Over at TUAW, TJ Luoma made note of something I wasn’t aware of: about a month ago, Apple quietly removed the “Downloads” tab from the Apple homepage. The page continued to exist, but it appears that Apple is no longer updating it.
On the one hand, Apple’s own Downloads page was always inferior to the likes of VersionTracker, I Use This or MacUpdate. The editorial resources they were employing to keep it up to date probably didn’t make sense when there were better repositories.
On the other hand, though, Apple’s Download page served an important role: it was an software repository that Apple neo-nates could easily find the first time they booted up Safari, offering a quick library of all the cool software they could use on their new Macs. The other, third-party Mac software repositories don’t have that sort of visibility to new Mac owners.
My guess is that Apple eventually intends to employ their App Store strategy with Mac software, but I wouldn’t expect anything like that to happen until either the next major version of OS X or iTunes. In the meantime, I think a lot of new Mac owners will acutely miss the presence of an updated Downloads section on the Apple homepage.
