to pursue is unlikely to spend even a footlong's worth of money on it, and we've lost yet more potential future engineers.
Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free. Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free. When the status quo of the industry is free tools (and the few that are for-pay are getting cheaper every year), one can question why Apple is the odd man out in a sudden reversal.
Sure. And Xcode would probably scare them off anyways, because it's decidedly not set up to be friendly to beginners. This is a non-issue. Beginning programmers on the Mac should under no circumstances go grab Xcode unless they want to feel utterly bewildered.
The $5 charge is utterly beside the point, here. One wonders how you imagine anyone ever gets into a hobby with more than a $5 barrier to entry.
> Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free.
They seem to have drastically increased the amount of effort they're putting into it, probably because of the increased iOS dev audience. That extra effort probably justifies the minor $5 price increase.
> Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free.
Which competitors would those be? Microsoft isn't giving their professional tools away for free, just a drastically cut down starter edition. Sun plowed a ton of cash into NetBeans, but following their financial lead seems ill-advised.
Do you mean Eclipse, NetBeans or any other modern, professional IDE is crippled?
This is a death blow to Apple hobbyists who live in parts of the world that don't have access to the Mac App Store.
All three of them, most probably.
And before we hold a eulogy for the vast swaths of poor put upon hobbyist devs who can't raise $5 or access the App store, you might want to establish the existence of these people actually having these problems rather than asking us to be outraged at a scenario in your imagination.
Of course, Emacs is my Lisp (Clojure) IDE of choice.
As for the idiotic pricing of Xcode 4, I am bothered not by the price tag and the restrictions it imposes on some, but by the fact Apple's accountants interpret SOX in unique and singularly stupid ways.
I have't tried the intelliJ IDEA series (pyCharm, phpStorm, etc) but based on the scala plugin, I betcha they're quite solid as well.
http://devnet.jetbrains.net/thread/287853;jsessionid=521D68C...
XCode Pricing: kinda like pinboard.in at $9.26, just enough to deter somebody from buying, for whatever reason.
There is a reason why Eclipse, NetBeans, Emacs, Eric and so many others compare favorably, if not blow their competition out of the water: it's because some of the developers who use them give back and improve them.
If you just need a compiler, install the development tools on the OS X install DVD that came with your computer. If you want to be doing software development for Mac or iOS, the developer fee is worth it for the documentation and prerelease software.
$5 is nearly as bad as $50: the difference between charging nothing and something is way higher than the difference between charging something and something higher.
Is it to defray hosting costs for a 4 gig app on the App Store? Then why host it for free before on their site?
For me, I actually had to get a Mac before I could even think about writing my first iPhone app. Then I found out my 10.5 Mac Mini wasn't compatible with XCode, so I had to fork over a bit to pick up Leopard. Then comes the $100 or whatever for a developer license so you can build on phone.
After all that, $5 doesn't sound so bad.
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5092/5513444433_fd70db527e.jp...
I actually had to get a computer before writing my first apps, but I could get whatever computer I liked. I never had one that was incompatible with these tools. Then came the $0 for a Python/Java/Perl developer license, so I could build on any server I liked.
After all that, $5 plus hooking myself up to Apple's death by a thousand cuts slow drip sounds pretty bad.
I remember when I first switched to OS X as a student. The free developer tools were very impressive to me. I remember telling people "See, this is how it should be done. You shouldn't charge people to develop for your operating system. More applications for your system only helps you sell!"
I'm sure the free developer tools were also a factor in Microsoft offering a free version of VS. Now, it seems, as Apple is becoming more and more popular, they are moving more and more in the direction that MS did in their hay day.
It appears that a once fairly open system is becoming slowly more and more closed. I sincerely hope that the cynic in me is wrong.
I mean seriously, you're going to spend at least 10 times that amount on programming books, or thousands of times that amount on college classes.
If all you want is to learn programming, there are free alternatives to XCode.
How much have you spent on iPhone apps so far? I have friends who spent several hundred €, one Happy Meal at a time.
Oh wait, you can.
In any case, you need a Mac, and it's gonna cost you.
Getting the proprietary parts for five dollars is certainly not a bad deal. But one has to wonder... why? Is it to cover download costs?
The potential pool of software developers isn't (and shouldn't be) limited to the US and Europe.
This is a step in the wrong direction.
This might be to make that harder and to thwart software piracy up to a point.
