In must say I am not too happy with the way Apple is managing this.
A while ago I paid 0.99 Euro for a 128 kBit/s song and now the 256 kBit/s version sells for the same price. But if I want to upgrade the already purchased song, I still have to pay an additional 0.30 Euro which means I pay 1.29 Euro in total.
Looking at my predominantly used account, iTunes suggests this upgrade price for the applicable songs:
Hm - nearly 60 Euro is quite some money.
It is advantageous if you have mostly albums, because the upgrade price is then typically below the 0.30 Euro.
My secondary account in the US asks for 18.90 Dollar for 61 songs and one video, my tertiary account 1.80 Euro for six songs.
Now, the rub is that the songs I have bought on iTunes which are not yet DRM free amount to 658 - which translates to a whopping +/- 197.40 Euro once the whole library is available at 256 kBit/s.
I guess I'll wait for a better offer...
4 smart comments:
I always told you, Apple is a company that wants to make profit like all the other ones out there. They are not more or less the "good ones" than their competitors are...
Huh?!
I never said that Apple is a charity, did I?
No, you did not, sorry for being a little bit rude. It's just that Apple sometimes is portrayed as good and the other guys especially the ones from Redmond as evil (just thinking about how to squeeze money out of their customers) and so from time to time I am pleased to see the world is not just black and white.
Before reading your blog and writing the comment I debated with a colleague at work (who is a huge Apple follower) and maybe your blog was the valve for this conversation I had earlier that day...
Yep, those Apple suckers - just like Scientology followers.
I think however that good and bad has been distributed anew. Wired had a cover a few months ago with a black Apple logo behind barbed wire, stating Evil Genius.
People tend to see Apple much more critical than in the past. But this is just shifting. The critics said 10 years ago Apple is dead and the same guys would say today they are taking advantage of their new power in an unacceptable way.
What has to be said - and I know I am biased - is, that Apple's strength comes from two things:
1) Microsoft continuing to develop Office for the Mac, which resulted in a lot of trust for a platform, that was close to dying.
2) Truly innovative products. I do not think any other company has excelled as Apple in the past years on hardware and software, be it iPod, OS X, iLife, laptops, music stores or the iPhone. This is a hard earned position and neither Microsoft, nor Dell, nor Sony, nor Nokia, ... have been able to keep up with this. And this pays out on many battle fields Apple is competing in, as people who have an iPod or an iPhone might buy a Mac. People who are fed up with Windows and would have merely complained in the past suddenly are willing to give OS X and this stylish notebook a chance. And so on...
In general I would say, that Microsoft is being simply judged today as a lame duck and Windows 7 needs to show what they can do better.
In principle, they only have an image problem and if they were able to better communicate with their customer, they could win back reputation, I think.
The new evil, by the way, is Google.
Though this is hard for me to understand, Google is under attack from many sides. Not only from their competitors who plot against them in terms of government investigation (said to have been very much pushed by MS), but also from more and more users, who feel suddenly uneasy about Google's huge grip on datastreams.
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