Apple's Mac App Store now open
Apple has thrown the doors open to its new Mac App Store.
Here are the details:
Apple® today announced that the Mac® App Store℠ is now open for business with more than 1,000 free and paid apps. The Mac App Store brings the revolutionary App Store experience to the Mac, so you can find great new apps, buy them using your iTunes® account, download and install them in just one step. The Mac App Store is available for Snow Leopard® users through Software Update as part of Mac OS® X v10.6.6.
"With more than 1,000 apps, the Mac App Store is off to a great start," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "We think users are going to love this innovative new way to discover and buy their favorite apps."
The Mac App Store offers apps in Education, Games, Graphics & Design, Lifestyle, Productivity, Utilities and other categories. Users can browse new and noteworthy apps, find out what's hot, see staff favorites, search categories and look up top charts for paid and free apps, as well as user ratings and reviews.
Entirely new apps, as well as current Mac favorites, are available from developers such as Autodesk, Ancestry.com and Boinx. iPhoto®, iMovie® and GarageBand® apps from Apple's popular iLife® ‘11 suite are available individually in the Mac App Store for $14.99 each, and Pages®, Keynote® and Numbers® apps from iWork® are available for $19.99 each. Aperture® 3, Apple's powerful photo editing and management software, is available for $79.99.
As the press release says, if you want this, you need to be running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and have updated to 10.6.6.
Today's the day that is set to make established Mac developers sad as a significant downward pressure is put on applications prices, and also a day that makes PC ownership suddenly seem more expensive than running a Mac. The future is about apps in the $X0 price range, not $X00 or as is the case with some software, $X,000.
Another game-changer. In fact, I'd go further and say that this is a highly transformational development.