Compared to Xcode 3, it lacks significant functionality that is quite likely to cause you problems immediately: no scripts menu, no disassembly window, no search'n'replace in selection, no remote OS X debugging, no Interface Builder plugins. Adding new functionality is nice, but if you've done without it so far, you can keep doing without it. Taking functionality away, on the other hand...
Whilst I've no doubt that Xcode 4 will eventually become better than Xcode 3 in all respects (not that Xcode 3 was all that great to start with...), at the moment it is not. So you're paying $5 for something that could easily end up worse for you than something that is free!
I think "waste" is a reasonable way of putting it. Perhaps a touch over-dramatic for my taste, but reasonable nonetheless.
(DISCLAIMER: if you don't mind what's not in Xcode 4, $5 might not seem like a waste. Unfortunately people can only argue from their own experience. This argument is made from mine. I'm sure yours was more fun, but mine is all I've got.)
That makes no sense. You are unhappy that other people can get something for free now? That's self-centered. You were willing to pay the price, why does the ability of other people to now get the same thing for free change your original assessment? It doesn't seem to change anything for me.
The argument that it was only $5 is a fine one, but to argue the overall point, I'm afraid you're wrong.
Would you feel the same way if you were renting a house, and had been saving away money for years, so decided to buy it off your landlord so that you would be a homeowner rather than renting all your life. Then a week later the same landlord, who owns all the houses on the street, decides to give the houses away to the tenants. Are you seriously going to be sat there, having spent six figures on the house, and say "I was willing to pay the price, I don't care about them now being given away free"?
Even on a less extreme example, if you spend $1000 on an iPad, and the next week an iPad 2 is announced and your iPad is in shops for $500, are you seriously not going to think "fuck, wish I waited to buy it"?
Humans are irrational like that but I try to not get annoyed by those kinds of situations. It's meaningless. If anything I would be annoyed at myself for apparently picking the wrong maximum price I was walling to pay.
But that makes no sense! The time component is kinda important, you can’t just remove it.
I’m not crying over the purchase of my 64MB, 350MHz and 4GB PC in 1998 because if I were to remove the time component the price I paid for it was way, way, way too high. That’s absurd, you don’t do that.
The regret is because your purchasing decision would have been different if you had more information. In the case of "tomorrow it's free", the information is temporal (tomorrow's price) instead of spatial (the other store has a better price).
The amount of regret changes with the time span, largely because of the utility you gain in the interim, but the key is the incomplete information - if you had perfect knowledge, would you still make the same decision?
If you knew in 1998 that 10 years later, your computer would be virtually worthless, would you still have bought it? Sure. In fact, you did know the value would approach zero over time, so there's little need for regret beyond nostalgia.
The reasoning was that they couldn't release Xcode 4 free for Snow Leopard because of Apple's extremely conservative interpretation of Sarbanes-Oxley. Xcode has always been free with new OS versions. They were only charging extra if you wanted to get it for the old OS.
(An extremely low price point like $5 is generally a tip-off that Apple is just charging a nominal fee to satisfy accounting rules.)
That's a good question, but unfortunately I'm not privy to Apple's internal workings to give you an accurate answer. The general metric seems to be "Does it add value to the core product?" This is the same reason iOS updates are free to the iPhone but not to the iPod Touch — the iPhone is viewed as a multi-year investment (and reflected as such in Apple's accounting), while the iPod Touch is a shrinkwrap product that Apple doesn't believe it can add value to without charging for it.
But the precise bar for when they feel like they need to charge is something only Apple could tell you, and maybe not even them. Like I said, their interpretation of the law is idiosyncratic.
Thinking about it further, I'd bet the distinction is that iTunes is on Windows too, so it's viewed as an independent product, while things like Xcode and FaceTime are tied to Mac OS.
I read something somewhere (can't remember where) that Apple is starting to spread the sale of new macs (starting with machines with Lion on them) over some longer period of time.
This would apparently set things up for providing new features (ostensibly iCloud) without having to charge small increments and still adhere to their conservative SOX interpretation.
