Officially, their dev tools cost money. Here is the 1997 pricing for various versions of Visual Basic 5.0 and Visual C++ 5.0 in 1997: ($99, $499, $1,199)
Unofficially, almost nobody ever paid for that stuff in my experience and it was ridiculously easy to get for "free." As was the norm in those days there was zero copy protection. You could sail the pirate seas, you could buy one "legit" copy and share it with the whole org, you could get the MSDN subscription and get "evaluation" editions of literally their entire dev tools catalog on a big stack of CDs with zero limitations besides the legality of the situation. I'm sure that with minimal effort it was easy to get a hold of Mac dev tools for free as well. But Windows was so ubiquitous, as was "free" Microsoft software, and you could build a nice little PC for cheap.
I always wondered why Microsoft charged for that stuff in the first place. Were they actually making money on it directly? Did they sort of want to give it away for free, but were wary of antitrust implications?
Apple had a different strategy. Perhaps this is an incorrect perspective it seemed like they just didn't care about independent garage and small business developers. They left things up to 3rd parties. In a lot of ways this was better -- it probably led to a richer ecosystem? For example, looking at the Microsoft strategy, it's not hard to see that they drove Borland into the grave.
This was a little bit later in the timeline, but I remember attending an event in Philadelphia about F#, and I walked out of it with a licensed copy of Visual Studio .NET and SQL Server. They were just handing them out. I had an earlier copy of Visual Studio from when I was in college, and I was working in .NET at work, but no one at the event knew that. It was just - thanks for showing up to hear about functional programming, take some DVDs on your way out!
It always felt to me like there was a culture of openness in the world of Microsoft in a way that didn't exist in Apple culture. You gotta pay for dev tools to use dev tools on a Mac. You want an FTP client on a Mac? Buy Cyberduck or Fetch. My impression of Apple was that everything was proprietary and had a price. Whereas I could cobble a computer together that ran Windows, there was oodles of shareware and freeware as well as professional tools. You have full access to the registry and file system in Windows, and you could very easily hack the bejesus out of the OS if you wanted to. It was great for tinkering. Everything was backwards compatible - the point where I had Windows 10 running on a 2005 era Dell laptop that had come with Windows XP, and I had managed to upgrade legitimately without paying (I think the Windows 8 beta converted into a full Windows 8 upgrade, free).
Today, I'm typing this from a 2021 Macbook Pro with USB-C ports - when I travel for work, I bring one charger, and it charges my laptop, my phone, my earbuds, even my mirrorless camera. When I need software, I can usually find something using Homebrew. The value you get for your money on a Mac is much better, but it's still a steep barrier to entry, IMO - even though I'm in a much better position today, and bought this without breaking a sweat. There's a lot of tinkering-related things I miss about the Microsoft ecosystem, but I've largely moved out of the weeds for my day to day work on a computer. All the software I was using on my Windows machine is multi-platform now, and the performance and battery life on these Apple native chips is hard to ignore. As a developer, it's just as simple, if not easier now, to build on Macs - ever since OSX opened up the Linux ecosystem to these devices. That, in conjunction with superior hardware, finally convinced me to switch after at least three decades of being staunchly Microsoft.
Hahaha I hate it but I'm doing that thing where I agree with the other 50 things you said but point out on thing I don't agree with, but:
The value you get for your money on a Mac
is much better, but it's still a steep barrier
to entry, IMO
Is it that steep? A refurb M1 Macbook Air straight from Apple with 1 year of AppleCare is $850. $1,189 if you want 16GB + 512GB.
That is more money than a lot of people can afford, especially outside of the US.
But boy, it's so much cheaper than ever. That's like, two Xboxes (+ controllers + a game or two) so it feels within the reach of a broad swath of the population.
Admittedly... you can get a nice-enough Windows/Linux developer desktop or laptop with a little Craigslist or FB Marketplace effort for like, $150.
Officially, their dev tools cost money. Here is the 1997 pricing for various versions of Visual Basic 5.0 and Visual C++ 5.0 in 1997: ($99, $499, $1,199)
https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/microsoft-sets-pricing...
Unofficially, almost nobody ever paid for that stuff in my experience and it was ridiculously easy to get for "free." As was the norm in those days there was zero copy protection. You could sail the pirate seas, you could buy one "legit" copy and share it with the whole org, you could get the MSDN subscription and get "evaluation" editions of literally their entire dev tools catalog on a big stack of CDs with zero limitations besides the legality of the situation. I'm sure that with minimal effort it was easy to get a hold of Mac dev tools for free as well. But Windows was so ubiquitous, as was "free" Microsoft software, and you could build a nice little PC for cheap.
I always wondered why Microsoft charged for that stuff in the first place. Were they actually making money on it directly? Did they sort of want to give it away for free, but were wary of antitrust implications?
Apple had a different strategy. Perhaps this is an incorrect perspective it seemed like they just didn't care about independent garage and small business developers. They left things up to 3rd parties. In a lot of ways this was better -- it probably led to a richer ecosystem? For example, looking at the Microsoft strategy, it's not hard to see that they drove Borland into the grave.