This is somewhat strange pricing - it seems ridiculously cheap if they're trying to make significant profits off of it, but pricey enough to prevent tinkerers who don't really know about coding but feel like trying it from getting a start in xcode.
According to the LLVM lead dev (Chris Lattner on IRC), this is due to Apple's accountant's interpretation of SOX (Xcode 4 is too different from Xcode 3 to be considered an update, they see it as a new product):
> it is due to some bizarro accounting rule. xcode4 is sufficiently new that it doesn't count as a free update or something. paid adc members should get free access. yeah, clearly we're trying to monetize it... doh
Same story as with FaceTime except worse. Apple's accountants seem very very weird.
I am not an Accountant and this isn't really an answer, but I will try to explain. Basically, it has to do with how you recognize money that you were paid. If I buy a MacBook for $999 and it comes with Xcode 3, and two years later, I get free major upgrades to the software, then the $999 I paid can't be recognized as revenue in the first year. It has to be spread out over the period of time that I will get free upgrades. If they charge me something for the upgrade, then they recongnize the $999 in year one, and the $4.99 two years later.
If this is all Apple is doing, expect Xcode 4 to be included in Lion. If it's not, they are simply charging for it now.
When you see token $.99 charges for things that should be free, this is the reason Apple does it. It's how they interpret the rules -- and, they are probably right. Since, there is no maintenance yearly charge, they can't keep delivering value to you for the initial price without spreading that money over the lifetime of the value delivery.
The great thing about Sarbanes-Oxley is that it is large enough to get away with blaming everything on it. Oh, you can say, my accounting team says Sarbanes-Oxley requires this 40% markup. Then if anybody actually calls you on it, you can refer them to their lawyer, who will charge them $15,000 to research the question. Since they can't read it either, they'll give you a maybe.
The real amusement to the law degrees, I'm sure, is that Sarbanes-Oxley doesn't really do anything and it's just a scare word, like Communism.
/s
All kidding aside, just look at that lead-in on Wikipedia. I needed a shot at the end of that, and that's not even a section. I'm curious why this would be the case myself, and I'm still looking, a couple hours later. On a Wednesday night.
If this is true then I wonder if buying a new Mac or a boxed copy of Mac OS entitles one to XCode 4 and all updates until XCode 5 (which will be years away)?
That is certainly the case with Facetime and the 802.11n update.
I'm guessing it'll be Lion doing that, as with Facetime. And depending on the release time of Xcode 5 (and its synchronicity with OSX 10.8 or 10.9) and whatnot, Xcode 5 may very well be as "free" as 2.0 and 3.0 were.
Yes, the more I think about it the less sense it makes. Putting it on the App Store seems perfectly normal, but charging money for something that used to be free, even a token amount, is a really stupid thing to do.
$5 is nearly as bad as $50: the difference between charging nothing and something is way higher than the difference between charging something and something higher.
Is it to defray hosting costs for a 4 gig app on the App Store? Then why host it for free before on their site?
The cynic in me thinks that it's $10 this year, $15 the next, and pretty soon Apple will be doing what Microsoft used to do. If so, it's a real shame.
I remember when I first switched to OS X as a student. The free developer tools were very impressive to me. I remember telling people "See, this is how it should be done. You shouldn't charge people to develop for your operating system. More applications for your system only helps you sell!"
I'm sure the free developer tools were also a factor in Microsoft offering a free version of VS. Now, it seems, as Apple is becoming more and more popular, they are moving more and more in the direction that MS did in their hay day.
It appears that a once fairly open system is becoming slowly more and more closed. I sincerely hope that the cynic in me is wrong.
My opinion is that it's just another "hidden fee" for OS X development. (A fee I'm happy to pay, for what it's worth.)
For me, I actually had to get a Mac before I could even think about writing my first iPhone app. Then I found out my 10.5 Mac Mini wasn't compatible with XCode, so I had to fork over a bit to pick up Leopard. Then comes the $100 or whatever for a developer license so you can build on phone.
