Back to the Mac: OS X 10.7 Lion Review
by Andrew Cunningham, Kristian Vättö & Anand Lal Shimpi on July 20, 2011 8:30 AM ESTApple introduced the Mac App Store (MAS) in its Back To The Mac event last October. It was released to public on January 6th and was automatically included in the 10.6.6 update. It’s obvious that the MAS is a spinoff of Apple’s extremely popular iOS App Store. While the MAS has been available for over six months now, Lion will bring some healthy improvements.
First, there will be support for in-app purchases. Since Apple does not allow trials, this is mainly useful for applications that can have additional commercial features or are subscription based.
Second, developers can now send push notifications to alert users. As in iOS, the usefulness of this feature varies from app to app, but the presence of third-party plugins like Growl speaks to the demand for this sort of thing.
Third, app updates are now just patches instead of full copies of the app. Apple refers to these as "delta updates," which is the traditional development term for an update delivered by replacing only the changed files/bytes in a application. In Snow Leopard and in iOS, you had to re-download the whole application to update it. That was very inefficient, especially if you were updating a bigger app. After iOS 5 comes out this fall, both it and OS X will feature app updates via patches, just like most other programs have been doing forever.
On a technical note, the structure of OS X application bundles makes them fairly well suited to these kinds of updates. But it's not clear at this time whether Apple is replacing whole files or doing binary patching to minimize the update size. Valve’s Steam service recently transitioned from doing file replacement to binary patching for this very reason, as games typically use a handful of large archives to store their content. For regular applications the difference is subtle, but the difference will have an impact on games distributed through the MAS.
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GotThumbs - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
Apple has recognized the money maker it has with its App Store (Or can we now call this an application store). I'm not a mac user and most likely never will be, but I have to say their business model works very well for squeezing income from every corner of their empire. The IOS app store has been a huge money maker (30% of every purchase adds up quickly) and now Apple is moving the same business model to its computers. Apple does have a tendancey to repackage and sell its products in various versions, but with the same underlying technology (develop once, repackage multiple times). True to form, all the apple fans will swarm around and gladly deposit their coin into the machine.GotThumbs - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
Realistically, They should give away their OS to invite more users, who will then shop their true money maker....the app store. Kinda like a drug dealer would give the first taste for free. :-)ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
Apple's CFO Peter Oppenheimer has already said they operate the App Store as a break even venture, ie. their 30% cut basically goes directly to operating expenses. Unless you believe their CFO is actually lying to investors at shareholder meetings in which case you should report this and your evidence to the SEC.GotThumbs - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
$1,634,000,000 in revenue from Other Music Related Products and Services (3)(3) Includes sales from the iTunes Store, App Store, and iBookstore in addition to sales of iPod services and Apple-branded and third-party iPod accessories
Lets not be too naive.
ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
The App Store no doubt generates revenue for Apple, but how much profit do they actually make?steven75 - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
Please educate yourself. As much as you might think it, yuo aren't smarter than the SEC.GotThumbs - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
I think ALL investors are looking for profits, and if Apple happens to turn a profit through their iTunes store (whoops), do you really think the investors will be angry about the white lie?Taft12 - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
Accountants can paint a revenue picture to look any way they want it to. Look no further than "Hollywood Accounting" in the movie industry. Don't take that break even comment at face value.parlour - Monday, July 25, 2011 - link
I would call up the SEC and tell them about your great insight. If what you are saying is true Apple is in deep, deep trouble.In reality it would be stupid for Apple’s CFO to lie about something like that, not worth the trouble at all.
Puppies04 - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
$1,634,000,000 just to break even! Sheesh that is some massive overhead.