Apple upgrades Mac with apps

Taking a page from its popular iPhone, Apple is going to be opening an app store for the Mac.

As with the one introduced for the iOS operating system, which serves the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, the store will allow Mac users to buy, download and automatically install applications for their computers over the Internet. As is the case with the iPhone App Store, the Mac OS store will also alert users when updates are available for their software and allow them to download updates for multiple programs at once.

Apple’s move marks the first time one of the two major PC operating system vendors – Microsoft and Apple – has built an application store into their software.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the Mac app store at a small media event at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters Wednesday. Jobs also unveiled an updated version and a new, smaller model of its ultrathin MacBook Air notebook computer with quicker start-up times and a longer-lasting battery, and an update to Apple’s iLife creative software suite.

Additionally, Jobs showed off some of the new features in the next version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system – dubbed Lion – which will be released in the summer of 2011, and announced that the company’s FaceTime video chat software is coming to the Mac, with a test version of it available immediately.

The new Mac app store, meanwhile, will open within 90 days for the company’s current Snow Leopard operating system. “We don’t want to wait for Lion,” he said.

The new app store could be a huge move for Apple. The App Store for iOS has been a runaway success. The store has some 300,000 applications in it – more than three times the number in the application marketplace that Google put together for its Android operating system – and consumers have downloaded some 7 billion applications since it launched, Jobs said.

The Mac app store may not be similarly successful. But it shores up a problem faced by Mac users, analysts say. With few PC software stores around these days and electronics and general retailers devoting little space to PC software – much less Mac software – Mac programs can be hard to find outside of Apple’s own retail stores.

“We’re not in the days of Egghead anymore,” said Ben Bajarin, an analyst with consulting firm Creative Strategies, referring to a defunct PC software retailer. “This is going to streamline the process of discovering and installing OS X software.”

“The app store is going to be a gold mine for them,” said Van Baker, an analyst for technology research firm Gartner.

The Mac app store will have some important differences from the iOS one. It won’t carry iOS software, and it won’t work on every Mac. Consumers will have to be running the latest version of the Mac OS X software – 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Moreover, unlike the iOS App Store, the Mac one won’t be the only way consumers obtain software for their devices.

Mac users will still be able to buy packaged software at retail stores and will still be able to download software over the Internet from Web sites or through services such as Valve’s Steam.