Is MacHeist worth it?
MacHeist is a bundle of Macintosh applications where 25% of the price paid goes to charity. It consists of 9+1 applications, many of them award winning and pretty well known, that — if bought separately — would cost around $300. The bundle goes for $49.
The applications are Delicious Library, NewsFire, FotoMagico, ShapeShifter, DEVONThink Professional, Disco, RapidWeaver, iClip4, One Pangea Game and TextMate (although that last one will be unlocked only if/when the charity raises $100k).
Now, as of the time of me writing this post there have been 4,908 bundles sold with the amount raised for charity being slightly less than $54,000. Is MacHeist worth it?
For anyone *just* getting a Mac and interested in three or more of the applications in the bundle it probably is worth it. Personally I find most of the applications useless for my needs and the ones I care about either I’ve already bought, or are not competitively priced.
For example, Delicious Library is a nice application, but awfully slow on older machines and I don’t think I’d pay $40.00 for it anyway. FotoMagico, DEVONthink, iClip4 and the Pangea Game are not applications I’d pay anything for. Shapeshifter, and customisation of the interface in general, is not something I care about, although I’ll admit it’s pretty well done. NewsFire is nice, but I don’t really like RSS readers. Not enough to pay for one anyway. RapidWeaver may be useful to someone trying to create their first web page, but I don’t exactly fall in that category.
The two applications I care about from this bundle are Disco and TextMate. Disco can be bought for $14.95 and I have already bought TextMate and use it daily. Besides, even if I hadn’t, there is no guarantee that it’d be unlocked anytime soon, considering there are 3 days and 11 hours left before the bundle offer ends.
So while Macheist is probably a good deal for the consumer, it is not at all tempting to me — and I imagine a whole lot of other Mac users. Like many, I am not quite sure about its value to the developers involved either.
In any case, even if you don’t end up getting it, it might introduce you to a good application (or two) you didn’t know before.
If you’re interested in these applications, then it’s worth it. And the fact that 25% goes to charity is a good move. However, as you said, I’ve already bought the applications I use (Disco, TextMate, Newsfire, Shapeshifter). The only app in the bundle that interests me is iClip 4 and it’s gonna cost less than $49 when it’s released.
I’ve bought it. Why? Devonthink Personal. The app alone costs 39.95$, so the app + 9 more or less useful apps = sugar bliss.
Hey Sugar.
Well, as I wrote above, it’s certainly a matter of preference. The same argument could be used for any application in the bundle, and most certainly for the ones that cost more than — say — $25-30. But, the point is that some of us already have licences for some of the applications in the bundle and do not need or want any of the others.
As far as I am concerned, DEVONThink is definitely not worth $40. That they are charging that much is no reason to pay that much — if you see what I mean. Personally, I wouldn’t even pay $10 for it, not because it is not well done, but because I think that spotlight + a modern journaling, arbitrarily complex meta-data supporting file system, such as ZFS for example is the best we can get under the 30 year old desktop paradigm our systems are built upon. While currently we’re stuck with HFS+ Journaling for a bit longer, I am quite happy with how my information is organised without resorting to some centralised database. Other people disagree and that’s why they use proprietary stuff like Journler, DEVONThink etc.
Still you got a licence for TextMate which I think is the application worth more than any in the bundle. Enjoy your new apps!