Kirk McElhearn on Mac App Store Prices

Kirk McElhearn, making the arguement that Mac App Store price drops will eventually hurt consumers makes the same argument people make about the "race to the bottom" in iOS apps:

But these days, as prices drop, users are no longer willing to pay more than $5 or $10; yet they’ll happily dump more than that on a movie, or even a cup of coffee.

Good apps are worth paying for. And users know that. $50 is a bit steep for 1Password but next time it goes on sale I'd happily pay $35 for it. Pixelmator is worth $50-$100, but at $30 I could easily pick it up without even needing to consult my wife. Fantastical was $20. Aperture was $80. Motion was $50. I have two dozen great apps on my Mac for less than the cost of a single-user license of Adoe Photoshop. If I still lived in a Windows world where everything costs $100 for apps of any reasonable quality I would probably still be pirating them. 

Like Steve Jobs alluded to when selling songs piecemeal at $0.99 a pop - make it easy for folks to be honest and most of them will. These lower prices made it easier for me to be honest and buying legal versions of apps I loved was awesome to be able to do. I want to support the developers but everyone has a budget and binary theft is so easy and tempting that lower prices make honesty easy. 

Having said that, Kirk makes a great point later that I could not agree with more. 

Apple should offer a way for developers to provide demo versions of software from the Mac App Store.