[keawade]

The platform in this case would be iOS, not Mac OS. But you can't work with iOS without a Mac OS machine which are particularly expensive.

In comparison, Android allows a lot more flexibility of cost when picking a development machine by allowing you to develop from Linux, Windows, or Mac OS.

[simonh]

They're both Apple products running Apple code, which you are free to buy if you so wish.

[ShroudedNight]

This is not my area of expertise, but from what I can gather, to develop apps for iOS devices one requires:

- iOS device for testing

=> iPhone hardware

=> iOS

- macOS device for compiling

=> Apple PC hardware

=> macOS

- Apple developer account

- Selling exclusively via the iOS App Store, yielding a 30% cut to Apple

If each aspect sold on its own merits without further restrictions, one could easily imagine (at the very least) building iOS apps using a Linux tool-chain, before uploading them to the App store.

That's not an option. Apple is using the perceived value of reaching iOS customers to 'strengthen' the offering of its mac line. This would tend to indicate that it believes the value of having access to its iOS marketplace is large enough to compel developers to purchase its mac hardware at a premium. Apple is using its market power in iOS to bias PC purchases in its favour.

The open question is whether Apple's use of its acquired market power is harmful to the broader economic ecosystem, and if it is indeed harmful, is it harmful enough that the state should intervene (which is a harmful process in itself).

[simonh]

iOS and MacOS are really just flavours of the same operating system. That includes most of their system services, core libraries such as graphics primitives, sound system, network stack, data persistence libraries, etc. Even the higher level application frameworks have a high degree of commonality.

When you run an iOS app in a simulator on a Mac it’s not like running a virtual machine under VMWare, it substantially uses the native underlying MacOS libraries directly, because they are the same.

To do that on Linux or Windows Apple would have to port almost all of their operating system services, application frameworks and GUI layers and XCode from the Darwin OS core to Linux or Windows. That would be a truly massive undertaking.

All they are asking is that if you want to use their software, as a user or as a developer, is that you buy it.