I just dont understand what constitutes a 499.99+ price for programs!

Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
104
Reaction score
1
Points
18
Location
Alhambra, CA
Photoshop, Final Cut...etc. are all so expensive. Don't get me wrong though, I absolutely love the programs! But for 499.99+ its just hard to afford it. All it is, is fancy packaging and a CD.

With stuff like the iPod, or videogame consoles you know why it cost that much because of manufacturing, the materials used to make it, and the actual hardware inside.

Case in point: Was taking a Lightwave 3D class and my teacher told me I had to buy the program if I wanted to get ahead in the class. So I said, "Sure, how much do they run?"

"With a discount? $700." He replied.

"And that's WITH the discount?" Said I.

/rant.
 
Joined
Apr 23, 2005
Messages
1,509
Reaction score
47
Points
48
Location
Cape Cod, MA
Your Mac's Specs
iBook
thing about this, when was the last time you sat down and made a photoshop like application in a couple of hours days or weeks? you can't. you have to use lots of time and development, you don't just throw these together. and how often have talked to someone for tech support? and all the problems that they have to fix each day and release with the application. It takes a long time to make a complex app.
 
Joined
May 11, 2005
Messages
264
Reaction score
16
Points
18
Your Mac's Specs
15" MacBook Pro 2.8 GHz/4 GB/500 GB
In addition to what macAttack said, not only do these apps take a lot of man hours to code and support, but some also have a limited audience. Final Cut is hella complex, and it is only for Mac, a fairly small audience to begin with, and then only professionals will be likely to buy it. The media and packaging might cost a dollar, but the actual app might have cost 1 million dollars to produce. If they only expect to sell 1,300 copies, they would have to sell it at $770 to just break even in our hypothetical world, and to make a profit, they need to sell it at an even higher price.
 
Joined
Jul 23, 2004
Messages
3,169
Reaction score
164
Points
63
Location
North NJ
Your Mac's Specs
i dont have no mac's
in addition to the well noted reasons above....people use FCP and photoshop in order to make art and films and to make lots and lots and lots and lots of money....the rest of the people around unfortunately pirate their copies
-chris
 
Joined
Jan 12, 2005
Messages
1,278
Reaction score
13
Points
38
Location
/home/sheffield/UK
Your Mac's Specs
12" 1Ghz PB 768Mb 10.4.5 30Gb Video iPod 40Gb 3G iPod 1Gb iPod Shuffle
500 is cheap!! CS2 Suite is £999 which closer to $2000

Think about it a development team of 20 people workin on it for 2 years all doing 38 hours a week on (im guessing now) $30 an hour.

You do the maths to work out how much it costs to physically make something like FCP and then ask yourself. Would you sell it for less and hope that more people bought it or sell it at a higher price knowing your target market will find the price reasonable considering the amount of money they will make from it themselfs
 
L

lil

Guest
Frankly for the quality of Adobe Creative Suite 2 Standard--it is worth every penny. If you want to create professional work; you need professional level software.

If you want to make money from your creative works, you need capable software.

So IMHO, I paid £380 for CS2 Suite Std (upgrade from Photoshop 7) and it was worth every penny. That said, I was very lucky to get Photoshop 3 with my IIsi in 1995 and so I have been able to purchase upgrades since.

For the amount o enjoyment and use I get out of Illustratr, InDesign and Photoshop every day at work and at home it was more than worth the money!

Vicky
 
K

Kettle

Guest
A new copy of AutoCAD 2006 will run you about 5000 CD. These programs are expensive because they are worth it. They do a lot more then your standard app, you're just spoiled because of pirated copies.
 
Joined
Mar 9, 2004
Messages
9,065
Reaction score
331
Points
83
Location
Munich
Your Mac's Specs
Aluminium Macbook 2.4 Ghz 4GB RAM, SSD 24" Samsung Display, iPhone 4, iPad 2
It is slightly mind-boggling at first:

iLife can do sooo much and costs 78$.
Photoshop is much more limited and specific in scope and costs >10x that.

But as others have said: It's all about the size of the audience and scope of features: Millions of people will buy iLife, but only a fraction of them would buy Photoshop.
 
Joined
Feb 17, 2006
Messages
385
Reaction score
11
Points
18
Location
High Wycombe, Just outside London, England
Your Mac's Specs
20" iMac 2.0Ghz, 2Gb RAM Early 2006, 30Gb iPod 5th Gen. 15" MacBookPro, 2.33GHz
What about MS Office for Mac? Surely loads of people buy that but they still insist on selling it for £349. MS can't even use the argument that they had to spend hours developing it as they already have the basics in the PC version.
 
T

tortoise

Guest
Say_Cheese said:
MS can't even use the argument that they had to spend hours developing it as they already have the basics in the PC version.

