Snippet: Apple’s Answer on Upgrade Pricing ☇

David Smith:

Logic Pro X is a Major (with a capital M) update to their professional audio editing suite. It appears to represent a significant investment in both time and resources. So how is it being sold, especially to people who already paid $200 for the previous version (Logic Pro 9)? It is a separate app download with a full cost purchase. No upgrades, no introductory pricing, just straight forward sale.

I’d say that this is the best indication of Apple’s intentions and expectations for the App Stores going forward. I wouldn’t expect anything like upgrade pricing to appear in the Stores. It seems like the message is to either give your upgrades to your customers as free updates or to launch a new app and charge everyone again. Neither approach is perfect but I am now very confident that this is going to be the situation for the foreseeable future.

Although I feel bad for the person that bought Logic Pro 9 over the weekend, I think this is an interesting approach—I hope developers don’t abuse this, but I think with Apple setting the pace of new versions as a full-price product, and minor upgrades and bugfixes free, things are generally fair for the consumer. Besides that, App Store prices are much cheaper than their optical media counterparts—Logic 9 on DVD was $499. On the App Store, Logic 9 sold for $199. In that case, the prior version and the new version are still cheaper than one version of the old pricing model.