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"If gas prices followed the inflation rate, we'd be paying $4/gallon these days. So shut your piehole and stop yer bitchin'." I consider that some of the sagest advice I ever received (especially the piehole part). It's advice that pops into my head every time someone chooses to whine about the cost of owning a computer.

Macworld Expo will kick off next Tuesday, and people are talking about the possibility of paid upgrades to iPhoto, iDVD, and iMovie. People have just finished bitching (for the most part) about the cost of .Mac which - if you use it - is well worth $99 (and certainly worth the $49 I paid. Now the rumor: $50 for the three iApps (iTunes, iChat, iCal, iSync, Mail, etc. seem unaffected).

These whiners have brought up the cost of Jaguar ($129) as another example of being charged more. Why? "OS upgrades use to cost only $99!" said one MacNN poster. Guess what? "If OS prices followed the inflation rate, we'd be paying $299/release these days. So shut your piehole and stop yer bitchin'." Seriously. Look at the cost of Windows XP Pro if you need further proof that "our" OS is still relatively inexpensive.

So what have we got here? $50. Three applications. Perhaps the only problem I see with this is the problem of bundling. I want iDVD, but may not care for iPhoto and iMovie. Will I be paying $50 for all three, or might I just choose one? I'm not sure. Apple previously "lumped" a bundle with the very same .Mac - several people whined about wanting to have "just email for $15/year" or whatnot. Was Apple stupid not to provide these options? Unfortunately, we can't say. I can only imagine that they decided the additional cost of keeping these billing plans separate and whatnot would have raised the cost above a threshold. The same may be true of a "three-pack" bundle of iApps. If anything, having to pay for iPhoto/iMovie (I own Final Cut Pro) might make me use them more often…

However, a key fact is this: the iApps - iMovie and iDVD - have previously cost $29 apiece. People who bought a Mac that came with iMovie 1 had to pay $29 to upgrade to iMovie 2. Same for iDVD. And the rumor is currently that the iApps - all of them - will continue to be bundled with new computers (and it's important to keep in mind that this is still just a rumor). It's amazing how selective the memory of a whiner can be.

The simple truth:

• Apple is a company. Companies try to make a profit.
• No, I will not use the above point to make an impassioned plea to "support Apple."
• Instead, I will simply point out what I consider to be the obvious: not a single damn person is forcing you to upgrade.

Apple sells a product. If you don't want to use it, don't buy it. If you didn't want Jaguar, you didn't have to buy it (same holds true for 10.1 and even 10.0 - hell, even Public Beta - which Apple relented on and gave $30 credit).

The bitching people seem to forget the world in which we live. We live in a world in which Mac OS X does not have any kind of copy protection or licensing restrictions. Heck, Apple even offers a $199 "Family Five-Pack" of Mac OS X for the honest people out there - for less than the cost of two copies of Mac OS X, you get five. Contrast this with Microsoft, which still forces you to enter some long license key, and then disables it if you change the hardware it sits on three times (or something like that).

So please, people, I urge you to excercise common sense and a bit of self-respect. If you don't want it, don't buy it. Don't put on some stupid air of importance and say things like "how dare Apple stick it to ME, their most loyal customer!" Don't make false or silly claims like "this is the last straw, I am getting a PC." By all means, get a damn PC. I could use a few more people bitching about all there is to bitch about in the Windows world… it helps Apple sell more Macs. People that like to bitch like to bitch about everything, regardless of whether they have a reason or not.

Shut your pie hole and quit yer bitchin'.

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