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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

I used OS X in VMware and Virtualbox (running Xcode) and the experience was awful. Mainly because 3D support is not available and OS X makes a heavy use of graphics acceleration.

OS updates also break the installation.

There are many discussion threads on this topic, like this one https://communities.vmware.com/thread/466874

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Same experience here. I usually don't have an Apple computer underhand, but I maintain cross-platform software for which I publish OSX binaries. I wish Apple gave some consideration to this situation, which is less of a problem for other plaforms which can be virtualized properly. After going though hoops running unstable VMs on old versions of VirtualBox, I ended up getting a vaguely stable build process up and running. But it was a pain.

Edit: less aggressive wording

"Doesn't Apple have any consideration for this situation?"

They do; buy a Mac.

EDIT: That sounds harsh, but it is their business model. That is the cost of entry to the Apple eco-system. I would argue that the running through hoops was your choice. The obvious choice is to not build for their platform.

That kind of consideration is synonymous with "give us more money" in my book. For developers who are willing to develop for iOS but don't use Macs, why not give them a bone and let them develop on a VM? Apple still makes money if the app sells.

Apple has considered that question, and the answer is "because they won't truly buy into our larger ecosystem."

And this isn't just greed. If you look at the quality of Apps on the App Store it's very often quite obvious who is building for the platform and who doesn't understand the platform and is just trying to cash in on it.

Apple wants high quality apps, not apps from people who just want to cash in. (And the people who aren't willing to spend $600 for a mac mini because they're being cheap are not likely to invest the much more expensive development time to make a good app.)

As an enterprise developer who only has to touch Apple products as a function of my job, I can say that they're very enterprise developer unfriendly. Everything in their ecosystem is centered around the individual experience and the journey sucks if you're a cog in the wheel of a big corporation.

I have $10000 in Apple products at the finger tips and I have no desire to touch any of them.

How can you say they do? They don't. Therefore, you have to buy a mac.

That's kinda like saying the obvious choice is not to build for Windows, because you have to have Windows to run Windows development tools.

Or not to build for Linux because you have to buy a linux machine.

You don't have to buy Microsoft hardware to run Windows development tools

But you do need to buy their software (or you did, until very recently), at least their operating system. In this case, Apple only sells their software in combination with hardware.

$500 for a Mac (with a license to all their "free" software) is not terribly far from $200 for Windows 8 Pro.

Incorrect on all counts - You have never needed to buy Microsoft's software in order to build something for Windows. There have always been free options from Microsoft and others.

And you don't need to pay for Windows either because Microsoft has given away 6 month trials of every version of Windows since forever. (And they give you an option to re-up the trial time without reinstalling so you can get like a year out of a free trial of Windows no problem.

> $500 for a Mac (with a license to all their "free" software) is not terribly far from $200 for Windows 8 Pro.

Amazon: Windows 8.1 OEM, $89.99

Amazon: Windows 8.1, $99.97

Amazon: Windows 8.1 Pro, $174.99

Windows 8.1 Pro provides no tools you really need for software development[0][1] (although client hyper-v is nice), you can develop on the standard edition of 8.1 just fine.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enterprise/products-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_8_editions

> Or not to build for Linux because you have to buy a linux machine.

Linux runs everywhere on anything. If you cannot find a place to run it for free, you aren't looking particularly hard.

When I'm fixing a bug in a piece of open source software reported by a user running it on a Mac, my inclination to actually pay money to fix that bug hovers around zero.

Let me just drop this link: http://macincloud.com/ ...you could totally use the iOS simulator, or compile the .ipa(iOS app binary) and send it to yourself via testflight or even faster, on a jailbroken device, just FTP/scp/whatever the .ipa to your physical location and install it on your device. But yeah, other than this cloud solution I completely agree on the price-of-entry point. Considering the salaries we're getting these days, allocating $1,000 for an iOS device and a macmini doesn't seem unreasonable. Around $1,600 if you need a macbook. That's how Apple rolls. Take it or leave it. If you're just wanting to learn to hack around with things, or just can't afford Apple hardware right now, then sure... hack around with OSX on non-Apple hardware. But if you're a professional paid engineer and serious about app development, dealing with this hack'ish OSX environment is a waste of time. Just by a macmini or sign up with macincloud. Spend your time developing your app, not pulling your hair out on whatever brokeness of OSX-on-NonApple-hardware you'll encounter.

The new mac minis (Late 2014) are terrible (google and see), and are not useable for anything other than web browsing. I recently had to dump this new mac mini and switch to a Macbook Pro for mac/iOS dev as they severely underpowered and limited entry level mac-minis, not to mention the craziness of soldering the ram (when form factor isn't an issue, compare to previous models), making basic upgrades impossible.

In conclusion, running Yosemite on VMs, especially AMD is really hard, and not worth it in the long run. Buy a mac instead, but AVOID the latest mac minis and get some other non-crippled model.

> I used OS X in VMware and Virtualbox (running Xcode) and the experience was awful. Mainly because 3D support is not available and OS X makes a heavy use of graphics acceleration.

For desktop use it's probably true, but you can enable SSH and log in to run build-jobs and test-runs with Xcode and friends just fine.

I can also cross compile for iOS in Linux... but the idea is obviously to use great tools not available in other platforms.

I run Yosemite Zone on a Lenovo W530 just fine, 13Gb RAM Allocated to OSten. Sure it's a little slow but it's usable. Still I agree, on slower hardware it's useless. I'm buying a Macbook Air 2011 next week since I need something faster and the Lenovo is a company machine.

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