“Apple’s decision to sell the Mac OS X Lion upgrade through its own Mac App Store won’t hurt the company’s bottom line but will certainly impact traditional retailers, a market analyst said Friday,” Gregg Keizer reports for Computerworld. “‘The Best Buys, the Staples, the PC Connections, they all still have a decent Mac software business,’ said Stephen Baker of retail research firm NPD Group. ‘This will have an impact on all those guys. [The release of an OS upgrade] is always a good opportunity for them to connect to customers, get them into the store and thinking about upgrading their devices.'”
“And with Apple pushing Lion only through its download Mac App Store, those retailers will be out of luck this time around,” Keizer reports. “Likely forever, said Baker.”
Keizer reports, “Baker declined to estimate the impact of Apple’s decision on U.S. retailers, saying it was impossible to gauge because NPD has no insights into how much revenue the Mac App Store was generating or how customers will react to Lion. But he said that Apple would easily make more money on Lion than it did on the predecessor, 2009’s Snow Leopard. That upgrade sold $29, but because it was a traditional DVD-based boxed product, Apple didn’t bring in as much per unit as it will with Lion as a download-only title.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Let’s see: More Mac users, no packaging, shipping or stocking costs, same $29 price will ding retailers, but increase Apple’s profit per unit. Je vous remercie, Monsieur évidentes.
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