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.