The PC version of Office is COM based. They had to completely, 100% rewrite it for the Macintosh.

How much something sells for has almost nothing to do with how much it cost to make it. How much something sells for is based on what the market is willing to pay for it.

Take this program you've surely never heard of, the Satellite Toolkit by Analytical Graphics. STK costs $30,000 for ONE license. You want to run STK on two computers? that's $60,000, thank you very much.

Why is it so expensive? STK is primarily used to model launching of satellites. When a company needs to launch a new satellite, they need to get it right the first time. A faulty launch or a launch that sends the satellite into a different trajectory than needed is going to cost them potentially millions of dollars. Suddenly that $30,000 sounds like a bargain.

Sure a design shop could use the GIMP instead of Photoshop. It's free, and barring pantone support, mostly does what Photoshop does. But the loss of productivity in its poor interface, its less stable and less efficient code, its lack of any integration with any other design app like InDesign or Illustrator, not to mention lack of integration with MacOS, suddenly that free price tag doesn't look so great and $500 for PS sounds wonderful.

If you do graphics work day in and day out, and it's the livelyhood of your profession, you're very willing to pay the price to get the real tools to do it.
 
Joined
Mar 29, 2006
Messages
19
Reaction score
0
Points
1
I think they should jack up the Price for businesses and lower the price for consumers.

It does go on how many copies are sold.
Some games take 2 or more years to develop and have massive teams working on them but because the sell so many copies they can sell them for $100 AUD.

Something like Photoshop is a great price for a something like a design company.
However for a consumer its a rip off.
Think about it when they release CS2 90% of the work is already done from CS and CS had 90% of the work done from Photoshop 7 (if you get what i am on about).

they are not making a whole new program they just add a tool and feature, plug in what ever here and there and making it look better.

Thats why photoshop is not universal because they have to rewrite the whole thing which will take a long time but in the same instance they know what they are making so there is not so much R&D.
 
T

tortoise

Guest
Les Exposé said:
Something like Photoshop is a great price for a something like a design company.
However for a consumer its a rip off.

It's also not intended for a consumer. What does a regular joe need with Photoshop? Standard consumer oriented graphic apps will do 99% of what the consumer needs. A typical stove and oven installed in someone's kitchen at home costs a **** of a lot less than what you'd find in the kitchen of a nice restaurant.

Think about it when they release CS2 90% of the work is already done from CS and CS had 90% of the work done from Photoshop 7 (if you get what i am on about).

Yes, and if you have CS you can get CS2 at an ungrade price.

Thats why photoshop is not universal because they have to rewrite the whole thing which will take a long time but in the same instance they know what they are making so there is not so much R&D.

They don't have to rewrite PS to be universal. I bet they have to touch very little code. It's more a matter of their build environment and marketing. Don't forget an x86 version of Photoshop has been around for years (on that *other* OS that Billy Boy likes to promote! :) )
 
L

lil

Guest
Say_Cheese said:
What about MS Office for Mac? Surely loads of people buy that but they still insist on selling it for £349. MS can't even use the argument that they had to spend hours developing it as they already have the basics in the PC version.

I take it you remember or know about how abysmal MS Office 4 for the Mac was?

No? Well; that was more or less a straight port from the PC, interface and just about the whole kaboodle—and was about the most dire set of programs to ever inflict themselves on the Mac. They were truly awful sluggish and hogging applications that killed performance dead.

Word 6 was dire compared to the nice and useful Word 5.1.

Thankfully Microsoft learnt their lesson and by 2001 we had a fairly Mac alike suite again, with 2004—they are almost there.

This is why 'straight ports' of technology are never a good thing, especially where MS is concerned (MS Windows Media Player 9 for Mac anybody? ;) )

:flower:

Vicky
 
L

lil

Guest
And to add, maybe I'm an exception to the rule here. I look at my Mac and find actually there isn't *loads* of software. On the commercial side of things I find:

* Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Family Pack (since I have two Macs)
* Adobe Creative Suite 2 Standard (upgraded from Photoshop 7, which was upgraded from Photoshop 5, which was upgraded from Photoshop 3...)
* Corel Painter IX
* iLife '06
* Microsoft Office 2004 Standard

And that's it. I evidently didn't get that lot all in one go either, but I saved long enough for each product. I have a few registered shareware apps like Quicktime Pro, RapidWeaver--uhh, that's it in fact and that is all I use.

Generally speaking—I would assume that people don't use 100s or even 20 big applications, but rather have a close knit set of 10 or so apps. In my case that would be Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Word, Excel, RapidWeaver, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and Corel Painter.

The more important thing is the data and for that there are 1000s of files. So really, if you were to save long and hard enough if you have to, the expenditure on software isn't necessarily that high. Especially if you are anticipating to earn something back from that.

