Tom Baker: a blog on tech, photography, and life

It’ll only be a short post, I promise!

In my ‘family’, I have two Macs – a Core 2 Duo white iMac, and a Core 2 Duo 15″ MacBook Pro. Not five Macs. Not one Mac. Two Macs!

So almost any time a new piece of software comes out from Apple — for example, OS X Leopard, or a new edition of iLife, iWork etc — it will always sell in two versions: a single license (the cheap one), and a ‘Family Pack’ of five licenses, which is usually about A$100 more.

You get the picture: annoyingly, the single license edition won’t install on both my machines, and the five-license version packs too many.

So instead of paying A$158 for a new version of Apple’s beautiful, wonderful OS X operating system (which is a brilliant price for one user), I have to shell out A$249. Now, by Microsoft Windows standards, this is tiny — but I’ve got used to paying less for more with Apple. That’s the way they make you think after a while.

The only exception to this that I’ve seen is Aperture, which is just great. Apple’s pro apps pack a license for a desktop Mac and a portable Mac, which is very smart.

But, for reasons that defy me, Apple — and most other software vendors for Macs or PCs — never do a two- or three-license edition.

Because no matter how much Steve tries to con me into buying three extra Macs, it probably won’t happen in the near future.