In the old days of buying software, you’d enter a store, stroll the aisles and schlep home a shrink-wrapped box containing disks and a manual. Once in front of your computer, you’d load the disks and go through a sometimes-lengthy installation process.
That seems so quaint now that I’ve perused the virtual shelves of Apple’s Mac App Store. It’s the Macintosh equivalent of the App Store familiar to the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch crowd.
Entree to the joint is as easy as running Software Update on a computer with the most recent version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard and clicking on the store icon at the bottom of the screen. What’s especially sweet is that when you buy a program, it installs automatically, just as on the iPhone or iPad.
In the last few years, Apple helped popularize the very idea of an app store when it unveiled its apps emporium for the iPhone. Google followed suit with the Android Market for its smartphone apps.
App stores for mobile devices make a ton of sense. But it remains to be seen how well consumers will adapt to stores geared to more traditional computers. You don’t hear much about the AppUp store for netbooks that Intel launched about a year ago, but it’s still around and gaining more apps.
Google recently opened a browser-based Chrome Web Store that’s also built into the fabric of the upcoming Chrome operating system.
And now there’s Apple’s Mac App Store, which opened Jan. 6 with a combined 1,000-plus free and paid apps. That compares with the well over 300,000 apps in the store for the iPhone. But Apple says it is adding programs daily and that more than 1 million apps were downloaded in the first 24 hours.
The store is easy to navigate, but I didn’t go crazy downloading…