The iLife ’05 Bundle

If I’m reading things right, people who bought iLife ’04 will have to pay $80 to get iLife ’05. There’s no upgrade option, and no way to purchase individual ’05 applications. I only really use iTunes and iPhoto, and I bought ’04 almost solely for the iPhoto speed improvements. I like some of the new features in iPhoto 5, but I’ll likely stick with version 4. As a developer, I like that Apple is no longer dumping the iApps on people for free, but I don’t like that everything’s all bundled together.

I wonder if the average savvy Mac user upgrades his OS and buys the new iLife at each opportunity. Maybe he also stays current with Quicken. If he’s going to buy that software anyway, for just $220 more he could get a Mac mini, plus the other bundled software. Who knows, maybe next year iWork will be included with the Mac mini, making its included software worth even more. (Right now the mini includes AppleWorks, which most such users already have.) Put another way: for this particular user, the marginal cost of buying a Mac is less than that of buying an iPod mini.