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Apple To Charge for Some iApps
randomErr writes "News.com has this story that according to sources familiar with the plans, Apple is expected to announce at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco Tuesday that consumers will have to pay for new versions of iDVD, iPhoto and iMovie. Previously, Apple had offered upgrades to its digital media, or 'i' applications, for free."
apple plans to make money. Of course they'll charge for apps at some point. You buy their hardware, it'll come installed on the equipment and you won't have to buy it (or the costs of them are buried in the total cost of the product, much as they are now). However, if you want to keep current with additional features, you should pay for it, just as you do with every other piece of software written by companies who are interested in making a profit. why wouldn't they? and why is the rumor news here? ;-)
iPhoto recently lost all 501 of my photos, and Apple (UK) wanted me to pay £35 to ask one question about how to get them back as my hardware (500Mhz G4 Tibook). I refused because I had no guarantee they could help me. I hope that with the paid version, support comes included.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
.Mac has failed miserably with down time and horrible responses from customers. I know I'm a subscriber.
.Mac because they said their would be future updates and addons, here we are and the only add on is some cheap Nisquality game that costs like 10 bucks by itself.
The only justification I have for telling people to buy a mac is the great software that comes free. If it's no longer free than you might as well buy a cheaper wintel system and by the wintel software equivalents.
If this is true Apple will have lost a customer in me on ethics alone. i don't respond well to bait and switch programs, especially not at the high prices Apple is known for.
I sprung for
Apple is blowing it. My next buy if this is true, will be a wintel machine. I don't give a shit how bad MS is, at least they have never pulled a bait and switch on me.
Given the economic climate, I'm hardly surprised. Companies need to turn a profit. I just wonder if this won't backfire: companies are losing money, but consumers don't have the extra money to spend. It's not like the iApps are must-have upgrades.
The only way I can see this working out is if Apple stops including the iApps on all their Macs or ships lesser-powered versions (like they do with Quicktime).
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Something cleverNo man, I can't agree. Several of my friends bought Macs/iMacs because they are easy to use, no driver mess but ALSO because with the iMacs you get "everything" you need right from the start. Calculating this into the somewhat stiff original price, they decided to go for Apple. Now this company is doing an "180 degree" (as they already did with .Mac last year). Stupid, IMHO...
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
I'm not an apple user but I would be...If I could afford one. I can't justify shelling out $1600 for a new computer. Apple is charging for these upgrades to increase revenue. But why don't they, or can they, lower the price of their systems where more people could afford them? I believe Apple has a better product than MS and I wouldn't mind using OS X on a regular basis. But I need to be able to afford it. They also increase user base by making them available to more people. Then more people would buy their systems and they could continue to offer these upgrades for free which would be another boon to people wanting a Mac to begin with.
J
Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit.
The issue at stake here is not about Apple, "iApps", mac users, or OS X. The issue at stake is the assumptions made by users and the corporations following those assumptions or trampling those in the mud.
I know a lot of you get pissed when people claim, in this example, that Apple should not charge for this software. It is a perfectly valid argument to claim that Apple has every right to do this, it is their software.
The phone company has every right to charge you ten cents a minute for even local calls. How many of your are on dial-up to a local provider? Sure, they have the right to do that, but the customer expects a certain ammount of respect from the companies we support.
A level of trust is missing in the customer-company relationship that needs to be found again, or perhaps for the first time in many situations, companies, and peoples.
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
stuff like this scares me. Last year was the first time I ever considered buying mac (I did a 'top' command at a command prompt and was sold on the concept).
However, the path for macs increasingly seems to be paved with nickles and dimes. Add that to the existing price difference for an i386, and i'm slowly easing my wallet back into my pocket.
It's just becoming apparent that wintel for all its faults is much more economical and versatile (in a free way). And Linux as a desktop is getting closer and closer....
Sure, it may "just work". But so does a $35k BMW. I could probably afford a BMW but that's not what I'm driving. Apple has a great product, but this is an extremely poor economic time to be making ankle-biter fees and charges part of the deal.
When iMovie 2 was released, the upgrade was not free for those who had the original iMovie (around $30 I think).
iMovie 2 came with new hardware, was easily pirated, and was later released as part of the major ($99) OS upgrades so most likely many people probably never heard of this policy.
I got iMovie 2 when I bought my TiBook and it. It's an easy to use linear editing system. If I wanted better titling, snazzy effects, or non-linear abilities I'd be looking at something in the $1K range. This works fine for me and I haven't really had any desire for more features for my home videos.
If Apple comes out with a new version, my current version doesn't stop working. It very well may have difficulties if I were to buy a new Mac, but then I'd be given the new iMovie 3.0 with that purchase. So there isn't a strong pressure to pay for an upgrade based on stability and compatability problems. This is the most refreshing thing. If I find that the features Apple offers in the iMovie 3.0 version compelling then I may choose to buy an upgrade, but that's based on what I find important features.
My cell phone, PDA, and MP3 player meet my current needs, but they aren't compelling. However, if a Sprint compatible version of the Kyocera 7135 SmartPhone is released in the US, I'd jump on the chance to upgrade for the features that it offers. Similarly iCal, iSync, iTunes, and the AddressBook aren't compelling apps but if they offered integration with a Kyocera 7135 feature set I'd easily pay a good chunk of change for the upgrades needed (they may work now, I have to get my 7135 to find out though).
