

Apple Seeking to Stimulate Mac Development With $99 Mac Dev Program - anderzole
http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/05/apple-seeking-to-stimulate-mac-development-with-99-mac-dev-program/

======
jcromartie
You don't need to pay anything to use Xcode to build and publish OS X
applications. Why would this stimulate development? Why would someone say
"well I wasn't going to develop this application for free but, now that they
let me pay $99, I'm on board!"

I doubt that official Apple support and forums are the main thing keeping
people back from developing for OS X.

~~~
tvon
They're offering a lower price membership to ADC, which previously started at
$500/yr.

------
frederickcook
After all the discussion on HN lately about how the iPad is bad for the future
of software development, it seems good that Apple is taking steps to reduce
friction for potential Mac developers.

~~~
mcav
As long as this isn't the first step toward a more iPhone-like development
model for Mac.

~~~
dnsworks
It's funny to think about it. Apple has managed to do such a good job at
building up it's own Karma, that it can release ecosystems to great fanfare
using rather similar techniques that would get Microsoft nothing but jeers. An
app store for the mac would be pretty horrendous, yet Apple's enthusiastic
fanbase just wouldn't consider chiding them as a hole. This would sort of be
RMS' worst nightmare.

------
allwein
The most exciting aspect of this for me is that the cost is less than the
traditional $129 cost of OS X upgrades. So now I can not only get my OS X
upgrade for free, but I can repeated early betas legitimately.

~~~
ashleyw
Surely they won't continue to release final builds now the program is at
$99/year?

~~~
wmf
$99/year is more than $129/2 years. Also, providing betas but not finals
creates an incentive for cheapskate developers to keep using beta releases,
which isn't a good thing. (Speaking from personal experience here, since I ran
OS 8.5 beta for a long time.)

------
ben1040
I wonder how long it will be before they offer a combined option that includes
an iPhone developer certificate and access to prerelease software on both
platforms. Surely they'd want developers to feed both ecosystems by building
great Mac apps that come with mobile companions.

------
icefox
If you are buying some mac hardware, signing up to the developer program pays
for itself with a hardware discount.

~~~
allwein
They've eliminated the hardware discounts from the new $99 program.

------
iuguy
If they really want to stimulate development, make it free and don't require a
Mac to do the development.

Less barriers == more developers.

~~~
teilo
XCode has been free for a very long time. It is not crippled. There is no
"XCode Professional". SDKs are freely available, and fully documented. No one
needs to pay to develop on Mac, and a good many developers didn't bother with
the previous incarnation of the Mac Developer program because it was
prohibitively expensive. All it did was get you pre-releases of OS X, hardware
discounts, and live technical support for the XCode toolchain.

As to supporting development on other platforms... That's just silly. Would
you try to develop Win32 apps on a Linux box? Seriously?

~~~
nitrogen
If the OP was referring to iHandheld devices, then it makes sense for anybody
but Apple to support multiple host development platforms. For example, a lot
of people are crazy enough to do embedded Linux development entirely on
Windows. Plus there's no native advantage anywhere, so any host CPU type is as
good as any other.

