Why Apple released Facetime as a Beta... and the new charge is completely reasonable.

[spacehog371]

Here's my theory...

Apple has to charge money for Facetime because of accounting requirements.

Something they didn't want to do, as they knew it would slow the adoption rate.

Extremely easy way to get around it?

Release it as a beta. Then the accounting requirements don't apply.

Everyone up until today was able to download and use facetime, so I can't imagine there are that many people out there that wanted to use it, but hadn't yet downloaded it.

Now, the beta still works. All of those people have a working copy of Facetime. (HD isn't needed since that only applies to new ones)

Conclusion: Facetime beta wasn't actually a beta at all, it was a way for Apple to give it to everyone for free.

 

[GadgetAddict]

I'll admit I was not happy when I read that Apple is charging for the Facetime app. But after the most recent rumors your take looks plausible.

 

[Bye Bye Baby]

Yes yes yes- but is the new version any better?

 

[spacehog371]

Yes yes yes- but is the new version any better?

It's HD, but that is only for the new computers with HD cams... which are going to come with this installed by default anyways. I've literally not had a single problem with the Facetime beta... Frankly, I don't think it was really beta.

Has Apple ever released a beta product in the past to the general public? I really think they just put a beta label on it so they could give it away for free. They obviously couldn't get away with calling it beta when it's shipping by default on new computers.

 

[Mik3F]

I had the beta and have bought the version from the app store. 0.59p is not going to kill anyone

 

[InteriorDEV]

Lion comes with a full non-beta version.

 

[newdeal]

...

accounting reasons is BS...true its only 99 cents but that is enough to get me to not want it

 

[Phil A.]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F5166b Safari/6533.18.5)

There was a bug in the beta (don't know if it's still there in the released version though as I dot have it): it couldn't see contacts in exchange address books, only local ones

 

[crumb963]

Uh...

If you can still video chat via iChat, tell me why this is a bother to some? Or is there something I'm missing about the facetime app?