Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
And I’m back
I’m ready to give a better answer for that question. It won’t make anyone happy, but it does have the virtue of being true. The answer is that it is technically the same, but commercially different. Another analogy for you:
Two real estate developers each build a shopping mall. Each builds the exact same building, brick by brick. Yet developer B can charge a much higher rent than developer A. How are they different?
Well, developer A built in the rural Midwest. Developer B built in downtown Manhattan. In some Platonic universe, the two shopping malls should have equal rental incomes. That, however, is not the real world.
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The problem with the analogy is that in effect both malls are doing the same the only difference is that one can have a higher rent than the other.
What Apple is doing is different than any of the other “malls” as none of them are charging or plan to charge (that we know) this special rent that Apple decided to have. The other problem is that malls are only as good as the stores in it and if the rent becomes too high that the stores can't have any profits then no amount of sales will allow them to survive in said mall. Also a rent is a fixed number that stores can agree on and work hard to sell enough to pay said rent and still have profits. Under Apples new rules these stores are not only paying a rent but would need to provide all their profits to Apple so what is the point of staying there if they can't make money.
They are entitled to force the inapp buy but not to force the price of the consumable to be less or equal to the sales outside. If they are so sure of their user base then having a magazine or ebook be $3 to $5 more for in app buys shouldn't be a problem for Apple. Or is it that they fear that people will stop coming to the mall and start going to the shopping center a mile a way where the same item will cost much less than the gas to get there.