Most of all, having nice boxes and manuals, and support from the publishing house really clinches the deal for me.

In all, I have on the above software spent around £1100 tops; not much considering how much I use and value the software, and I'm not one for buying the latest version unless there is enough to compel me to do so.

Vicky
 
Joined
Jan 18, 2006
Messages
1,868
Reaction score
106
Points
63
Your Mac's Specs
G4 Cube
First realize that customer pricing has pretty much zero relation to the actual product and associated costs. Take a look at cell phones, for example. You can get them for free sometimes, or else really, really cheaply (sometimes they even pay you!). iirc my Motorola v710 cost $99 and included a headset, leather pouch, etc. The v710 is a tri-band cell phone with a speakerphone, Bluetooth capability for wireless earpieces, MP3 player, video & photo camera, dual LCD screens, a slot for a memory card up to 512mb, text messaging, email, video games, and other stuff I haven't even played with. You'd think something that powerful and that small would cost $600+, but it doesn't. And yet the complete Adobe CS package costs well over $1,000.

There's target markets, too. For example, Optoma sells a certain projector with two different markets. In the home theater market, the projector is called the "EzPro 739" and sells for up to $1,900. That same projector is also sold under the label "EzPro 745" and is targeted towards the PowerPoint presentation market and is sold for just $1,200. Go take a look at Target and Tiger Direct, respectively.

The real question is, how much is it worth to you?
 
C

caveatipss

Guest
jaywong87 said:
Photoshop, Final Cut...etc. are all so expensive. Don't get me wrong though, I absolutely love the programs! But for 499.99+ its just hard to afford it. All it is, is fancy packaging and a CD.

With stuff like the iPod, or videogame consoles you know why it cost that much because of manufacturing, the materials used to make it, and the actual hardware inside.

Case in point: Was taking a Lightwave 3D class and my teacher told me I had to buy the program if I wanted to get ahead in the class. So I said, "Sure, how much do they run?"

"With a discount? $700." He replied.

"And that's WITH the discount?" Said I.

/rant.


Because they can. It's that simple. As long as enough people are willing to pay $700, they won't refuse the money. The prices are not based on how much it costs to develop them, but rather on what the market will support.
 
Joined
Jun 25, 2005
Messages
3,231
Reaction score
112
Points
63
Location
On the road
Your Mac's Specs
2011 MBP, i7, 16GB RAM, MBP 2.16Ghz Core Duo, 2GB ram, Dual 867Mhz MDD, 1.75GB ram, ATI 9800 Pro vid
Its been said that selling software is like printing money. That is only true if you have a hit.

The fact is after developing the software, a company has to further spend money to market, sell, support and enhance the product. Don't forget the general staff you need just to run a big company. Then there are the cycles. Paid upgrades boost sales for a while and then sales slow to a crawl until the next upgrade.

Besides all that. If a company can get $1000 instead of $99 from people, all the power to them. Eventually what is available in this 'high end' software will filter down to the $99 stuff you and I are willing to pay. :yinyang:
 
Joined
Mar 29, 2006
Messages
19
Reaction score
0
Points
1
tortoise said:
It's also not intended for a consumer. What does a regular joe need with Photoshop? Standard consumer oriented graphic apps will do 99% of what the consumer needs. A typical stove and oven installed in someone's kitchen at home costs a **** of a lot less than what you'd find in the kitchen of a nice restaurant.



Yes, and if you have CS you can get CS2 at an ungrade price.



They don't have to rewrite PS to be universal. I bet they have to touch very little code. It's more a matter of their build environment and marketing. Don't forget an x86 version of Photoshop has been around for years (on that *other* OS that Billy Boy likes to promote! :) )

Well i have heard a guy from Adobe on a podcast say its a big mod/rewrite to make it universal even down to the plug ins.

If it was easy it they would have universal CS2 now.

The fact that you can get a upgrade price is beside the point.

I am not a Pro but i need photoshop for my photography and DV work.
A stove in a restaurant is industrial and made for making meals for lots of people and would be no benifit for a consumer unless they have 100 guest comming to thier house.

PS would enpower a consumer to be able to get a professional result a big oven would do nothing for a consumer.
 
Joined
Nov 24, 2004
Messages
726
Reaction score
11
Points
18
Your Mac's Specs
Black Colorware PowerBook 1.67 GHz G4, 2 GB DDR2, 100GB 7200 RPM
Les Exposé said:
I think they should jack up the Price for businesses and lower the price for consumers.

I completely disagree. If you're a consumer, and want a pro-level app, you should be prepared to pay a pro-level price. That's why they're called 'prosumers.' If you want a consumer-level price, buy iLife, or Photoshop Elements.
 

Shop Amazon


Shop for your Apple, Mac, iPhone and other computer products on Amazon.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Top