Hacker News Reader

The article says it cost $200,000 "in lost income". That's not quite the same as spending $200K, they're factoring in opportunity cost to make it sound more dramatic. It's also possible that some of the equipment (eg laptops & displays) was purchased before they started iPhone work.

Definitely agree about iPod touches & cutting costs, though.

View on HN

The 5th gen iPod Touch is not the same as the iPhone 5 - it is more like the iPhone 4S, as far as I can tell, but obviously with the larger screen.

Buying two certainly sounds like an extravagance. A better distribution of devices would be 1 x iPhone 5, 1 x 5th gen iPod Touch, 1 x 4th gen iPod Touch, which would cost about the same as 2 iPhone 5s and also give you a reasonable idea of performance on iPhone 4S (roughly equivalent to 5th gen iPod Touch) and iPhone 4 (equivalent to 4th gen iPod Touch).

That assumes your program is OpenGL- or CPU-heavy. If not, you can probably do fine with whatever you've got, plus the simulator :)

Opportunity cost is real! $200,000 in lost income is $200,000 in lost income - there are no two ways about it...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com