Seems the conditioning they put you through worked well. In fact seen in that light, the new fee makes sense. They just want to dull your resistance against paying through the nose.
I had to pay zero for Python and Java and Perl development (a fee I've been happy to pay, for what it's worth).
I actually had to get a computer before writing my first apps, but I could get whatever computer I liked. I never had one that was incompatible with these tools. Then came the $0 for a Python/Java/Perl developer license, so I could build on any server I liked.
After all that, $5 plus hooking myself up to Apple's death by a thousand cuts slow drip sounds pretty bad.
Being a hobbyist and learning to program in the 80s meant my dad shelling out hundreds of dollars for THINK Lightspeed Pascal, and yet, somehow I and many others managed to learn to program and become hobbyists and finally professional programmers.
They'll sell you a full-featured, modern IDE with all the pro features uncrippled for a measly $5. That's not a death blow to hobbyists, that's maybe one of the cheapest hobbies on the planet.
It was free, so I don't how you can call it anything but erecting a barrier to entry to developing POSIX apps on the Mac. You don't just need $5, you need a credit card number.
Like many other things in computing, the price to play has gotten steadily cheaper over time. When it gets more expensive we should ask why.
It makes sense for Apple's future of curated computing, but it's definitely another dick move.
They just plowed thousands of engineering man-hours into significantly overhauling both the infrastructure (huge amount of work around LLVM) and interface of Xcode for the Xcode 4 release, addressing a substantive number of long-standing complaints along the way. This release is by far the biggest overhaul of the product in the last decade. All of those engineers cost a lot of money. They aren't working on this out of charity. That's why.
I simply do not understand why people are hung up on an IDE that is the product of thousands of engineering man-hours costing as much as a single foot long sandwich slapped together by a bored teenager in 60 seconds.
A single footlong sandwich may be a significant sum for people not in Western, industrialized countries. But that point is secondary to the fact that even $5 is a barrier for beginners.
I think people are objecting because they themselves happened into programming as a passion and career - I know I did. They found some tool, probably for free (QBASIC for me) that got their feet wet initially, and that's how they got their start. A beginner who is neither sure nor convinced that programming is a good thing to pursue is unlikely to spend even a footlong's worth of money on it, and we've lost yet more potential future engineers.
Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free. Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free. When the status quo of the industry is free tools (and the few that are for-pay are getting cheaper every year), one can question why Apple is the odd man out in a sudden reversal.
> A beginner who is neither sure nor convinced that programming is a good thing to pursue is unlikely to spend even a footlong's worth of money on it, and we've lost yet more potential future engineers.
Sure. And Xcode would probably scare them off anyways, because it's decidedly not set up to be friendly to beginners. This is a non-issue. Beginning programmers on the Mac should under no circumstances go grab Xcode unless they want to feel utterly bewildered.
The $5 charge is utterly beside the point, here. One wonders how you imagine anyone ever gets into a hobby with more than a $5 barrier to entry.
> Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free.
They seem to have drastically increased the amount of effort they're putting into it, probably because of the increased iOS dev audience. That extra effort probably justifies the minor $5 price increase.
> Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free.
Which competitors would those be? Microsoft isn't giving their professional tools away for free, just a drastically cut down starter edition. Sun plowed a ton of cash into NetBeans, but following their financial lead seems ill-advised.
Had in mind Visual Studio Express (heavily crippled vs the purchased editions), the commercial Ada and Lisp IDEs whose free versions have onerous limitations, etc. There's a lot out there beyond the java IDEs.
And before we hold a eulogy for the vast swaths of poor put upon hobbyist devs who can't raise $5 or access the App store, you might want to establish the existence of these people actually having these problems rather than asking us to be outraged at a scenario in your imagination.
Neither Eclipse nor NetBeans can be called Java IDEs more than Emacs can be called a Lisp IDE. I develop in Python under Eclipse and I prefer Eclipse for general Java development. I prefer NetBeans for JavaME stuff and I absolutely love Emacs for Python, but there are things that Eclipse + Pydev do better (specially App Engine stuff). For what I know, the support for Roby and Rails in NetBeans is also very good.
