Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrEfficiency | Hacker News Reader

Dont forget you need to buy an apple, and the yearly membership, and have to constantly update when code is intentionally broken.

As a small time dev with limited resources, Apple is my least favorite company to deal with.

View on HN

As a consumer, I'm happy with the rapid pace of change in Apple's software. Yes, that raises the minimum needed to keep an Apple app working.

I have never heard Apple praised for rapid pace of change in their software but there's a first for everything! In fact IMHO they lack behind everyone else and live by taking what others do, brush it up a tad and sell it as the best new amazing feature ever made.

Im pretty sure Apple has a marketing team patrolling ycombinator.

or fanboys.

Oh noes, you have to have the platform from the company to make apps for the platform from the company. The horror.

I honestly cannot take seriously any complaints about having to have a Mac to make Mac apps. How on earth are you testing if you don't have the platform you're supposed to be targeting?

Well, with regards to iPhone development at least, it's not that you're buying the platform you're targeting, it's that you have to buy a specific separate piece of hardware, running a specific separate software OS, which are not the same as the target platform, to develop for it. An then, as the GP notes, you have to keep updating them for reasons unrelated to the targeted platform.

I mean, I understand having to have a Mac to develop for a Mac, but having to have a Mac to develop for iPhone is just Apple being Apple.

I still can't take that complaint seriously.

Maybe because you already have a Mac? If you had to buy a NeXT workstation to develop for it, that might feel a bit different then though, right? It's only a slightly different proposition. Sure, a lot of people already have Macs, but it's not really that hard to make the software work on other operating systems. Apple just doesn't care to to make it cross platform, and also makes more money and solidifies their market by requiring Macs.

I think he is more complaining about having to have a Mac to build iOS apps.

> Oh noes, you have to have the platform from the company to make apps for the platform from the company. The horror.

Useless snark.

> I honestly cannot take seriously any complaints about having to have a Mac to make Mac apps. How on earth are you testing if you don't have the platform you're supposed to be targeting?

The point is that you don't have to buy dedicated hardware for the other two big platforms (Windows, Linux). The fact that this restriction is essentially arbitrary makes cross-platform developers reasonably annoyed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com