Do i need to buy a mac to develop iphone apps?
The shortest answer that will give you the smallest problem: Yes, you need a Mac.
But as far as I know, there are several possibilities that try to override some Cocoa Frameworks (however they may only be Mac OS X, not iPhone): GNUStep is an example.
But I don't think you got something that was brought into Xcode (IDE for iPhone development) this way.
And I think there are some OSX86 VMs (however, they seem to be against the Apple EULA and thus seem to be clearly illegal, so I won't point you anywhere to get them).
So, if you want to develop for iPhone: getting a Mac is the easiest way, although not the cheapest one.
Hope it helps.
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The short answer is yes.
One way to learn some of the things you need to know before getting a Mac is GNUstep.
However, GNUstep is mostly useful for learning Objective C, especially since it provides many of the classes that the Cocoa iPhone toolkit offers. This can be run on Windows. However, it does not support some of the core 2.0 language features that are used "all the time" in any example code. This will allow you to create a UI using your GORM UI designer and use a nearly identical message-based system to implement the UI, and you could theoretically write Objective C classes in GNUstep and then use them on the iPhone.
However, to compile an iPhone app, you basically need to have a Mac, because then you can get a key to sign the app, etc. Since you need to get a Mac at some point, it is much more difficult to use GNUstep and learn a more limited implementation, unless you need to get started before the tools are available.
Despite the new SDK terms that other programming languages may use, if you really want to start without a Mac, I would probably be tempted to look at something like Unity, or maybe even Appcelerator Titanium, and figure out all non-platform-specific logic first on any platform (Unity has a free version that can run on Windows, for example).
I'm not that big a fan of xcode, but it's far from the best way to do Objective C development simply because there is almost nothing there.
There are, as always, other options. If you are building a web application type project, you can implement a website and check it out a lot in the browser. Additionally, since both Android and iPhone browsers are WebKit-based, you can use the free Android SDK to see how the pages look on a comparable mobile device. And since you can use C and C ++ classes as well as Objective C (NB not for GUI as it needs Objective C extensions to communicate between objects), another option to run without using a Mac would be to use Eclipse , QT Creator, or some other C / C ++ IDE to implement non-GUI classes, provided you are not using platform-specific libraries.
But the end of the long answer is still that whatever you do to compile a suitable iPhone app, you will use xcode and related tools to finally build and sign it, and so you need a Mac at the end. If you want to create something aimed at the iPhone and you won't have access to a Mac, then perhaps your best bet is to build an iPhone-adapted website using iui or similar toolkit to give the site a suitable look and feel.
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