[judah]

Controls: It doesn't force me to use native controls. :-) My web app today is still using the free and opened web, and all the goodness that comes with that, for UI and code.

Requiring a Mac: Now you've met one. I built a halfway decent iOS app, and I don't want to spend $7000 on a Mac and its crappy dev tools and frameworks.

I've poured nearly 7 years of work into user experience. I don't need to redo all that for Apple's closed, proprietary platform.

[rolha-capoeira]

$7000? Your bias is showing. You can buy a Mac for <$1000 and it's perfectly capable of developing most apps.

[waddlesworth]

While possible, it's far from ideal. I had this experience, using an old MacBook to build an iPhone app. It repeatedly crashed because I had Atom and XCode open at the same time.

[mgkimsal]

<$1000 mac for even moderate development use cases? your bias is showing now.

[jclardy]

The $500 Mac mini can handle Xcode just fine, and that is a many year old machine that hasn't been updated. Maybe not if you've been spoiled on better hardware, but it performs adequately.

[cache_miss]

I used my personal $500 mac mini for full-time desktop and webapp development when employed at Citrix. This excludes the cost of peripherals, of course.

[rsynnott]

MacBook Air and Mini should be fine for most stuff, certainly for glorified web apps.

[OtterCoder]

Exactly. I write the main code on my Linux machine, then switch to the MacMini for testing and UI finalization.

[evilduck]

We're talking about a Cordova-wrapped SPA. You can develop those on Raspberry Pis if you had to. A 9 year old $250 MBP off ebay will absolutely suffice.

[rolha-capoeira]

Yes, even for moderate development use cases. I've never had any problems.

[zghst]

I bought a 2013 Macbook Pro for $700. Retina Display. Where there's a will, there's a way.

[judah]

Yes, I'm using hyperbole. :-) Even $1000 to build a free app is too much. (That said, going to Apple.com and clicking Mac shows me the base model for $4999.00 [0])

What happened to cross-platform apps? Why is it that Google and Microsoft are champions of the free and opened web, and even cross-platform dev tools for web development, while Apple is holding back progress?

I think the reason is their business is jeopardized by the free and open web, just as Microsoft was in the late 1990s.

[0}: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac-pro

[eropple]

"Clicking Macbook shows me an iMac Pro"

Yeah, no, it actually literally doesn't. There's no "Macbook" button on Apple's site. There's a Mac button. The Mac page then shows you a range of Macs, from the Macbook to the Mac mini, at the top of the screen. they are showing you the iMac Pro--their halo-effect product and newest release--on the Mac landing page; that's not the same thing and it is dishonest to assert that it is.

Open standards are good. (The open web, whatever. I use React Native, because I like writing applications that feel responsive.) Open standard thumping as a proxy for weird platform fandoms is really not. Stop.

[judah]

Mac button, not Macbook, but you already knew that.

Open standards are good. And we should want them to win, because it provides a safe haven from the abuses of big corporations. And I think right now, Apple is stepping into those waters: they are holding back web standards in order to keep promoting their business, which is reliant on native apps.

[scarface74]

Open standards aren't "good" if they provide an inferior user experience.

[realusername]

They only provide inferior user experience because Safari mobile is crap.

[kbutler]

To be fair, judah said "going to Apple.com and clicking Mac shows me the base model for $4999.00"

Doing what he said takes me to:

  https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac-pro

On which the only computer I see without scrolling is the Mac Pro. My UI design friends constantly tell me anything "below the fold" may as well be invisible.

Clicking the "Buy >" button takes me to

  27-inch Retina 5K 5120-by-2880 P3 display

$4,999.00

I know there are other options, but that's the default path for a naive user wanting to buy a mac from apple.com.

I hope casual users don't end up following that path often!

[rolha-capoeira]

First you said "$7000 on a Mac", then I said "You can buy a Mac for <$1000", then you said "Macbook shows me the base model for $4999.00" and you linked to an iMac Pro.

[waterside81]

You linked to an iMac Pro, a high-end desktop, not a MacBook. Entry level MacBook is 1299

[eropple]

You can buy a completely dev-usable Mac for under $1000. (My CI machine is a Mac mini I bought used for $350 and dropped an SSD and an extra stick of RAM into.) Its "crappy dev tools" are free.

This is some silly stuff right here.

[avtar]

How reliable is your CI machine? I don't have the log entries anymore but in the past I've seen Mac Minis that were set up as Jenkins nodes throttle hard, leading to variable job results. The Minis were running VirtualBox VMs which would arbitrarily report long running test failures. I remember thinking perhaps it was VirtualBox specific behaviour until I search for "mac mini cpu throttle" and found similar results.

[eropple]

For my purposes? Very reliably. But my use cases are very sporadic; I'm just exposing a webhook for my VCS and running when one of a small set of my personal projects are updated.

(It also runs a couple other small things for the house.)

[limeblack]

> My CI machine is a Mac mini I bought used for $350 and dropped an SSD and an extra stick of RAM into

All but the vintage 2012 desktop Mac minis have been nuetered in the sense they are not upgradable.

[eropple]

"Neutered" is a weird term. The line is due for a refresh, I think it's got an i7-4578U Haswell in its top-end machine, but that's not "neutered". Yeah, they want you to pay for upgrades themselves and that sucks, but, whatever--my 2012 one has an Ivy Bridge i7 in it and it is still plenty fast for build tasks in my (fairly price-conscious) environment.

If I needed a beefier machine, I would be making much more money and justifying its purchase.

[orangecat]

my 2012 one has an Ivy Bridge i7 in it and it is still plenty fast for build tasks in my (fairly price-conscious) environment.

That's the point: the current mini is worse than what you could get in 2012, due to removing the quad core option and upgradeable memory.

[eropple]

OK, so buy one used. It's just not a big deal for a home developer.

[abrowne]

I'm guessing they mean the lack of memory slots in the current model.

[valuearb]

You've poured nearly 7 years of work into user experience, and you don't appreciate the benefits of native UX, especially on iOS?

My company builds our app in React, with the performance and UI critical functions in Java (Android) and Swift (iOS). I've spent my career learning and applying one key rule about UX, little things can make huge differences in how enjoyable and productive the user experience is.

[briandear]

> I've poured nearly 7 years of work into user experience. I don't need to redo all that for Apple's closed, proprietary platform.

So don’t. I also don’t have to use your app.