Apple has recently taken a tough line on super-expensive apps. There is BarMax CA, a California bar exam prep app, and a couple of industrial apps like MobiGage and Agro. But the $999 app club has only a couple of members. This week, the exclusive group gained a new member as Vizzywig 4K debuted. This hyper-deluxe iPhone application “captures full 4K resolution photos at the rate of 24 photos per second along with synched audio” rather than capturing video. You can thus get really, really, really nice clips with your iPhone 5s.
Is there any point pricing an app at a thousand bucks? Well, there might be.
The BarMax CA is actually bouncing into the list of top 40 educational iPad apps every couple of days and is even cracking into the top 400 of all iPad applications every now and then. Considering how few people are really into taking the California bar exam, it might make sense to go all out and squeeze those law school grads for all they’re worth.
The same logic may apply to the extremely small pool of people who truly, deeply care about capturing 4K video quality on their iPhones. For those of us who care slightly less about iPhone video quality, there is also a somewhat more modest VizzyWig application that is priced at $30. This editing suite is more than 30 times cheaper than the one on VizzyWig 4K… and perhaps that is the point.
A $30 price point is sky-high in the photo/video application category for the iPhone, but it suddenly seems cheap indeed when you compare it with the $1,000 price point. Sometimes, the point of having a hyper-luxury app may be making the luxury app seem reasonable.