Craig Hockenberry, one of the developers for Twitterrific, has written a post on Stack Overflow estimating what it costs to develop a similar iPhone application.
We worked some pretty long hours. Let’s be conservative and say it’s 10 hours per day for 6 days a week. That 60 hours for 9 weeks gives us 540 hours. With two developers, that’s pretty close to 1,100 hours. Our rate for clients is $150 per hour giving $165,000 just for new code. Remember also that we were reusing a bunch existing code: I’m going to lowball the value of that code at $35,000 giving a total development cost of $200,000.
Anyone who’s done serious iPhone development can tell you there’s a lot of design work involved with any project. We had two designers working on that aspect of the product. They worked their asses off dealing with completely new interaction mechanics. Don’t forget they didn’t have any hardware to touch, either (LOTS of printouts!) Combined they spent at least 25 hours per week on the project. So 225 hours at $150/hr is about $34,000.
There are also other costs that many developer neglect to take into account: project management, testing, equipment. Again, if we lowball that figure at $16,000 we’re at $250,000.
I sometimes wonder what monsters haunt the nightmares of Apple’s resident designer, Mr. Jonathan Ive. He’s so prim, so meticulous, so clean and proper, but on those nights when he has a slice of pepperoni pizza a little too close to bed time, what horrors does he dream up? Some horrible Cenobite iMac dragging itself bloodily across the floor whispering “Make way for the new flesh:” a biomechanical monstrosity of Foxconn components crammed into the pulsating sack of some skinless, cancerous stomach?
Or is it something more like this cardboard box Hackintosh, put together by the guys over at One Block Off the Grid — a cooperative for buying photovoltaic solar panels at a group discount — after one of their Macs proved too slow to run Adobe After Effects?
To make this Hackintosh, the One Block Off The Grid chaps simply ordered $900 worth of components from Amazon, including a 2.66 Intel Core i5 CPU, a 1 TB hard drive, 8 GB of 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM, and an XFX Radeon HD 5770 1GB DDR5 Graphics Card, and installed it inside the cardboard box in which it had all arrived. They installed Snow Leopard on the finished machine using iBoot Multibeast.
The end result? The performance equivalent of a $2700 Mac Pro in a $900 ghetto package. Jonny Ive must feel invisible insects crawling all over his body right about now. Some things were not meant to be.
Apple has gotten very predictable in how it schedules its rollouts, with new iPhones being released during the summer, new iPods and Macs in separate Fall events. And like clockwork, Apple just announced it will hold a media event called “Back to the Mac” on October 20 to let us know “what’s new for Mac,” as well as “a sneak peek of the next major version of Mac OS X.” Since the graphic for the event shows a lion peeking out from behind a tilted Apple logo, it’s probably safe to assume that Mac OS X 10.7 will be known as Lion.
Not much is known about what might be announced for 10.7, which has been appearing with increasing frequency in web server logs over the past year. Rumors that 10.7 would require apps to be signed with an Apple root certificate – effectively ‘jailing’ Mac OS X and creating a desktop App Store – were denied by Steve Jobs. There has also been some buzz about a revolutionary new feature, “something that has never been done before and will truly amaze everyone,” referred to in a job listing Apple posted a few months ago. Though the details about the change in the “very foundations” of Mac OS X were left vague in the listing, the software engineer Apple was searching for needed experience with Internet technologies and services, and especially “up close and personal experience with the HTTP protocol as well as other protocols layered atop it.”
Of course, many observers will be looking to see if the long-rumored 11-inch MacBook Air shows any sign of actually being released. Fall is the traditional time for new Mac announcements, and the Air hasn’t seen a refresh in over a year. The supposed “mini” Air, which is claimed to be manufactured by Quanta Computer and feature a 32nm Intel Core processor, has been talked about for months, and may well be announced next week… if it’s not total vapor, that is.
The event will be held a week from today on Apple’s Cupertino campus at One Infinite Loop.
Craig Hockenberry, one of the developers for Twitterrific, has written a post on Stack Overflow estimating what it costs to develop a similar iPhone application.