tech drops

Woz on Mac OS price.

From Letters of Note: Apple must make Macintosh a standard:

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has since said:
“The computer was never the problem. The company’s strategy was. Apple saw itself as a hardware company; in order to protect our hardware profits, we didn’t license our operating system. We had the most beautiful operating system, but to get it you had to buy our hardware at twice the price. That was a mistake. What we should have done was calculate an appropriate price to license the operating system. We were also naive to think that the best technology would prevail. It often doesn’t.”

Since I believe this is still true (maybe not in the numbers of multitude as back then) it feels like Woz agrees with me.

OSX is the most expensive operating system

The title of this post might sound fatuous to you. The latest update to the Mac operating system, OSX Lion costs only $29, that compared to the main commercial competitor is over seven times cheaper than the full-fledged version.

But when I think of the people I know, my thinking becomes very simple: to be able to buy OS X Lion, you need first and foremost a Mac… either a MacBook, an iMac, a Mac Pro or a Mac Mini. Any of these will do the job. But buying a Mac in general isn’t the cheapest choice. It’s rather the most expensive one, in most cases (except the high-end maybe, where differences are not so relevant). In addition, if your machine is slightly old, you need to buy Snow Leopard at $29.

My point is, for many, the need of a Mac and all its features is not justified by the price: for much less they can have a simpler and cheaper machine running either Windows (for the common user) or Ubuntu (for the geekier one) that can do pretty much whatever they need to do.

And to me this is fine. Peaceful. And Apple is fine too. They still make tons of money thanks to their great ecosystem of iTunes, iPods, iPhones, iPads, App Stores etc. They create beautiful products that are more profitable for them when targeted to the higher market. And selling the hardware is their most profitable market, not the software itself (even thought Apple’s apps on the App Stores are highly profitable too) but high quality software and the ecosystem around it is what’s needed to make the machines so valuable.

To sum it up: to be able to buy the best and most affordable operating system in the world, you need to own the most expensive computer in the world. More or less…

iWork ‘11? Maybe with (and only with) OS X Lion…

(This post is written on my personal assumptions and I premise that I did not personally try the Developer Preview of OS X Lion)

Rumors reported that Apple already finished developing the new version of iWork apps: Pages, Number and Keynote. It was also rumored that Apple would release the new suite alongside the Mac App Store. I bet Apple will silently release the long awaited new version of the productivity suite alongside the release of Lion, instead.

I presume that the new versions of iWork ‘11 is so much depending on Lion’s new technologies that they might not make a version available for Snow Leopard. This is just my theory though.

One thing for sure is that Apple is finally making tons of money on software, with iLife and iWork apps nearly-constantly in the Top Grossing ranks of the Mac App Store. This is happening because it’s much easier for the average users to find out about these three apps. Instead of pirating them – that is what most technical users do since it’s really simple in this case – they just buy them, also because they are rather cheap after all.

So why Apple should not keep riding the wave of profits and wait for a good shift and sell a new version of the app? It’s just a marketing decision to postpone an awesome, finished product.