Mac App Store to sell iLife and iWork Mac apps individually
updated 05:40 am EDT, Thu October 21, 2010
Adopts iPad App store model for iWork apps
In Apple’s Back to the Mac presentation, Steve Jobs and VP Craig Federighi discussed and offered a quick demo of the new Mac App Store that will be made available for Snow Leopard users in around 90 days. An interesting observation made has noted that Apple apparently intends on selling its iLife apps, and its iWork apps through the store, but available for individual download. Until the appearance of the new Mac App Store, both suites of applications have only been sold as part of a bundle.
During the Back to the Mac keynote, Steve Jobs indicated the new Macbook Airs are shipping with iLife ’11 pre-installed. Currently, existing users of iLife '09 wanting to upgrade any one of the apps must purchase the full suite of iLife ’11 apps that is retailing for $49. Apple first introduced the concept of buying individual apps from its iWork suite upon the launch of the iPad, through the iPad App Store. iPad users have been able to download Pages, Numbers, and Keynote individually for $10 each. Mac users have had to opt for the iWork bundle, which retails for $79.
Gauging by the presentation, iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand for Mac will be available for $15 each through the Mac App Store, as will Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
Junior Member
Joined: Sep 2000
This could be a good thing
Unless the sum of the cost of parts of the bundle comes out greater than the bundle cost this is a good thing. I use iPhoto extensively and sometimes iWeb but have never had a need for iMovie and Garageband. I think bundling it skews Apple's perspective on which parts of iLife and iWork that people find important. Steve was talking yesterday about the millions of Garageband users but is that true? Given the choice how many people would actually buy Garageband?