Hi Mac User,
I can feel that from the end-user's point of view, it is disappointing to see the Mac OS X version being more expensive.
The higher price is due to the higher cost to us. The Mac OS X version actually is 4 editions combined - Power PC 32-bit, Power PC 64-bit, Intel 32-bit, Intel 64-bit. It is because different Mac computers, and different versions of the Mac OS X, uses different processor architectures. It needs 4 times the number of resources for building it and testing it.
Although you can "run" a PowerPC 32-bit application in a 64-bit Intel machine, you cannot "link" or "load" a PowerPC 32-bit DLL in a 64-bit Intel binary. For example, you cannot load a 32-bit PHP DLL in the 64-bit PHP in Leopard. So we need to support all 4 processor architectures, so that when the user moves or upgrades their Mac OS X, the application will continue to work. This is also why the "libchartdir.so" is very large in file size - because it is actually 4 editions combined into a Universal binary. Some of our customers will "de-fat" it using "lipo" if they only need to support a certain processor architecture.
On the other hand, the Windows edition is Intel 32-bit only.
We are already thinking that in the future, if we no longer need to support PowerPC based computers, we can lower the price to be the same as that for Windows.
Regards
Peter Kwan |
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Mac Dev License costs more.