First Wave of Mac App Store Apps Features Broad Range of Prices
One of the major questions with the Mac App Store has been whether the same "race to the bottom" effect on pricing seen in the iOS App Store will carry over into the new Mac App Store. The pricing dynamic is even more interesting for the Mac App Store because it reflects a new distribution method for many long-standing Mac developers while also inviting over many developers who have experienced significant success with relatively low-price titles on the iOS side of things.
TUAW has taken a look at the Mac App Store's offerings in the UK, finding 959 unique applications appearing a total of 2,004 times, as some applications are tagged to appear in multiple categories. Today's press release announcing the launch of the Mac App Store cited over 1,000 applications, suggesting that the U.S. store may include a somewhat greater number of applications than in other countries.
TUAW's analysis of pricing in the Mac App Store does in fact reveal a disparity, with two general groups: a low-priced group ranging from free to $5 that carries a heavy emphasis on iOS titles ported to the Mac platform and a higher-priced group operating primarily in a range of $10-$50 and weighted toward existing Mac applications taking advantage of the new distribution method.
As you can see, apps broadly fall into a few pricing categories. Almost half of the apps in the Mac App Store are in the cheap-and-free sub-$5 bracket; an informal survey reveals a lot of ports of iOS games falling into this area. There's then a bit of a no-mans-land between $5-10; then huge numbers of apps in the $10-50 brackets. Again, informally surveying the store, these appear to be mostly traditional Mac software packages that have been ported over to the store and broadly maintained their price points.
Finally, we have a small -- but significant -- number of apps above the $50 mark -- price points almost unheard of in the iOS App Store. It will be very interesting indeed to see how sales of these apps go, assuming any of the developers are willing to share that data.
With developers having for the most part set their initial prices without knowledge of what their competitors are doing, it will be interesting to see how the pricing dynamic plays out over time, particularly as the worlds of iOS developers and Mac developers become increasingly enmeshed.
Popular Stories
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
