Mac App Store - Wow!

The new Mac App Store was just released so have downloaded and had a quick look.

So far. Prices. Wow

Aperture 3 £173 on disc - £45 in the store!!!

Pixelmator $60 direct or £17.99 in the store

iPhoto 11 £8.99

As far as I know, we were told that licenses were valid for all your Macs with your iTunes account, so will need to check, but if it's the same as music, thats 5 licenses per product! We currently have 2 Macs, with Fiona hopefully getting her own MacBook this year making 3, but only buying each application once is looking like it's going to be so cheap!

If this is what we can expect, bring it on!

Are you sure you don't need 5 Licenses for each Mac

Yes Algi, I'm sure!

It might not mean much for most of you I know, but if I said that Microsoft had released an App Store and that 5 licenses of Lightroom would only cost you only £45, it would be major, major news.

So far, every application that I have put off purchasing (because I knew the App Store was coming) is not only cheaper, but covers all our machines as well. No more licensing issues, every app will work on every machine!

If only they can persuade Adobe to get CS5 on there dirt cheap!

I think MS originally did a 3 PC license on W7 but it was too
popular so they stopped it

Apples multi packs licensing are based on the honor system. You can install the os and ilife suite on as many supported macs as you have, without paying for the "Family pac" licence.
The only caveats are in their pro software lines. If you were to install Aperture on more than one machine, for example, you will get a licensing error if you try to open Aperture on two machines simultaneously.
Providing you got both machines connected to the same network of course.

This is a somewhat easy to live with limitation if for example you have a laptop and desktop, and do quick edits in the field, then transfer the project to your desktop for final editing.

It is however preferable to have two licensed copies of Aperture.... if you need two editors editing images from the same referenced library, at the same time.

Sounds busy I remembered after the previous post XP Pro
always covered 2 or 3 CPU's you couldn't buy a single PC version

With all software if there's only 1 user they should let you install
it on as many PC's as you want. I think QPro did that when they ran
Lotus 123 out of town.

I nearly bought Kaspersky today when I saw it covered several
PC's.... I backed off when I saw it was only for 1 year, which
is a pure ripoff. They have to keep their db's up to date for
new s/w sales so charging again in 12 months just for the DL'ds
is money for old rope. Customers supply them with all the infected
files anyway.

.. and you won't get any improved software, will you?

there's a new version of the product out each year on the AV market - it gets lighter and smarter each time...

Bret

Easy to abuse for sure, but we didn't splash out for iLife '11 knowing the App Store was coming and even a single licence was £45, family pack £70.

Now, we can buy iPhoto '11 and iMovie '11 for £8.99 each! As we don't use Garage Band, our iLife '11 upgrade has just gone from £45 - £70 depending on how honest I choose to be to £18, and we can install them on 5 machines! Actually, I'm gonna do that right now! - Done!

So glad I held out, wanted Garage Sale for eBay sales which is $66 dollars for our 2 machines direct, or £24 through the store with 5 licenses, and getting a £25 iTunes voucher for Xmas has paid for that!

The way it's been setup is fantastic! When we do get Fiona her laptop, all I'll have to do is logon with my iTunes account, and click OK to install every app, free or paid for, in one go.

Definately seems to be the way to go, getting excited about it! Off to search the store!

Since when? AV products are pure bloatware. Norton got such a bad name for it they had to go back to basics and release a lighter faster version.

I'm with Virgin Broadband and they supply PCguard free for 3 machines.
They updated some time back and my PC slowed right down, so I restored an Acronis image prior to the update and I was up to speed again.

Unfortunately (unlike Norton) the db files no longer work with the
old version. I'm with Barclays so I might as well get a Free 12 month
trial of Kaspersky off them.

I usually donate about £1 year to Spybot - Search & Destroy its
downloaded from mirrors and this site alone has had 84,087,614
downloads and if everyone donated £1 they would have had £84M.
So I can imagine how nice it is selling annual AV licences, no
wonder so many companies jump in with the free stuff. Only about
2 years ago they were trying to charge £60 year per PC but the
public wouldn't wear it.

Very shortly in your line of business your going to have to pay
something like £3500 year to use the H264 codec and I have read
that most Apple software only covers amateur use only

I'm not sure exactly what codec we use for upload but since it's all only youtube, it's not a huge problem. I'd sure as hell hope that running a €1000 software package - in this case FC Pro - would allow professional use.

Looking forward to seeing Ogg and Theora in HTML5.

As far as the AV is concerned... consider it a service. S&D is not as good as others (malwarebytes is one that springs to mind) but they are all only retroactive tools, rather than a defence. And they can't remove everything.
Any AV is only as good as its definitions and technology. Same thing with Mac - for itself cool and the way they're distributing apps is excellent ("I'm off to try and find something to buy!" is the quote I get from above). If only MS could learn from it... but then there would be "MONOPOLY!" calls...

Bret