Install Instructions for Protools 9
• 0. Make sure you have gdb installed. Test by typing “gdb test” into terminal.
1. Uninstall any versions of Pro Tools that are already installed
2. Install Pro Tools, Complete Production Tookit 2 and HEAT (in the optional installers folder) from the full iso
3. Use the [K]‘ed installer to overwrite the necessary files
4. Launch Pro Tools from the loader and everything should work as expected
This crack requires Xcode to be installed. Xcode can be downloaded for free from developer.apple.com. Also, DO NOT REPLACE THE LOADER. The loader included with the new release (loader version 1.1) was designed for this release as a background process which is what people wanted. It also now breaks on ptrace so there is no need for the anti-ptrace extension posted later in the topic. To use Pro Tools launch the loader and wait a few seconds. Nothing will show while it does some work in the background and then it will launch the main Pro Tools app a few seconds later. Big thanks to unsanity, simblism, and XVX for their respective contributions.
Apple's leveraging the work they put into building the App Store infrastructure (and business deals with credit card companies) to do something a lot of other companies couldn't (make something that was free cost something again without too much fallout).
> it is due to some bizarro accounting rule. xcode4 is sufficiently new that it doesn't count as a free update or something. paid adc members should get free access. yeah, clearly we're trying to monetize it... doh
Same story as with FaceTime except worse. Apple's accountants seem very very weird.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act
That is certainly the case with Facetime and the 802.11n update.
The real amusement to the law degrees, I'm sure, is that Sarbanes-Oxley doesn't really do anything and it's just a scare word, like Communism.
/s
All kidding aside, just look at that lead-in on Wikipedia. I needed a shot at the end of that, and that's not even a section. I'm curious why this would be the case myself, and I'm still looking, a couple hours later. On a Wednesday night.
If this is all Apple is doing, expect Xcode 4 to be included in Lion. If it's not, they are simply charging for it now.
When you see token $.99 charges for things that should be free, this is the reason Apple does it. It's how they interpret the rules -- and, they are probably right. Since, there is no maintenance yearly charge, they can't keep delivering value to you for the initial price without spreading that money over the lifetime of the value delivery.
Charging for the forums/bug tracker is probably a good way to keep people out who aren't that serious about development, but I don't get why they charge for XCode. It's not like they'd make any relevant amount of money off XCode.
This is why certain updates for the iPod Touch cost money while they are free for iPhones: It is entirely driven by how Apple writes up iPod Touch vs. iPhone revenue.
Apple reports iPhone revenues over a 24 month period, this is called subscription accounting. Since an iPhone is sold as a subscription, Apple can write off services associated with providing that subscription on an ongoing basis, i.e. give all upgrades away for free.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/tag/subscription-accounting/
iPod Touch and Mac revenues do not use subscription accounting, therefore Apple is not allowed to give away major OS upgrades for these products, it must treat upgrades as separate products that make or lose money for themselves. Apple is not allowed to give away a major iPod Touch upgrade and apply the costs of writing the upgrade to its iPod Touch business.
I am certain of the rules around subscription accounting and its effect on requiring Apple to charge for iPod Touch and Mac OS upgrades (and Apple is happy to charge for OS X upgrades any ways).
Whether the $4.99 for XCode is a byproduct of these rules is conjecture. I think so, but I've looked all over and I can find neither my Apple Employee badge nor my Chartered Accountant diploma, so it's more than fair to doubt me on this.
p.s. Another clue to the reasons for the charge is contained in the fact that XCode is still free for ADC developers. Since ADC revenue is subscription-based, Apple can give away whatever it wants to ADC subscribers.
"Apple has for the first time made this full iOS upgrade free to all of its iPod touch customers, rather than charging the customary $10 fee that provoked groans in the past."
(http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/reviews/entry/apple-ios-4.0...)
This leads me to believe that the whole accounting rules canard was just a way to make more money. Why did they start charging for XCode? Because you'll pay it.
That being said, they haven't said that the XCode charge is a subscription accounting thing, so there's certainly no logical reason why you may not be correct in saying that they are charging for XCode because they can. I'm guessing otherwise, but this is armchair speculation.
UPDATE: I was wrong about subscription-based accounting affecting how Apple accounts for expenses. Here's a link I found:
http://www.macrumors.com/2009/09/23/standards-board-approves...
Or Apple's accountants changed. They seem to be very strange people, and I say that in a bad way.
