i’m sure these have been asked before, but I cant find them anywhere. So to start off I’m going to ask, if i get the $300 unity iPhone engine, or whatever, does it come with a license, so like will i be able to sell my games? also i know that if you use the SDK on mac, that uses XCode, you need to pay $100 to upload the apps you make to your iPhone/iTouch, is this the same with unity? (note im not running on a mac) also lastly, how different is it from normal unity scripting, and in general (im a javascripter). also any basic knowledge i should know please also let me know.
yes, has been answered many times; and here usually people get bored to answer the same questions, so let me answer you since i am not here too often 
You can sell your games on the apple store, but you need to pay 100 bucks a year for the developer “tax”; this is what apple ask you to pay to send games on the app store (either free or not); other than that you have no other expenses (cost of Unity iphone + 100 bucks a year for Apple)
Now if you become millionaire selling apps and games, and buy a ferrari a week; you have to get a different license, and possibly gotta share your fortune with the Unity guys (If you make more than 100K a year in profits you need the other license; please correct me if i am wrong; even because AFAIK there is no game as now that grossed so much, so i am not sure)
If you don’t run on a mac you cannot use unity iphone but only unity, since you need Xcode and the SDK to make anything.
Scripting is an entire different story…people here had beliefs wars about languages; so just search around and you will find a good answer; other than that if you are on pc and use VS I would suggest to use C#; at least you can use it anywhere, even outside Unity; while the JS language is kinda like an non legit son of Java and regular Javascript; so you can learn it easily if you know either one, but you can use it only in Unity; so pick your fav
Now get the free indie version of unity, read the manual and if you are happy with that go buy a mac, and start with Unity iphone 
im confused then? what is unity iPhone do then?
You can be very sure that the Unity games which got into the top 10 made rather more than 100K. And yes, you need to buy Unity Pro if you make that much, but I doubt you’d be complaining…
As far as Javascript goes, there is no dynamic typing on Unity iPhone, so basically all your scripts have an invisible “#pragma strict” in them.
–Eric
What do you expect that it does?
It is a tool that let you write games without having to deal with OGL and OBJ-c; that notoriously is a PITA for many people that do not work with that language
(is reductive, i know, sorry)
To run unity iphone you need Unity desktop; now the trick is that Unity desktop can compile full apps without the need of a mac, since there is a client for PC; while the iPhone version cannot do anything without the SDK; hence, you need a mac, since there is no sdk for pc (i would love to see that and laugh thou :P)
does it make more sense now?
I would love to see these numbers I have data only for apps, and not even goodreader or iwork apps makes so much money as now
Of course i believe you; just would like to know the source
yes much more sense thank you haha, now im sad though because i need a mac… but I have another question. My friend has a mac and normal unity, if he got unity pro and stuff, could i make the games on regular unity, send him the projects, and have him add them?
Posts from the authors, such as Zombieville getting over a million paid downloads…you can do the math there.
–Eric
This goes on legal stuff now…you can potentially ask your friend to compile with the pro, if you add pro features, but that would not be fair since you didn’t paid for the pro features, so it is a violation of the EULA i guess
Then even if he has the pro version, i do not get why would you send him the projects, since you can compile for mac and pc on your indie version Unless you mean “can i send him the project and he makes me iphone compiled apps”; in which case is a double NO; since you are again using something that you didn’t paid for (and your friend need a valid unity iphone license anyway, since unity pro does NOT compile for the phone), and also the projects made for regular unity are no match for the poor processor on the portable devices; so you cannot simply compile in iphone and have a game that run decently (usually ) 
Got the point; but you know that you don’t get 99 cents per app; since you gotta count the money to pay to the app store, the commissions to the app store for each sold app, and so on; so potentially the money that you mentioned are not really the ones that goes in the dev’s pocket.
my approach was much more on “do i have 100K at the end of the year after selling this app?” once that you pay taxes and all that you gotta pay
My advice for you is to spend another 300 Bucks and get an used Mac Mini on eBay to have all tools you need in your own hand. If you are serious about developing for iOS you should get the tools needed, and that is software (SDK, Unity iPhone) and Hardware (Mac, no hardcore machine required, and iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad).
