The new M1 Mac Mini might literally be the first 'affordable' Apple machine that isn't underpowered. Will need to cough up some $ for display adaptors if you want more than one monitor for development though.
$600 is a lot for a small dev who already has a computer. What if they’re a windows gamer and they’re happy with their old desktop? $600 is a lot to many people if it’s not strictly necessary.
Apple does more than just not make tools for other platforms though. They make it impossible for anyone else to make tools on other platforms that can deploy to the App store. And after a certain scale, it isn't even the development machines that are the problem, it's your CI/CD pipeline.
I mean you also need to buy a monitor and peripherals for a PC. Since they’re not built in you could find a 1080p monitor on Facebook marketplace locally for almost nothing. If you’re just doing iOS development the Mac mini should be fine.
Math much? 20 million (that's 3-year old numbers [1]) apple developers. Probably a lot of them on the $299 enterprise plan, but let's assume they're all using the $99 one. 20mil * $100 = $2 billions. QED
The figure available was "billions". For ease of calculation, say it was 7b. That means if each developer pays $100 and total revenue was 7b, 1% of the world must be a developer. (1% of 7b * $100 = $7b)
Also, by your own figure, 20 million is already ~0.25% of the world population.
Who cares how much they make? If you’re unhappy, go to Google or petition Microsoft or Amazon to get back in the game. I’d also like a provider that allows other app stores and has high quality like Apple — one of those companies should do it. But it’s ridiculous to force apple to do it when you could go elsewhere.
So they are making billions -while- creating an effective incentive against spam on their platform? That must the most obvious case of profits well deserved in the history of modern LTDs, good for Apple and their shareholders!
Yes they do, the fee is yearly, and they make billions in revenue from this. Google charge one-time.