Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Put another way - in the last Ten years as an owner of:

  o PowerBook - 2000
  o PowerBook - 2003
  o MBPro - 2007
  o MBAir - 2010

I have purchased the following Applications:

  o VMware Fusion+Upgrade
  o Windows XP
  o Microsoft Office (Twice - 2011 rocks my world)

Yet - I have 40 or 50 apps on my laptop (VLC, Colloquy, Acorn, ChickenofVNC, etc, etc..)

Looking at my iPad + IPhone, I see that I have approximately 200 applications, purchased, on average, for about $3 each + a few premium apps (Omnigrafflle, OmniFocus - $50/each) Subscriptions to the Economist, Zinio, PressReader, WSJ, and copies of Time, Wired, The New Yorker, PosSCi.

Reviewing my itunes Bills - I see I have spent approximately $40/month on applications - or about $1500 in the last three years, not even including content - which adds another $2k I don't even _think_ about purchasing $1.00 Apps, I just do it. I'm also comfortable buying, with a bit of research, the nicer $5- $10 Apps.

None of which seemed to have hurt the price points of Applications like Omnifocus/Omnigraffle that much.

I expect that my behavior on the iPhone/iPad will carry over to the Macintosh, once a nicely curated store is available for me.

I _love_ rewarding developers - I just need the channel that I feel comfortable in doing so. The Apple Store is that channel for me.

I've had the same experience with Steam.

I don't think I purchased a single PC video game since I discovered torrents and usenet (unless I needed a multiplayer key).

But recently I've been buying games on steam for the pure convenience of having a nice store with trailers, one click purchases and quick downloads.

Compared to having to deal with shady torrent sites, torrent download speed shaping from my ISP and cracks.

There's also lots of $2 games on Steam and it hasn't killed the premier developers' ability to charge $30 or $40 or more for their AAA titles.

I'm not following your point. Are you saying having a curated store is what causes you to buy more apps? So what specifically drives the increased purchases? Ability to easily discover more apps? Lack of free alternatives? Low pricepoints?

The reason my purchases on the Mac/PC side are fairly low is the amount of free programs that fit my needs (and do it well). Whenever the best app was not free I bought it (Disco, Transmit, come to mind).

Apologies - I should have been more explicit. The point is that I am the type of individual who has the means, and desire, to purchase applications and show my appreciation to the developers that create them; I have done this on the IOS platforms (iPhone/iPad) - but I have NOT done this on the OS X platform - despite using that platform as much, or more, than my iPad/iPhone, and despite there usually being somewhere, a PayPal funding button for those more popular Apps.

Some other thoughts:

  o Once there is a curated environment that offers
    low friction, and reasonable prices for applications, 
    I will buy them for OS X.

  o Even though there will be $10 VNC apps on the MacStore 
    I will still  pay $119 for Microsoft Office.  

  o Finally, (and not stated) - I am looking forward to 
    paying through the MacStore for tools like VLC, 
    Colloquy, etc...

As to _why_ - I'm not really sure. It might be the desire to believe that I'm not the only chump clicking on the Paypal button (Though, rationally, if my desire is to reward developers, that shouldn't play any role). It might be the convenience of having the curated store track, and filter out the nefarious malware (Though, once again, google, plus only choosing the popular software out there, is a good substitute for that). It might be the belief that I have some control over what is installed on my laptop (though, ps -ef, launchtl list, netstat -an, and find / -cmin -3 after an install usually gives me a pretty good hint)

All I know is that this time, next year, I expect to have purchased about $600 worth of OS X software from the Mac Store, which is about $500 more, on average, than I have in the last 10 years for OS X.

I may be a couple standard deviations away from the mean, but I don't think I'm three.

Net-Net - I believe the MacStore is going to be great for Mac Developers, and will result in significantly more income flooding into that software channel, without wiping out the higher end products. I disagree with the posted article's hypothesis.

Let's check back in a year and see who ends up being correct.

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