Comment by pavlov 3 days ago
They must be looking at the revenue Claude Code is making on Mac and thinking “Why aren’t we getting 30% of that?”
Wouldn’t be surprised if macOS starts locking down CLI tools towards an App Store model too.
I'm not sure Claude Code is making enough for Apple to take notice & drastically alter their CLI like that? CC has 100-150k users across all platforms, paying $200-1200/yr each. Even if every developer is on the top tier Max plan, and on MacOS, that's $180mn in revenue at Anthropic. So even in the most optimistic scenario, that's only ~$50mn revenue for Apple at a 30% take.
That pales in comparison to the hardware & subscription revenues Apple brings in by being a dev-friendly OS.
Claude code reached $1B in six months in early Dec and given what I am seeing on ground, I wouldn't be surprised if just in last 2 months after that their revenue grew by double.
[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-acquires-bun-as-cla...
> Wouldn’t be surprised if macOS starts locking down CLI tools towards an App Store model too.
The day that happens is the day Apple sees a mass exodus of developers to Linux, I don't think they'd be that stupid. They enjoy enough goodwill right now as the platform of choice (vs. Windows for those that don't want to run desktop Linux), I can't imagine they'd casually just throw that away.
> I don't think they'd be that stupid.
We're talking about the company that abandoned CUDA, OpenCL and Vulkan mere moments before they were killer technologies. If Apple wanted to phase-out Homebrew, I genuinely think most of the community would nod in unison and switch to developing in UTM. Mac owners are nothing if not flexible.
Yeah no, as a Mac and Linux user, I would seize buying Mac hardware and buy exclusively Linux if they took down Homebrew from being usable. At that point a Mac is no longer a Unix system.
The Mac is barely a UNIX system to begin with. It doesn't ship with UNIX compliance out-of-the-box, and nobody complains. You're likely the minority here.
If Apple locked Homebrew behind SIP or some other inconvenience, it would just result in more virtualization. The default Mac environment hasn't followed industry standards for more than a decade, most professionals are doing their work in a VM already. Truth be told, even Apple wants you to stop compiling software locally in the long-run: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/
If Claude Code was in the Mac App Store, they would have signed an agreement to do so (offer an in-app purchase option and Apple gets a 30% cut of subscriptions for the first year, 15% after that).
They would also be sandboxed such that the app wouldn't have access to the level of system integration it needs.
It does work like that.
For me personally, I have used this method to spend my Apple gift cards purchased on a discount. Effectively I got a Claude subscription at 15% off. (You could argue this only works because OpenAI/Anthropic charge the same price across web/mobile, and I agree.)
So, as much as I despise Apple's business model, in some sense I have directly benefitted from it (other than stock price).
Developers are a tricky market for this because they could realistically move to different platforms if stuff like this started to happen. Or at least work on remote machines.
If gaming on Macs ever became popular though this would be a real risk.