> And in any case, if that were really true, why not charge a penny? Or the download cost? I don't buy it.
If they think they need to charge for Xcode 4, they probably think amounts under that would be seen as non-compliant. Facetime was $.99 and shipped with new macs.
The law is not particularly concerned with whether the major version number or the minor version number changed. It's all about what features changed.
If this turns into a "real issue", such that XCode 3 was rescinded and XCode 4 remained paid only - as opposed to some stupid accounting problem which might mean it would be bundled free with Lion, with XC3 hanging around for (Snow) Leopard - then I suspect we'll soon see MacPorts or their kin come up with a downloadable toolchain based on this existing Apple open source work that would allow them to continue virtually unchanged.
http://twitter.com/joedamato/status/41235981722066944
It would be "neat" as in clean. No drama on Apple's behalf. Just put a price tag on the only real compiler, and it's over. Unless someone solves that issue.
http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/gcc/gcc-5646/
http://llvm.org/releases/download.html
I love my mac, I have since OS X was mature enough to be useful, and I've converted tons of people, and I have lots of credit cards.. it's not about the money - Apple is seriously making me think about ditching them.
Isn't this like saying that you'd really like the new version of the dev environment on CD because you don't like DVDs? I doubt anyone would be complaining if it was 2003 and Apple was charging a $5 shipping and handling charge to ship you a DVD.
I'm ok with a 0.7% price increase (if I wasn't a registered developer, that is).
[1] http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page [2] http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2010/04/iboot-multibeast-inst...
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 barrier on the accessibility of the platform as a application dev environment.
I'm honestly really happy to have focussed my efforts towards web based apps instead... If its the future of computing -- iOS apps, and on device apps instead of web based -- it sure doesn't look so bright.
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.
With that in mind, they've replaced gcc with clang in XCode 4, didn't they?
Maybe they want those downloading to truly have an interest in doing something with the toolkit and not just downloading it to look at/tinker with. A $4.99 hurdle is probably just enough to cull out a significant amount of downloads by people who probably wouldn't actually use it anyways.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Sarbanes+Oxley+Apple
Imagine if all OS X and iOS apps disappeared today? How many would still buy Apple hardware?
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.
ETA: Also does anyone seriously think that the $4.99 is going to remotely even slightly come anywhere within a few orders of magnitude of paying for the development costs? I mean, really?
iTMS cards are purchasable at every 7-Eleven and nearly every major supermarket, Wal-Mart, Meijer, Target or what-have-you in the USA. You can buy Xcode with $5 in nickles if you have access to a Coinstar machine.
Let's be realistic, the hardware demands are much more serious than $5 on an iTunes card. The problem here is the message Apple is sending.
Outside the USA, what do you do?
I probably wouldn't working in the field today, that's for sure.
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, say, accountants or lawyers would buy their precocious coder-child a bunch of tools or understand the importance of it?
Today, a teenager would say, "What's a paper route?"
So not only did that lead to me being a programmer for a living, I got some negotiation skills out of it too.
You can get Visa gift cards at the convenience store for $10. If a teenager can't find the motivation to scrounge up 10 bucks, they're going to have a hell of a time learning how to program.
Many successful hackers were brought up in places where $5 is nothing to be sneezed at, and the dance of getting-that-$5-into-Apple's-pocket can cost you more than that in time and effort alone.
Also, "Many successful hackers were brought up in places where $5 is nothing to be sneezed at".. so fucking what? The revenue they bring to the table is immaterial. They don't matter to a large company.
I also think this is an unnecessary and dumb idea.
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 superior technology with an earned reputation for coolness, then losing anyhow because your userbase doesn't grow as fast.
That's one hell of an understatement...
I just want to relate the experience, not start a flame war. Java tools are pretty darn cool nowadays.
I think the pricing was only one factor of Java's success. Smalltalk, for the C programmer, is pretty alien. No source files, no compiler... That takes some to get used to. Java provides a nice path towards OOP that's more forgiving than C++, yet, it's aesthetically compatible with C.
Envy had a few pathologies, but I think there were pathologies in the projects as well.
You can start from here: http://www.gnustep.org/experience/DeveloperTools.html
I do develop open-source software (SumatraPDF) and give it away for free, but this kind of attitude of entitlement always gets me.
http://www.jetbrains.com/cidr/
Friction is a good word for the problem. Who knows? Maybe in another life I would have actually used Microsoft's stack. I used their tools in college, and at work when they were provided...
