I think combination of JUCE/IntelliJ pricing and Unreal Engine model would be a sweet spot:
1) Personal License - free if <50k annual revenue
2) Startup License - keep current price (500usd/month) but
a) allow 1 month subscription commitment instead of paying 1 year upfront
b) when subscription not get extended you should still be allowed to distribute product that is not updated
c) if you payed for 1-2 years of subscriptions and cancelled subscription after 1-2+ year, you should be able to keep using the version of Qt the moment when you first signed for .
3) allow Startup to choose another licensing option. Instead of paying upfront licensing fee, just allow paying annually 5% of revenue from products that keep using Qt.
It seems they dropped ball on mobile devices (iOS/android). In last few years they where mostly focusing on embedded, automotive and desktop. I wish they provided more indie friendly alternative license for mobile market something similar like Unreal Engine had e.g. taking ~5% of your revenue.
I know they recently provide 'small company license' and ~500usd/year is justified as long it's just hobby project if only your as a dev. The moment you reach $250k as a startup and have to hire few devs and pay $5k/year per each developer is making this less affordable. On top of that if you focusing on mobile devices (android/ios) probably you would need to have Felgo license (to cover some Qt limitations) which is crazily even more expensive.
At this point in few years Flutter, ReactNative, Unity, Unreal Engine and Electron will be slowly stealing more of Qt market.
why not use a gyrocopter then? It's cheaper, easier to maintain and more safe. Even if they are not that fast you don't have to get stuck in traffic jam, wait on traffic lights in the city and can flight directly with straight line from A to B.
good first start. What I still would like to see extra:
* option to notify user certificate got revoked. Short description why twitter style and link to details and give user choice to quarantine it or to still use it. This is in similar style what antiviruses do it telling you: 'this kind of malware name was potentially found but if we are wrong feel free to remove from quarantine'.
* revocation list is checked twice a day locally on the machine and twice a week (always on the same days) the current way remotely to strike a good balance as a default. Allow user to adjust frequency.
* only 2x usb-c port (connect one to charger and choose if wanna have external monitor on debugging iphone app via wired cable or... go with the dongles)
* still old 720 webcam
* old design and old hardware except new SoC and Wifi 6
* only 8 CPU (4 performance and 4 efficiency cores) - no upgrade options
* supposed to be usb 4.0 but "USB 3.1 Gen 2 (up to 10Gb/s)" instead of 20Gb/s
* no any innovation:
* no esim
* no truedepth camera
* no fast charging
* no reverse charing
* no magnetic charger
* no IMU sensors
* no gps
* no smaller bezel
* no bluetooth 5.1
* "faster than 98% best selling PC laptops" - but best selling PC is usually cheap. what are those 2% laptops? Interesting how it stucks with thinkpads and dell XPS that will still cost a fraction of those mac with 16gb and 1tb ssd
* "2x faster ssd than previous macbook air" 2018 macbook air had 2GB/s but 2019 only 1.3GB so that would be around 2.6GB/s - nothing special comparing you can get faster SSD very cheap today e.g. 1TB 3500 / 3000 MB/s nvme SSD you can get for just $135
* keep in mind those 8GB or 16GB will be shared between GPU and CPU - have fun connecting your macbook pro 13 that starts with 8GB to 4k display
* "16x faster ML" seems likely only affects inference and 16x only related to previous macbook air/pro (instead of PC or macbook 16 with discrete GPU)
* tensorflow seems only accelerated for inference - seems unlikely can be used for training but let's see.
* price still the same, didn't get any 'bone' like making it cheaper or starting with higher SSD or RAM as a base
* macbook pro starts with just 8GB ram and 256GB SSD
1) Personal License - free if <50k annual revenue
2) Startup License - keep current price (500usd/month) but
a) allow 1 month subscription commitment instead of paying 1 year upfront
b) when subscription not get extended you should still be allowed to distribute product that is not updated
c) if you payed for 1-2 years of subscriptions and cancelled subscription after 1-2+ year, you should be able to keep using the version of Qt the moment when you first signed for .
3) allow Startup to choose another licensing option. Instead of paying upfront licensing fee, just allow paying annually 5% of revenue from products that keep using Qt.