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.
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I think it's pretty clever on Apple's part. $79 is pushing it, but generally they've sold iLife for cheap enough that most people figured it would be worth it even for just one app (not counting iTunes, which is free anyway). Of course, once they get all those other apps, people tend to think one of them might just be worth it, like iMovie, or GarageBand, or whatever. Plus, Apple can say that every Mac has the ability to create movies, author DVDs, etc, etc.
If you skip this year, I bet that iLife '06 will be worth buying. I'm ponying up this year, and might skip '06. I bet Apple's okay with that. :-)
iLife, iWork, .Mac, and a copy of the OS every year (admittedly, Tiger is taking longer than one calendar year) is $386. Just the cost of being an Apple fan.
Almost worth it to buy a new Mac mini every time there is an OS upgrade, and sell the old one on eBay.
Danny: Just to be nitpicky, paid upgrades of OS X have always been released more than a year apart. 10.0 was released in March of 2001; 10.2 Jaguar in August of 2002 (recall that 10.1 was a free upgrade); and 10.3 Panther in November of 2003. So if 10.4 Tiger is released sometime in March or April, this would be consistent with the past release schedule.
2005? I misread it--thought it said 2004!
I'm with you. I'd be willing to pay something reasonable for an upgrade to GarageBand and maybe iDVD, but I'd rather not pay more for the upgrade than for the original applications.
Michael,
Don't search for rationality and business integrity where there is none!
http://www.usercreations.com/weblog/2003/05/19.html#a225
Robb