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/ [2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/default.aspx
Of course, it took literally a couple of years to get each of those programs started. I remember spending months just arguing back and forth about whether or not an edition of Office should be in MSDNAA (since it is a development platform, from the point of view of add-ins, Access, etc.) and how much lost revenue it would be.
It's just still too convoluted compared to the OSS options out there. Everyone uses PHP, Python or Ruby.
I realize that Microsoft still has 90% of the personal computer market, but it all reads like the last days of Big Blue to me. The king is still king, but the writing is on the wall.
And this is not a Linux neckbeard saying this.
Perhaps it sets up an expectation for the consumer - a small utility should cost about $0.99 and that a larger application should be about $4.99.
This gets consumers in the habit of paying for software they might expect to be free, motivating developers to use the Mac App store and builds up an ecosystem to match the iOS app store.
Apple probably should have made XCode free regardless, but his point struck me as the most likely reasoning behind Apple's decision to charge for it.
This is just a small part of the plan. Just wait until you have to be in a Apple approved facility, wearing apple approved developer uniforms to independently program anything for Apple.
MOOOOOAAAR!!!
Flash Builder: $699.00
TextMate: $56.00
Coda: $99.00
BBedit: $99.99
Xcode 4: $4.99
NetBeans: $0
DevShed C++: $0
Emacs: $0
The complete GNU compiler collection: $0
Xcode 3: $0
http://imgur.com/cWRp6 http://imgur.com/8LHXW
This isn't the end of the world, it is not like now you no longer have access to the development tools. I wonder like a lot of people if this has to do with tax laws.
If it just slowly dies, then this is a very shrewd move by Apple because the pain (i.e. "I have to pay to get any dev tools") comes some time in the future and the people can dismiss the nay-sayers right now with, "but you can still get X Code 3 for free!" If Apple were to immediately pull XCode 3, and all access to dev tools was pay-only, then it would be a lot easier for more people to side with the people decrying this move.
I don't know what the future holds, I don't work at Apple, and if I did I am pretty sure I wouldn't be allowed to tell you.
Sure we can speculate at this point, honestly I think that Xcode 3 has run its course and that Xcode 4 is the future.
Xcode 4 being priced the way it is may be for tax reasons, Xcode 4 may be shipped with OS X Lion, Xcode 4 may later on be offered as a $50 package on the Mac App Store. We don't know. For now I hope, and tend to agree with people that Xcode 4 will be bundled with OS X Lion and at that point will be free once more.
I have to periodically check whether my version is out of date. When it is, I have to find the download URL, click on it, remember to come back when the package has downloaded, and run the installer. I have to do this on all of my machines.
Sure, this isn't all that much work. But $4.99 isn't that much money, either.
If paying for the software were easy for everyone who has a Mac everywhere, I would feel a little bit uncomfortable, but that would be all. My point is that this move may effectively shut off parts of the world that have no access to the Mac App Store.
Don't get me wrong: I like Apple and used Apple computers since my early days as an Apple II developer. My main computers run Linux, but I like to keep a Mac around. What worries me is that this move actually hurts Apple a lot more than we may realize at first.
It's, of course, next to impossible to develop Mac software without a Mac and, since we are talking about Xcode, access to a modern Mac is a necessary condition.
Now, if I want to update anything I type the following in the command line:
sudo apt-get udpdate sudo apt-get upgrade
... And that is all. Unless you meant some other kind of pain and suffering?
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.
Yes. Because Xcode has been free for 10 years it's taken for granted that Xcode is free, and because OSX's base install does contain any C compilers, it's in the Xcode install.
I think you ment to say "Doesn't" instead of does. This nullifies any argument that GCC and the Gnu Toolchain are free to download, if in a year from now the OS you buy doesn't contain GCC in the base install in order to download and compile GCC.
(This is tongue-in-cheek! I use Vim!)
The bottom line is that many vendors learnt that to make tools available at a low price point for at least some audiences to capture mindshare.
Apple: you stand to make more with us than without us. Your dollars spend the same as the ones from Android's marketplaces. Be careful when you tread on free. Free makes us friends, pals, maybe even lovers. When I have to pull out the wallet, I stop to ask myself "how much is this relationship worth to me?" Give me XCode and I'll come help you move a couch one day, sell me XCode and you go on a balance sheet where the most cost-effective option wins.
I'm so tired of Apple.