Yep, that's my point. We'll see what happens, it stinks that they are charging people who paid $499 for the logic box to get what are essentially optimizations and bugfixes, but I don't think it's an indication they're going to charge for every update of Logic and other apps.
Up until MainStage 2.2, all MainStage updates were free with Logic Studio as well. I think this whole pay-twice thing is more about the way it *looks* than the way it *feels*. Apple should've given registered users of Logic 9 a free download of MainStage on the App Store to continue the upgrade cycle; I'm sure it's within their technical capabilities to do so.
Absolutely. At the same time they released MS and Logic on the app store they also released a free Logic update. Charging existing users for the MS update was purely a financial one, not a technical one.
The fact that they didn't says a bit about how they view their professional users.
I don't know if it really "says" anything or if they just decided to split off MS and handle it differently. If Apple really wanted to nickel and dime users they could have forced people to buy Logic on the app store to get the 9.1.6 update, which they didn't.
Apple could charge more frequently for Logic updates (paid 9.2, 10.1 etc). But they could do that whether it's on the app store or on disk (7.2 was a paid upgrade). I think some people are jumping to conclusions, reminds me of people freaking out that Logic would suffer the same fate as FCX regardless of how little evidence there was for that.
I assume that Logic 10 -- if it will exist -- will be App Store only. This is a bummer because it will make it harder to have multiple versions of Logic around in case some bug requires a downgrade for a task (and anyone who uses Logic knows this is pretty common). I have a feeling they're also going to require Lion (or Mountain Lion, if it takes that long), which would suck, but it seems like we're being pushed to Lion no matter how buggy it still is (the latest Xcode is Lion-only as well).
Sure looks like MAS only. I think you can still keep older versions of the app, you just have to make a copy and set it aside before running an update (which is what you do now with Logic updates to keep older versions). I've done that with other MAS apps and been able to keep multiple versions no problem, the only issue for me has been MAS telling me updates are available after I have the latest version.
I think it will take long enough that it will be after the ML release or close to it, my guess is it runs on Lion and ML. At this point ML is looking like a nice improvement over Lion so I would think that people who have the hardware that supports it would want to run that.