Of course, Emacs is my Lisp (Clojure) IDE of choice.
As for the idiotic pricing of Xcode 4, I am bothered not by the price tag and the restrictions it imposes on some, but by the fact Apple's accountants interpret SOX in unique and singularly stupid ways.
python IDE's/text editor/whatevers: komodo Edit (the full $300 version) works very nicely for perl/python/ruby (never tried tcl), if you get somebody to buy if for you (no BizSpark that i can see).
I have't tried the intelliJ IDEA series (pyCharm, phpStorm, etc) but based on the scala plugin, I betcha they're quite solid as well.
You do realize it is hard to find a list of IDEs to compete in favorable terms with the free (as in speech) ones, don't you?
There is a reason why Eclipse, NetBeans, Emacs, Eric and so many others compare favorably, if not blow their competition out of the water: it's because some of the developers who use them give back and improve them.
Maybe they want to create an incentive for developers to release their software at a low price on the App Store instead of making it free? Transform the freeware into low priced apps on which they get a share.
That's actually a very interesting thought, and quite plausible. Though I'd expect them to charge more for XCode if they wanted to spur thoughts of "I need to recoup these costs" properly.
It's probably an incentive to get people to become paid developer members. You already need to be enrolled to submit apps to the Mac and iOS app stores.
If you just need a compiler, install the development tools on the OS X install DVD that came with your computer. If you want to be doing software development for Mac or iOS, the developer fee is worth it for the documentation and prerelease software.
It's probably a part of a longer term pricing strategy. It's hard to start charging "real" money (even $40/$50) for an application you were formerly giving away for free. People feel like you've taken something away. By charging a micro-payment disposable price of $5 (Happy Meal, Latte, etc.) they deflect a lot of that criticism and avoid some of the negative publicity. Over the next 10 years they can slowly raise the price, each time keeping is reasonable.
Apple's leveraging the work they put into building the App Store infrastructure (and business deals with credit card companies) to do something a lot of other companies couldn't (make something that was free cost something again without too much fallout).
Kids in places where the App Store doesn't reach still can buy Macs from channels other than Apple, they can buy and borrow books and teach each other. They can't download Xcode 4 unless they have an account with Apple, a valid credit card (issued in the right country) or a couple of iTunes gift cards.
The entire thing is built on open source. I certainly won't be paying and this shift in culture at apple is turning me off. I probably won't be buying another product from them for a while.
Built on open source... an important part of which they invested in (LLVM). One can as well easily install LLVM/clang via MacPorts, or wait until Lion (under the assumption that XCode will still be included on the download media).
Getting the proprietary parts for five dollars is certainly not a bad deal. But one has to wonder... why? Is it to cover download costs?
The whole IDE portion isn't open source, just the compilers. Thats like saying IntelliJ shouldn't charge for their IDE because the java compiler is free.
Some pirated software and cracking patches rely on gdb. So a user has to have xcode installed in order for the cracks to work. At least, it's often a requirement.
This might be to make that harder and to thwart software piracy up to a point.
Well, I'll just paste instructions from a crack a friend of mine needed me to help him with:
Install Instructions for Protools 9
• 0. Make sure you have gdb installed. Test by typing “gdb test” into terminal.
1. Uninstall any versions of Pro Tools that are already installed
2. Install Pro Tools, Complete Production Tookit 2 and HEAT (in the optional installers folder) from the full iso
3. Use the [K]‘ed installer to overwrite the necessary files
4. Launch Pro Tools from the loader and everything should work as expected
This crack requires Xcode to be installed. Xcode can be downloaded for free from developer.apple.com. Also, DO NOT REPLACE THE LOADER. The loader included with the new release (loader version 1.1) was designed for this release as a background process which is what people wanted. It also now breaks on ptrace so there is no need for the anti-ptrace extension posted later in the topic. To use Pro Tools launch the loader and wait a few seconds. Nothing will show while it does some work in the background and then it will launch the main Pro Tools app a few seconds later. Big thanks to unsanity, simblism, and XVX for their respective contributions.
