- October 24th, 2010 by Jon Parsons
Last week Apple announced a new operating system – Lion. It included a host of new features, which were all pretty compelling upgrades to the current version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard. However, one interesting announcement from Apple was the Mac App Store. Steve Jobs asked what it would be like if we could get the iTunes App Store, which serves up applications for iOS devices, to deliver apps for the desktop experience?
Ryan Block at GDGT has his reservations about it, and says that it can’t possibly become as successful as the iTunes App Store where you can grab all those fart apps for your iPhone. I have to disagree with Block here.
Sure, software providers might not be too keen on giving Apple a cut of sales by delivering products through its store. And there is no telling just how tough it’s going to be to get stuff approved there, anyway. If it was anything like the early days of the iTunes App Store, there could be some trouble. However, I think Apple learned its lesson there and will loosen up just like it did in its current app store.
The thing is that Apple tends to lead the industry when it comes to changes in the way we compute, and the hardware with which we do our computing. Many journalists and bloggers, like myself, feel that the current crop of MacBook Air PCs portends the future of the PC – namely the death of the optical drive.
When was the last time you used your optical drive to watch a DVD or load up a CD? I haven’t used mine in ages. Perhaps the last time was to load up some photography software that came with my Canon DSLR. Otherwise, I watch all my movies and grab all my music online. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a waste of space now in my MacBook Pro.
The Mac App Store could be the future in terms of how we get software and apps. It doesn’t even have to be watered-down applications for the desktop because of the medium in which we’re being served software. Perhaps at the start it will be, but if the future is one without optical drives, then we’re looking at digital mediums for getting our apps and software. No more driving to Best Buy to grab a copy of Microsoft Suite or hitting up Amazon to have discs delivered.
Why do I think this is the future? It’s simple and easy. Too easy, as a matter of fact. Let’s say I want a language learning pack from Rosetta Stone, just as an example. Instead of driving down to Borders to buy the boxed set of CDs and save the stuff on my iTunes, I can pop into the Mac App Store and download the entire pack for use within minutes. And I didn’t even have to leave my computer.
There are a lot of questions surrounding the Mac App Store right now and just what kind of success it might see. It’s a stretch for me to say that it will be as successful as the iTunes App Store as we know it today, but then again there were folks bemoaning it back in 2008 when it was introduced. Now we can see just how short-sighted that was, so I prefer to err on the side of, well, history.