Well, mac mini with a 950 intel graphic card and a fluffy processor would make him so frustrated that he would abandon the idea to work on Unity after a month 
Get a nice old imac or a mac pro 1.1; they cost nothing nowadays; then you can also use windows on them and you can have a single machine doing 2 things
Anyway develop for iphone is not cheap…you need
-device (500 bucks for an ipad, 200 for a phone, 250 for a ipod touch)
-Machine (500-1000 for a decent one)
-Subscription to ADC (100 a year)
-Unity iphone (300)
That’s why i told you to start with the indie, and if you feel fine, invest and go on the iphone chariot (that is where you see the money flowing in your pocket, unless you make a crappy app that crash all the times :P)
Depending from your free time and your experience with programming languages, you will be able to use Unity pretty quick, but to make something serious you will need time and skill; and you can always port your unity games on the phone (with some patience and a lot of optimization )
Not likely. I have one of those, and it’s fine for running Unity iPhone. The processor is a decent Core2Duo, the graphics suck but who cares, you’re doing iPhone games. (The only caveat is missing occlusion culling because of the GMA 950, but newer Mac minis don’t have that problem. Also Unity doesn’t have occlusion culling in Unity 3 anyway unless you have Pro; not sure if the new occlusion culling system has the GMA 950 problem or not.)
There isn’t really any “and so on”, there’s just 30% to Apple and that’s it, which is not that hard to figure (aside from the $100/year, which isn’t even worth mentioning in this context). If you’re talking about taxes, the license doesn’t say anything about after-tax income. Specifically, it says “Companies or incorporated entities that had a turnover in excess of US$100,000 in their last fiscal year must use Unity Pro.”
–Eric
alright so im not going to quote, because there where a few answers, but I already do a lot of scripting, I’m on a team thats making Omuni Online, and even though I havent made a full game yet, I’ve had a lot of experience javascripting in unity, not much with C# though. I’m confident that if I invest I’ll be able to make a few games, but how fun will they be, I dont know. Also throw in the fact that I’m a 16 year old kid, and I dont have that much money, but if needed I could afford all this stuff, and trust me I want to make iPod games/apps really bad, I will commit. All this considered, should i invest, and should i get an old iMac or a Mac Mini?
if you have a full desktop setup already then getting a current (not old) mac mini will be all you need and you will be very happy about it likely
if you don’t have a desktop setup yet, the decision is up to you which side you prefer, if you want an imac or a mac mini. the costs will favor the mac mini, but the desk space savings etc favor the imac
thank you guys very much, but i have one last thing
so that’s really the only main difference? or is there a bigger one that should make me learn C#?
its the only one, the lack of dynamic typing. But that has more than just this consequence.
From what I recall, the { } initializers for hashtables / arrays will fail too for example
That’s really the only difference. If you want to use JS, by all means do so. I learned C# but I prefer JS most of the time.
That should work (there may be something about {} not working in the current beta of U3), although
var foo = {};
is kind of obscure. While being a fan of brevity, I’d probably use
var foo = new Hashtable();
regardless in this case.
–Eric
Sorry for the off-topic here:
Dunno where you live, but in US the State wants money from me for every extra dollar that goes in my account if i make 100K before taxes, i gotta pay 30K to apple, and 40% as extra income (since i have a job already; is taxes as much as when you cash stocks profit).
This brings me roughly 40K a year…still in the limits for an indie license, but the numbers says that i have sold for 100K…see how things changes based on how you wanna see them ?
C# is a programming language, JS on Unity is a nice simil language.
Who tells you something different is just talking pretty much from the geek side; we can argue for ages about what a object oriented language is and how you define it based on the specs (good luck reading a book about this topic; there are gozilions anywhere; kinda like the amount of books that talks about anti-matter and other intangible things ).
Speaking about facts, if you use C# you learn a language that you can actually put on a resume, and use it in Visual studio to make nice apps and games with XNA (is not like Unity, it takes a certain programming knowledge to make games with it); while if you learn Unity JS you learn a nice and quick language that outside Unity has no reason to exist (maybe i am just one of those grumpy racist that consider C and C++ as only languages worth to be learn, while the rest is just another way to loose time; so take my suggestion with this consideration in mind :P)
Anyway, if you are like many of us on the forum, you will know many languages and switch between each one with ease, once you get the basics of OOP and start to actually code something
Keep in mind thou that the majority uses JS, and almost all the examples and tutorials use JS…that’s another point that you wanna consider, until you can read either language like your favorite magazine (in that case it doesn’t really matter what you use)
Good luck!