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News: Lightroom 4 Is On the Mac Store

Adobe’s Lightroom Product Manager, Tom Hogarty, announced that Lightroom is now available on the Apple Mac Store (for North America only). I think overall it’s a good move for Lightroom. For new Lightroom users out there who are on the Mac store and may never have otherwise heard of Lightroom, this is just another way to get it into their hands. However, there area few, caveats, shall we say 🙂

1) It’s for Mac only (duh!). This probably doesn’t seem bad if you only own Macs. However, I can tell you from being on the road teaching Lightroom over the last few weeks, there’s LOTS of people out there that have both a Windows and Mac machine. The boxed version and download version of Lightroom can be installed on both Mac and PC.

2) Updates will take place through the Mac store. From personal experience of being the managing editor of a digital magazine (Light It magazine) that’s delivered through the Mac App Store, that (sometimes) approvals can be a pain in the neck. So, when Adobe feels an update is ready they’ll release it. That doesn’t mean it’ll be immediately available on the App store though, as it may take a few days.

3) There’s no upgrade pricing. So basically, if you have LR1, 2 or 3, you can can’t get the upgrade price to 4 (only $79) on the App store. Instead, you’ll pay $149. And there’s no guarantee that when 5 comes out, and you bought LR4 on the App store, that you’d be able to upgrade as well.

My Take: I kinda wonder if I’m alone in doing what I do. But, I have a Mac and when I see software I want to buy that’s on the App store, the first thing I do is go to the software makers website to see if I can buy it direct from them. For me at least, I prefer to buy a copy of the software straight from them. I may be crazy, paranoid, whatever… but that’s just the way I do it. That said, if I can’t buy it directly from the developer, then I have no problem buying something through the App store. It’s just not my first choice. And remember, Adobe’s just trying to create another channel for which to buy Lightroom (if you owned a product you’d make sure you’d get it out there in as many stores as you could right?). They can’t control the App store policies when it comes to upgrades and updates. Anyway, just thought I’d let you guys know what the deal is. Hope you have a great weekend.

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