> Apple could give a rat's ass about the developer community, and why should they? We represent a vanishingly small fraction of the total consumer space and we are orders of magnitude more demanding.
This is a popular refrain, but I don't think it holds up well at all under scrutiny:
1. By your logic, who should care about developers? Only open source projects or ISVs? And yet everyone does, a lot.
2. iOS platform developers buy Macs (and often multiple iOS devices) to develop iOS apps.
3. Xcode, warts and all, is basically free. Same with all of the OS X and iOS developer documentation. Have you priced Visual Studio or an MSDN subscription lately?
4. No one who feels this way has had Quinn the Eskimo answer a Core OS or Networking question for them in the Apple Dev Forums. If you don't care about developers, you don't pay folks like him to dispense wisdom to a bunch of yahoos who each paid $99/year.
1. Pretty much just open source projects or ISVs, and I think you'll find "everyone" gets a lot smaller the further you get from the Valley.
2. No disrespect intended but BFD? Are you proposing that developer hardware purchases represent anything besides a rounding error in Apple's hardware sales?
3. I see Xcode's pay-to-upgrade model and $99/yr developer subscriptions as a variation on the MSDN/Visual Studios theme.
4. Wait, what? Cult of Personality issues aside, we're talking about a company that's pulling in billions in profits quarterly nickle-and-diming their developer community. How is this beneficial to developers again?
1. I think you underestimate the amount of dev talent being consumed outside of "software companies", for a wide variety of platforms (including desktops).
2. Fair point, but are you proposing Apple doesn't care whether devs buy Android and WinMo devices instead? None of these platforms are fighting for developer attention in a vacuum, but they are fighting for developer attention.
3. Xcode charging $5 to upgrade is quite a "variation" on that theme indeed. $99/year dev subscriptions, again, are outside MSDN theme-level fees by an order of magnitude.
4. My point is that if you're paying $0.30 per day to rent a Ferrari, Ferrari is not "nickel-and-diming" you. Is "totally free" the only fee level at which you're interested in consuming tools and developer support? Do you make such decisions for an organization with money riding on the results?
This is a popular refrain, but I don't think it holds up well at all under scrutiny:
1. By your logic, who should care about developers? Only open source projects or ISVs? And yet everyone does, a lot.
2. iOS platform developers buy Macs (and often multiple iOS devices) to develop iOS apps.
3. Xcode, warts and all, is basically free. Same with all of the OS X and iOS developer documentation. Have you priced Visual Studio or an MSDN subscription lately?
4. No one who feels this way has had Quinn the Eskimo answer a Core OS or Networking question for them in the Apple Dev Forums. If you don't care about developers, you don't pay folks like him to dispense wisdom to a bunch of yahoos who each paid $99/year.