I’ve been using TechTool Pro for several years now. I upgraded to version 9.5 about a year ago, then to 9.6 in December. Now they want me to upgrade to Version 10. Every time they charge $19.95.
My understanding now is that the upgrade will apply only to a single machine. You must pay $19.95 for each machine onto which you wish to install TechTool Pro.
This is beginning to seem more like a subscription service.
I’d be interested in hearing the thoughts of others on this. Is their upgrade/pricing model reasonable? Should they just call it what it seems to be becoming: a subscription-based application?
What alternatives to TechTool Pro do you use? Is it worth flipping?
As I have never used TechTool Pro, I cannot say whether it would be worth flipping but I can vouch for Disk Drill, which I have used for at least a few years. It is also the highest recommended alternative to TechTool Pro, among a bunch of others.
A random thought or two, and a question. First, I don’t have a problem with a $19.95 upgrade to a new version (whole number, not “.8”). We all love free stuff, but it’s only fair we pay for something we use. Twenty bucks a year would be a very fair subscription price.
Can’t think of the other random thought now.
But, here’s my question: are the utilities like TechTool or Disk Doctor wise to use for “regular maintenance”? It seems to me in the past when I’ve used a utility to do regular maintenance on my hard drives, it’s not too long before I’m getting significant errors that utilities (including Apple’s Disk Utility) cannot seem to fix. A reformat and reinstall is the only solution. In contrast, on my current 13" MBP with solid state drive, I haven’t run any maintenance apps on it, and I’ve not had any problems at all.
It’s almost like the third party disk utilities create a situation (unintentionally) that is technically correct (file trees, maps, whatever) but that some bug in the macOS file system trips over. Strange.
Well, if it were only once per year, I might not mind quite as much, but if you read my OP you will see that it’s closer to every 6 months now. Even still, if they really want a subscription plan, they should just do a subscription plan, and NOT charge $100 at the start and then $20 every six months thereafter.
Also, these are NOT major upgrades. I paid for 9.0, 9.5, and 9.6 (which was really just a beta to try to achieve file system compatibility with High Sierra).
As for Techtool corrupting your drive – I assume you had some symptoms before running it? This reminds me of a friend who claimed that his arthritis was caused by glucosamine. He tried glucosamine for about a week and didn’t think it was doing anything. So he stopped. Then, about 6 months later, he had a bad flareup of his arthritis. He blames the glucosamine that he took for a bout a week several months earlier. Why? Because he had never had a problem like that before he took glucosamine, ergo, the glucosamine must be to blame. Your standard post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
Good points, Quahog. I agree, $20 for incremental updates every several months is probably going over the line in my view.
As for running the utility and then problems showing up, I should have been much clearer. What I should have explained is I would take something like TechTool Pro, run the portion to see if there are any problems on a disk, have something show up, fix it in TTP, and then experience problems in the macOS operations on the disk.