As a part of Thursday’s roll-out of the new Mac App Store, Apple will offer standalone versions of six of its apps that were previously available only as part of the iLife or iWork bundles—and at reduced prices.
The three key apps in the $49 iLife ’11 suite—iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand—are now available via the Mac App Store for $15 each. The boxed iLife ’11 suite, in contrast, costs $49—slightly more than the three apps a la carte, though the suite also includes iDVD and iWeb, two apps that haven’t been substantially updated in recent years.
The three apps that make up the $79 iWork ’09 suite—Pages, Keynote, and Numbers—are also available on the Mac App Store, for $20 each, undercutting the $79 price of the boxed suite. It’s an even better deal if you’re only a user of one of the apps—Keynote, for example.
“Managing six different [apps] in [individual] boxes is very difficult, if not impossible, which forces you to bundle them together in suites,” Apple VP of Internet Services Eddy Cue told Macworld. “On the App Store, we didn’t feel any need to force customers to do that in any way, because we can package them individually. At the same time, given the apps we’ve built, we’re highly confident that they’ll sell well individually.”
Indeed, all three iWork apps for the the iPad—available for $10, half the cost of their Mac equivalents—have sold well since they were introduced along with the iPad in April 2010.
In addition to the iLife and iWork apps, Apple is also selling its Aperture 3 photography software as a Mac App Store download for only $80. The boxed version cost $199.
iLife ’11
Author: Jason Snell
Jason has written for Macworld for 25 years, and was lead editor for more than a decade. He writes about Apple at Six Colors and podcasts at Relay FM and The Incomparable.