Delphi XE4 pricing

It’s not exactly a ‘leak’ given it comes from an official promo video, albeit in Russian, but anyhow, the US pricing for Delphi XE4 has come out:

See here (for some reason, the video couldn’t show on Firefox, my usual browser, but it ran fine in Safari). In a nutshell, the XE4 upgrade will be a ‘nominal’ $49 for XE3 Professional edition owners uninterested in iOS support, or $499 if they are. In contrast, the upgrade cost from XE3 for Enterprise and above will be a flat $499. Slightly disappointingly (well, in my view at least), nothing clever has been done with the Starter edition – that remains Win32 only.

Does $499 (I shan’t guess the exchange rate for outside the US) fulfil the promise of iOS support being a ‘low cost add-on’ for XE3 Professional owners? Probably not, and while I’d prefer it lower, I’m not sure it’s particularly expensive for the market either:

• RemObjects are currently running a ‘limited offer’ promotion for getting Oxygene for Windows, OS X, iOS and Android for $499. While this is more platforms than Delphi, at least for now, you’re only getting a vaguely Delphi-like language – ignoring the lack of a shared visual component library (which RemObjects are no doubt quite sincere in dismissing the very idea of), there’s no shared RTL either, at least at the level of Delphi’s, let alone .NET’s.
• Xamarin sell their eponymous Mono-based tools for $299 per platform for ‘indie’ developers, and $999 per platform per seat for ‘business’ customers. Since only the ‘business’ (or beyond that, ‘enterprise’) edition comes with Visual Studio integration, if you want that, you’re looking at $2,697.30 (!) for all supported platforms (this includes a multiplatform discount). On the other hand, unlike Oxygene, you are buying a commercial licence for not just a language (C# in Xamarin’s case – and a very fine language it is too), but an extensive RTL (i.e., their implementation of the .NET BCL) and a dedicated IDE, which Xamarin ships alongside (or in the case of the ‘indie’ edition, instead of) its VS integration.

Of course, beyond pricing, there is the quality issue to consider too. Put briefly, it’s all very well promising the moon, but if you end up delivering a trip to a boggy field instead, the original promise will backfire. Time will tell…

[PS – I’d forgotten about Software Assurance when I wrote this post (silly!). I’ve no idea how that will be handled. Pure speculation, but maybe XE3 Professional users on SA will get iOS support, but with higher renewal charges kicking in if they want to keep it for later releases…?]

[PPS – Joylon Smith has posted further comments on his blog (link). As there’s no point in fragmenting the discussion, please feel free to comment there, or the thread I started on Embarcadero’s Delphi Non-Technical forum (link), rather than here.]