As another example, I won't use iPhoto at all. I find its abilities aren't what I'm looking for in a digitial photo album. Even though it's free, I prefer my own system of folders in the file system. If Apple adds enough features to iPhoto that I changed my mind about using it, I think I'd also be okay with tossing in some bucks for the upgrade.
That would imply they lured you in with a "free updates forever" and then tried to get you to buy the "updates will cost you extra."
That makes no sense. The iApps aren't meant to be long-term user apps anyways. They are:
1) proof-of-concept Cocoa applications.
2) stopgaps for the "why should I use the new OS which has no Apps, why should I write Apps for the OS with no users" conundrum.
3) setting the bar for 3rd party App quality
If you want free updates forever, then I suggest you look into supporting the GNU projects on OS-X. Things like GTKAqua will bring the gamut of GTK apps from the FreeBSD ports collection to OS-X. This includes GIMP, and forthcoming GIMP-Film.
"Waaaaah... If I have to pay, I might as well pay Microsoft" will get you diddly squat. Oh, and the best portables: TiBooks don't run Windows. They run OS-X (Darwin). You just don't know what your options are.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Plus, people seem to forget the fact that the top 10% of taxpayers still pay an overwhelming majority of the taxes. Believe it or not, it is possible for the "rich" to get a bigger tax cut than the "poor," and still end up paying a larger percentage of the overall tax burden. That "the rich get richer" claim just doesn't hold water.
Besides, the other option (the rich subsidize the poor until everyone's equal) is outright socialism - and we know that doesn't work in the real world.
Commercial software is pretty much a trap. You buy software and you have to use it on their terms, not yours, and you have no guarantees it'll be there tomorrow.
I bought Zend Studio for a few hundred bucks, it was a good deal, really nice software. Only it doesn't work for me now, it won't run under a glibc2.3 system. Most likely I'll have to buy an upgrade(the new 2.6 version they're pushing) to see it work under my new system.
Cold Fusion 5.0 at work has DB driver problems. Their solution for a fix? Upgrade to MX(which has its own problems under Linux).
So it's back xemacs for an IDE for me and at work it's PHP in our future. No forced upgrades. 5 years from now emacs will still be there for me, most likely PHP will be as well.
You can't say the same thing for any software you buy from a company. 8 years back I bought Symantec's Cafe for Java and used emacs on the side. Cafe is dead, even Visual Cafe is pretty much dead, but emacs lives on.
I used to buy a lot of software. But the more I buy the more I find out that in the long term, it just isn't worth it.
Listen up people. Those of you who are about ready to strap on a tactical nuke and take out the Apple campus need to take a step back and absorb the following: Apple has always charged for version upgrades for iMovie and iDVD. If you bought a G4 that had iDVD 1, you could hop over to the apple store and buy iDVD 2 - for $19.95. Why the media is somehow thinking that Apple doing this is somehow screwing their customers is stretching the facts. Then again, it is news.com.
Perhaps its a sign that Apple is making a gradual progression from being a hardware company to a software company? I know that Apple throughout its entire history has based its business model on making money on hardware. However, it looks to me like that within the last year or so Apple is focusing more on software and making money from it rather than relying on hardware sales for the majority of its income. There's lots of money to be made from software, perhaps more so than in hardware (look at Microsoft for example). That doesn't mean Apple will totally get out of the hardware business. Maybe Apple will focus its hardware on some niche, high margin markets (high performance graphics and video workstations, UNIX servers to support the workstations) and release a desktop x86 version of Mac OS X to make money in the high profit margin software arena.
For years macs came with an OS. And you always had to pay for an upgrade to a new OS unless you got a new mac.
.Mac happened at all. I was just counting the minutes before they put up banner ads or spammed me to recoup their costs---which I doubt were covered by hardware costs. (I was a pig and I had 3 free accounts)
How is this any different than before? You get a fully functional "free" version with the computer just like you always did. If you don't get a new computer or do not need the new features, you can stay where you are just fine.
How is this ANY DIFFERENT THAN ANY OTHER COMPANY??
Just because apple gave free programs with their computer that they wrote---much like Gateway, best buy, walmart, etc. bundles 3rd party software...its not free for life people!
Software models have always been based around subscriptions.
Even hardware will have to be replaced. My old SCSI scanner is no longer worth the cost to get adaptors and 3rd party catch all drivers to get it to function worse on a new machine than my old one. So for $50 and a rebate I get a new one that will have supported drivers for another 4 years...
My old ImageWriter ][ which Im STILL using the SAME ink ribbon works on my mac with some clever LINUX ports---thank god for open source drivers....perhaps you can understand why they stop stupporting drivers on old hardware now? If they open source drivers, you'll never be forced to buy a new model.
I was surprised
I get a new mac every 6 months so I don't care. Macs have great resale value; so I only "lose" $200 each 6 months. Do the math and see that it saves money in the long run; and I don't have to fool around when I switch between machines either.