Proprietary cables are hardly new, and to be fair those cables and connectors are usually way better than the standard stuff. Firewire and thunderbolt were actually released as open standards and saw decent adoption. Lightning is far superior to Micro-USB. Just listen to the wailing and gnashing of teeth by Macbook owners having to give up proprietary MagSafe for USB-C charging on their laptops.
XCode is free and has been for ages. To this day you can develop whatever you like for the Mac and not pay Apple a penny. You don’t even have to use XCode to do it. It’s even free for iPhone development for your own device now, though you have to pay a fee to publish stuff. I’m not sure what you comment about emulators is about to be honest, The iOS emulator for the Mac is free.
Yes they want their cut from Spotify. I don’t understand the Apple exceptionalism about this though. Nobody rages on HN about Sony’s monopoly over games development for the PlayStation, or Microsoft for XBOX, or Nintendo for the Switch, but for some reason Apple which came to this business model two generations late is the root of all evil. It really is kind of weird how that works. Maybe if their iconic image was a cute little plumber instead of a half eaten fruit, everyone would say 'Aww how cute' and give them a pass.
True it is all free except the whole having the purchase a 1000 dollar computer part.
By the way, I have (in the past) managed to run macOS on Vmware successfully, but one needs a pretty strong PC to make this work without having the fans lifting the PC off the groud.
Only if you're publishing.
With Apple I have to buy the PC from Apple at it's marked up price since no competition. So it is a fair point.
Why on earth would you want to develop Mac software without buying a Mac? This argument really does make no sense at all. It’s like complaining that if you want to drive Porsche, you have to buy a Porsche from Porsche. Er, yeah. That’s how that works.
Please quibble about renting and dealerships or something. Please. I dare you. I double dare you! I swear I won’t stop laughing for a week.
It would be more like a mechanic being required to buy his tools from Porsche to be able to work on a Porsche.
And it's good you bring this up, this too is a problem in the auto industry world. Car manufacturers are pulling these stunts and creating locks for their cars so only approved tools can be used with it.
To continue the analogy, it would be like buying an Epson printer and being force to use Epson ink. Or buying a house and being forced to buy your DIY suppliers from the real estate agent.
We can keep going with analogies all day.
macOS:
$800 Mac Mini (Apple's most affordable offering that runs macOS)
$90 Acer SB220Q Monitor
$FREE Xcode
Total: $890
Windows:
$200 Dell Inspiron 11 3000 (Most affordable Dell PC I could find being sold new)
$1200 One time payment for Visual Studio (but you don't get updates)
Total: $1400
So if have to both buy a computer and need a full featured IDE then Visual Studio's license wipes out any savings you get from avoiding the "Apple tax". It gets even worse if you want perpetual updates to Visual Studio which cost $800/year but come free with XCode.
This is counter to what I had expected beforehand myself, I expected the "Apple tax" to make the bar of entry much higher than PC development.
If, on the other hand, you can get by with a less advanced IDE or are developing in a non-proprietary language like Java, Python, or Scala the cost goes way down:
Cheapskate Option:
$200 Windows/Linux laptop
$FREE Eclipse/JetBrains CE IDE/Visual Studio Code
Total: $200
This is certainly more affordable than the $800 macOS alternative. Although one could debate whether the above mentioned IDEs are on equal footing with XCode/Visual Studio.
No Spotify's letter put it very clearly, they want to take their 30% cut from Spotify while putting their own music service on the market undercutting their prices. This is blatantly anticompetitive and is rightly being slammed by Congress.
Apple's response to this has been shrug. I don't think Apple shouldn't be allowed to offer their own music service but they shouldn't use anti-competitive practices in order to stifle competition.
The shady tactics resumed when Spotify stopped using the App Store to bill and reduced the price to compete with Apple Music. Apple isn't interested in competing with Spotify, only with freezing them out of the market.
Yeah, right.
You might already own a Mac.
If you mean cross compiling from other OSes into Windows, good luck creating anything beyond CLI apps based on POSIX.
Ah but there is Wine! Not really, there are tons of Windows features that it doesn't support, and probably never will.
And if you mean Web apps, then I also develop Webapps for Mac without having one around.
For me personally and I think for a lot of people that is less about a love for MagSafe than it is an aversion to USB-C.
Side note undercutting my point: there are places, like OpenGL where the underlying hardware is significantly better/different and the iOS simulation is not representative of the real environment. Mostly these only matter to high-end games, and there you better be checking regularly on a list of hardware.
It also matters in more than high-performance GPU rendering. It’s easy to miss bog-standard CPU performance or memory leak bugs when you’re running software designed for a 1GB Ram, dual core CPU machine on a 32GB, 8 core machine
Might be because the App Store is the sole channel. Also, apps are easier to substitute than games, making anti-competitive behavior possible.
Apart from Lightning, which was created when no better alternative existed, I cannot remember a proprietary Apple connector in at least the past 10 years.
The Magsafe connector has, too.
As has MagSafe 2...
The original MacBook Pros had MagSafe, which was proprietary, but DVI for displays (open); later on they had Mini-DP or Thunderbolt The MacBook follows a similar pattern.
So once MagSafe was eliminated, Apple switched to non-Apple-only plugs, though since they were early adopters, it perhaps seemed like it was proprietary. However, Apple did not own (mini) DVI, (mini) DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, or USB-C.
The only Apple-only pugs are/were the old 30-pin iDevice connector and Lightning.
Gotcha, then why does new iPhone not have USB-C while new MacBooks only have USB-C?
As far as whether Apple should now migrate from lightning to USB-C, that's a separate question with tradeoffs on both sides.
There is a better universal alternative out there today and yet they continue to use Lightning port in iPhones.
They could have easily went with USB-C.
Not true anymore [1]
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43932076/how-to-build-ap...
No you don't. XCode takes care of all of that automatically, I haven't had to hassle with provisioning profiles in years.
That's so wrong. Try building a game for any console and see how far that assumption will take you.
> Apple’s approach has always been to grow the pie.
Apple's approach has always been to grow it's own pie. They have never been even remotely interested in playing nicely with other companies. I don't fault them for it, but let's not kid ourselves here; the app store is largely an extremely profitable exercise in rent seeking.
It's not like this is new for Apple; they've had proprietary cables and adapters for as long as I can remember. Developing software for their hardware has always meant using Xcode, which, surprise, is not free. Literally every other platform has given away tooling and emulators, but that's never been true for Apple. Occasionally this kind of behavior works out well for customers -- they were unafraid to use their market power as a cudgel to kill off Flash (which I think we can all agree needed to happen) -- but all too frequently it's purely anti-competitive. Apple has created some incredible products and services over the years, but let's not kid ourselves about this; this is simply a way of extracting value from Spotify.