[addicted]

One of the consequences of iOS was the drop in quality Mac apps (this may possibly be my perception. I wonder if others feel the same). It seems to me what started happening was indie Mac shops who would sell their apps for $20-80 had to now support an iOS app as well and could not charge much, if anything, for it. So it was just an additional cost to be supported by their Mac app.

Further, Apple released the Mac App Store and dropped the price of iWorks apps to $19.99 (or 9.99?) thereby reducing the perceived value of Mac apps as well. Pre MAS, when Apple included iWork and iLife for free with your Mac you looked at it as Apple throwing in several hundred dollars worth of software for free with the Mac. By changing the structure where you now downloaded those apps, they assigned a value to them that was really low affecting the entire eco system.

Considering the massive growth of the Mac eco system, that the state of Mac software is at best as good as it was 10 years ago with a much smaller market is disappointing.

[selectodude]

I think the drop of Mac OS X going from $129 to zero probably had as much, if not more, to do with that.