Apple tell us that ADC Membership gets us more, but does it really? I began to wonder about this after reading The Decline of WWDC (originally from Gus Mueller). Michael and I are ADC Select members through Advenio and have been for a number of years. Do we get $500.00 worth of benefit from it each year?
The most obvious way to get value out of the Select membership is to take advantage of the Hardware Purchase Program. It doesn’t seem to say anywhere what the discount is but I will tell you that you’ve got to buy a pretty well configured machine to save $500.00. While we do use the coupon every year it could be argued that some of the purchases are spending money just to save. My old TiBook is still in active use and it would be possible to purchase a consumer Mac for less than a pro model even with the discount. We haven’t taken advantage of the Special Event Hardware Discounts because we haven’t exhibited anywhere.
Select members also receive shipping versions of Mac OS X in the mail, at least according to the website. I haven’t received anything since Tiger was released. Certainly on years without an OS release this isn’t overly useful. It also isn’t made clear how exactly we can use the license. I have 4 Macs in my household and so I purchase a family license when the OS is released. I guess I could use that one license on all of them, but that seems wrong. We can download Mac OS X Server for development and testing. This isn’t something we’ve taken advantage of because we haven’t been developing anything specifically for OS X Server.
The Developer Technical Support consultations are probably quite valuable if you are really stuck on something. I’ve never used one of the two we get per year and I don’t know if Michael has either. Generally I find answers to my questions in the documentation, the ADC website, Apple’s Mailing Lists, Cocoabuilder, CocoaDev, books I’ve purchased, or even a Google search. There are two of us and we get two consultations. To be fair that means one consultation each and just having one makes it seem so precious that it would be hard to decide when to use it. Is this problem really worth using the consultation or should I save it for a bigger challenge? That said, I think all ADC members, myself included, should strive to use these and share the knowledge gained.
Pre-Release Software is likely the most appealing aspect of ADC membership for me. Having access to new operating system features in time to support them in your software is important. So important that you might think Apple would want to make it available to all developers. Unfortunately there is no way to prove that someone who signs up for the free Online membership level of ADC is indeed developing software for the platform. However, as we’ve seen with the Leopard Sneak Peek from WWDC there are always people willing to break the NDA and make the OS available for piracy. This is a bit of sore spot with me. There are many people, particularly Vista fanboys, running Leopard without having attended WWDC and as a paying ADC member I still don’t have official access to it. We will get a seed eventually but that too will be quickly pirated.
Twice a month (pending availability) we have access to the Compatibility Labs in Cupertino. We live on the east coast. Cupertino is not a cheap place to reach. If there were a lab in Boston, or even New York it might be something we’d use. I could use access to an IPv6 compatible network right now actually, but for most consumer oriented (and non-game) applications is this level of testing important?
The most important aspects of ADC membership, namely access to the development tools and kits are available to the free Online members. This is important because it used to be the case that Apple tried to make money on their developer base. Whether the paid memberships are worthwhile for you or not depend greatly on how much you take advantage of the features of it. After this examination of Select I will strive to utilize more of the services we’ve paid for and hopefully get more from my membership.
