$599 for a mini would be stopping me for me one. Since I'm not getting paid to do mobile development $599 is money that could get me a holiday or a used car, I'm not trying to make angry birds here; just a few tools to make my life easier. Besides it seems silly to spend all that money on a low spec Mac when I already have a perfectly serviceable workstation that I have invested in.

Even if it cost them a fair amount of money to port it all over, they're Apple so they have the money in the bank. Plus I can imagine the ROI would be fairly significant when you consider how many more people could get into casual iOS development and then potentially make it into a full time thing.

Nope.

Xcode and the entire stack behind it do not run on Windows or Linux. It would take a team of engineers months to pull it off, then another team to continuously support it. In those months, the feature set of Xcode and the compilers will have improved again and there would never be a stable version for a different platform.

Porting Xcode to Windows or Linux would probably be the worst idea Apple ever made.

Xcode is just the IDE right? No particular need to port that if you can just use Eclipse or the command line tools. The simulator could come later as long as you can test on a device so all your really looking at is a objC compiler and a linker.

Whilst I'm sure it's not a trivial task something tells me that there is more to this than technical limitations.

Along with XCode comes the iOS simulator, debug tools, publishing/packaging and certificate handling. And of course there is more to it: diminishing returns.

> Porting XCode and emulators to windows/linux is probably a huge undertaking

Apple doesn't need to port their software to Windows or Linux at all but simply allow to use OSX in an emulator. Even this is forbidden by Apple (it's not a surprise).

I think it was a huge mistake of Apple to allow iOS development on Macs only. If they hadn' make this mistake almost all people would develop for iOS mobile devices now, and Android wouldn't have had any chance to win. In some sense Steve Jobs himself was the main reason that Android became so successful :-)

> In addition, the cost of a Mac for development ($599 for a mini) is not stopping anybody,

It has stopped me. I have a pretty good PC, and I never accepted that I would have to buy an additional Mac solely to fed my iphone. It's a waste of room and money. For that reason I use Android.

The cost for a Mac Mini is big enough for me. Yes I can afford it (I actually do own one), however a Mac Mini is a desktop and that's so 1998 that I can't stand it.

Personally I have a pretty close and loving relationship with my workstation. That's why it needs to be a laptop.

Wow, I had no idea I was so far behind the times. If desktops aren't useful anymore...

I sometimes work at home, lying on my sofa. I sometimes work while drinking a fresh orange juice or a caffe latte at a nearby coffee shop. I sometimes take trips and work from wherever.

I can't stand being tied to a physical location and working through remote desktop is too painful to bother, feasible if something is burning, but not otherwise.