Paul Howard » apple

parallels - unfair practices (update)

Paul Howard — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 10:10:27 +0000

Well it’s been over a week and I have had no reply from the customer services people at Parallels.

The two questions I asked them were as follows:

When you add the standard product to your shopping cart it also lists “Extended Download for Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac [300134581] (12 months) “. This costs £3.94

Does this mean you have to pay extra for the ability to redownload the software after your first purchase? If so why does it only last a year? Surely once you have purchased the software and obtained a license key, you should be able to download it as many times as you like. I would assume you could just download the trial and activate it. So what is this charge for?

The second question was why they were charging VAT at 19% when we in the UK pay 17.5%? It’s possible that they are selling it from another EU country that has a higher rate of VAT and we are liable to pay it. If that is true there is no mention on their site of this and as they didn’t reply to my email it looks like I will never know.

I have been happy using the VMware products for years and it looks like I will be continuing to use them. Parallels works fine. I have no complaints about the actual product but I am not going to give money a company that doesn’t reply to a simple pre-sales email. Not exactly good marketing in my opinion.

** Updated **

I have just found this on the FAQ page:

What is Extended Download Service?
Signing up Extended Download Service means that after you purchase our product, we’ll keep a copy of your program for ONE FULL YEAR. If you need to reinstall your Parallels product, you will be able to download it again for free.

What????? You limit people to one download? So if their hard drive crashes and they didn’t back up the install file they have to pay for it again? Yeah - not gonna happen.

first iphone visit

Paul Howard — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:08:54 +0000

While checking through my web stats today I just noticed I had my first visitor using an iphone.

How exciting!

parallels - unfair practices (possibly)

Paul Howard — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:02:00 +0000

I was looking at purchasing a copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac today. I had used the 30 day test version and it appeared to fit my needs.

Before purchasing I emailed a couple of questions to their pre-sales team. If I am right, they have some very strange agreements for people to accept.

If I am wrong then all is fine. If not it’s VMware fusion for me.

tagging problems pretty much solved

Paul Howard — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 20:27:26 +0000

A few days ago I posted saying that I was in two minds about local tagging as the tags didn’t get copied up to various online services.

Well, today I noticed that an updated Picasa Uploader that was released last October now adds the ability for you to duplicate iPhoto tags (or keywords as they call them) into Picasa Web Albums.

I tested it out and it works very well. Nice one Google.

itunes tv series too expensive

Paul Howard — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 23:37:29 +0000

With the updated Apple TV more and more people are going to want to start watching TV/films via the Internet rather than using traditional media such as DVD.

I even attached an older, G4 powered, mac mini to my TV this weekend and have been copying over ripped DVDs to it so I can get the boxes out of my living room.

Just out of curiosity I went to the Apple store today to have a look at the price of UK TV shows. Let’s just say I was not impressed with what I found.

As an example, let’s take The West Wing season 2. Amazon has the DVDs for £17.97 while the Apple iTunes store has the same series for a whopping £31.99, which is just madness.

Why does Apple insist on charging such ludicrous prices? I can understand putting a premium on their hardware but downloads of a TV show?

If they want people to stop buying physical media and trust them to deliver good quality content, the first thing they have to do is make sure that the pricing of their downloads reflects real world pricing.