It's the new subscription model, subscribe to rights that you should have by default. Such as the ability to program the computer that you just bought.<p>Early computers all came with built in programming capability, then we lost some of that and then open source happened and suddenly it seemed ridiculous to ask developers money to support your platform.<p>It's like charging the guys that sweep your street toll.<p>Be happy that people want to develop for your platform and make it as easy as possible for them.<p>Things like this will incrementally push developers away from closed platforms. Why on earth would anybody pay a subscription to a toolchain. Open source tools are abundant and free, run on practically any piece of hardware from small embedded controllers all the way to supercomputers.<p>When switching from a windows environment to open source for my main dev box a couple of years ago, I was worried about not being able to bring my tools along. Now I feel completely unable to do anything useful on a machine that does not come with at least a full complement of unix tools.<p>I can see a device like the ipad as a target, but if development is going to be limited to apple-only then the subscription fee is the smaller part (we do have an imac here, but I doubt that everybody that wants to develop for the pad has a mac ready to go).<p>So for some the cost is significantly higher than just the subscription to the SDK.<p>I prefer software without a built in expiry date anyway.