I doubt you'll have to pay to develop for Mac, the 99$ are for joining the developer program that allows you to get your apps on the App Store (Mac or iOS). Xcode, compilers and the possibility to run and sell your programs via other means will still be free.

That's my point. It's free at the moment, but the fact that I can't compile and run my own code on my iPod Touch or so without paying the $99 is abhorrent. I don't know if a similar situation will take hold on the mac or not.

Pah, when I was a teenager in the mid-90s I had to spend $300 (which was a helluva lot of money for me in those days) to write software for my mac (or rather, my parents' mac, which was the only machine I had).

That was the dark age of self-taught developers. Before that, everyone had BASIC for free, and after that everyone had gcc for free.

It's unclear if you're making a projection about the future or mistaken about the present, but Apple's Mac dev tools have been zero-cost for years. Nothing about that changed yesterday.