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Free Windows 8 Offer for Mac Developers Lasts About 30 Minutes

Microsoft today offered (nearly) free Windows 8 USB sticks to Mac developers but apparently "sold out" just over 30 minutes after the offer was posted.

A blog posted at 10:12 a.m. today offered a Windows QuickStart Kit for Mac developers, including a copy of Windows 8 and Parallels Desktop 8, on a USB stick, in return for a $25 donation to a select charity.

At 10:45 a.m., the blog was updated:

The Windows Quickstart offer sold out quickly. Given how popular these were, we will look into making other offers available in the near future.

The offer was made "courtesy of our friends at Swish," Microsoft said, as part of promotions for the new Microsoft site, modern.IE, described as "a new set of tools to help you support modern and older versions of Internet Explorer."

The Windows 8 offer included a full Windows 8 Pro license, Parallels for Desktop 8 for Mac and labs for porting iOS and UX to Windows. The download site said users would be required to prove they were developers, apparently by writing some fairly simple code.

Besides the Windows 8 QuickStart offer, the blog post also said other goodies were available, such as new virtual machines for IE10 on Windows 7 and IE8 on Windows XP, and three months of access to BrowserStack, where sites can be tested across browsers.

Some readers weren't too happy with the brief duration of the offer. One said, "that deal for the QuickStart kit went fast... must have been like 10 of them available or something :( I hope you guys will release more, obviously the demand is high."

Another wrote, "Sold out before I even knew this existed.. nice job -.-"