Comments on: WolframAlpha iPhone: Why the $50 Asking Price?

By: James

James — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:53:56 +0000

How is the app store an infringement on “the rights of a consumer’s wallet and the programmer’s creation”?

By: whab

whab — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:59:30 +0000

$50 is quite a steal for an app that requires an active internet connection, and that does not provide much more than the web version… Actually there are several graphing calculator apps for the iPhone that cost 10 times less and able to provide at least 95% of the needs for a graphing calculator, eg: the 4.99$ “Math Graphing” app (http://iphone.kybervision.com/mathgraphing/) looks more useful for students than Wolfram Alpha.

By: dirk

dirk — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:51:20 +0000

The app store model is a distasteful fad and a lazy supplement for poor web/browser-based programming ability. The web-based software model is where things were heading until Apple, in kind, opted to cater to consumer’s (and developer’s) lesser desire to have things ‘just work’. Steve Wolfram, like Steve Jobs, has only one real motivation- to make money. WolframAlpha is a gimmick, not an innovation. The Apple app store is a horrible infringement of the rights of both the consumer’s wallet and the programmer’s creation, at once, to the enormous monetary benefit of the company and the enormous detriment of innovation at large. Meanwhile, somebody in Russia is tinkering with command-line interface to make a real product on a Linux machine, while a million Mac users are making pictures of themselves look prettier than they do in real life and uploading them to facebook, unemployed. So thank them both for being unidirectionally motivated by greed for me next time you see them.

By: ugo

ugo — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:44:47 +0000

don’t you think they just wanted all the media-coverage on their new release like they are getting it now?
we all know now about the existence of this app!
probably soon the price will drop.