While I think there needs to be alternatives I suspect a lot of people will be disappointed as many developers don’t alter pricing at all and we are going to see some really scummy behavior by some going forward.

I am a very infrequent user of the app store as is and we have always had freedom on the Mac platform and that just meant mostly other stores with their own embedded fee structure along with having to guess if a site and developer were trustworthy.

So we may just end up in a situation where we have a few large trusted app stores and still have to pay them all.

I haven’t played with pricing across the laptops as its not my area of interest but I do know comparing the mini to the studio usually results in a beefed up mini costing as much as the studio with a lower tier processor; the memory and storage costs are such that you need to pay attention to where other models start.