The cost of being an Apple fan [updated]

I’m in the mid­dle of fol­low­ing Steve Jobs’ keynote from Mac­world, and it sounds pretty cool. The price of some of their soft­ware has gone up, how­ever, and it reminded me of a post I’d wanted to write some time ago. Between text-based page refreshes seems like a good time.

Apple’s prod­ucts have always been expen­sive. I under­stand that. But lets add up some of the num­bers _after_ you’ve bought your com­puter. It comes with the oper­at­ing sys­tem and a whole pas­sel of Apple soft­ware for “free.” And that’s good.

But a year later, they’ve updated the OS, they’ve updated iLife, and your yearly sub­scrip­tion to their online .Mac ser­vice is dues, and you’re look­ing at, well:

>iLife ’05: $79
>iWork: $79
>OS 10.4: $129 (okay, not exactly yearly any more…)
>One year of .Mac: $99 (for… the slideshow fea­ture, that’s all)

>Yearly: $386

Ouch.

Update: Denny pointed out that the prices are a lit­tle less for education-discount-getting folks like me. Those prices would result in a yearly pay­out of $276. Still a lot.