Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro

Re:Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro by onion2k on Monday October 31, 2016 @05:03AM (#12835164)

Apple have locked developers in to the Apple ecosystem if they want to write apps for Apple devices. You can't build an app for iOS or OSX on a Windows or a Linux machine. If there's a large exodus of developers away from Apple devices then there'll be a resulting drop in the number of apps available in their app stores. That would ultimately damage Apple's appeal to other users.

You're absolutely right that Macbooks aren't specifically for developers, but releasing a laptop that developers generally don't feel is appealing to them could be really damaging to Apple's ecosystem.

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Re:Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro by kayoone on Monday October 31, 2016 @05:32AM (#12835316)

> You can't build an app for iOS or OSX on a Windows or a Linux machine

Well actually you can, when using something like Xamarin which has worked pretty well for our company. Sure, somewhere you need a Mac build machine, but that can be an older generation mac mini or similar. The development can be done on Windows using Visual Studio and C# which overall is a pretty great experience with the added benefit of sharing a large percentage of the codebase with the native android version of your app.

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Re:Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro by mhomde on Monday October 31, 2016 @07:18AM (#12835782)

Wouldn't it be ironic of most of the Apple developers ended up developing iOS apps in Windows on PC Computers :) Meanwhile in the Windows Store...

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Re:Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro by pjmlp on Monday October 31, 2016 @05:58AM (#12835455)

I don't remember being able to write for the Commodore while on my Timex, nor for the Amiga while on the PC, or for UNIX while on the PC....

Even UNIX developers are locked to their OSes APIs, unless they constrain themselves to command line POSIX tools.

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Re:Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro by loloferrari on Monday October 31, 2016 @08:51AM (#12836240)

"Apple have locked developers in to the Apple ecosystem if they want to write apps for Apple devices."

IF.

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Re:Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro by anfogoat on Monday October 31, 2016 @05:07AM (#12835189)

> You can't build an app for iOS or OSX on a Windows or a Linux machine. If there's a large exodus of developers away from Apple devices then there'll be a resulting drop in the number of apps available in their app stores.

I wonder. I've been running OSX in a KVM guest and it's been surprisingly trouble free and smooth via ARD (remote desktop).

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Re:Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro by thrill on Monday October 31, 2016 @11:04AM (#12837376)

It's been about two years since I asked the question, but Apple refused to license the use of OSX under a VM when the enterprise I worked for needed to setup a number of systems for offshore developers to work with.

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Re:Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro by anfogoat on Monday October 31, 2016 @11:18AM (#12837508)

This is still the case as far as I know. This is not a viable option for a business entity. Probably not even for an individual depending on what you do with it and how ok you are with breaking the EULA.

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Re:Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro by karmajunkie on Monday October 31, 2016 @08:44AM (#12836191)

What's the host machine? I was under the impression that OSX would only run on apple hardware in a vm – is that no longer the case?

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Re:Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro by anfogoat on Monday October 31, 2016 @11:07AM (#12837392)

The host is a white box Haswell system so this is not Apple hardware. Sierra _can_ be virtualized on non-Apple PC but you'll need to use a bootloader that supports it and build a customized .iso[1] from the install medium downloaded from AppStore. I believe the same goes for Yosemite and El Capitan.

So no, it is no longer the case. It is still prohibited by the EULA though.

[1] https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM/blob/master/create_install...

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