iPhone/iPad Development

So I was looking into doing an iPhone/iPad application.  Turns out, Apple is quite proud of their stuff.

You are looking at $99/yr minimum in order to develop iPhone/iPad applications.  You are looking at $299/yr do to Enterprise applications (IE the ability to deploy proprietary applications in-house).

And... you have to have a machine running OS X to run the IDE.

For someone like me who has never owed a Mac... I'm looking at about $700 (likely close to $1000) get get a new Mac machine running OS X to develop with.

So $800 - $1,1100 minimum to start developing applications for ONE platform.

In contrast, I could buy a computer and a full featured version of .NET for that price and have the capacity to do Windows, Web, Smart Phone, etc development.  OR... download the Express versions for ... FREE.

There's a reason Apple lags behind Microsoft in the business environment... this could be one of them.