BarMax iPhone app retails for $1,000, but who's buying?

As the cost of the best iPhone apps continue to climb, a new education program called BarMax gets a whopping $1,000 price tag.

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Interested in the BarMax iPhone app? You better be flush with cash.

How much would you pay for an iPhone application? For most iPhone users, the answer lies somewhere in the $3 to $5 range. (Although this blogger was not particularly adverse to shelling out 7 bucks for "Civilization Revolution," one of the most absorbing games to be released for a mobile device in the past year.) How about $1,000? That's the price tag affixed to BarMax, a new application developed by BarMax LLC.

One thousand bucks. So what do you get for that kind of cash? (Our first guess: A digitized personal life coach, who would sit inside our iPhone, pass judgment on our life decisions, and advise us accordingly. That might be worth it.) In a word, you get education. BarMax, which was developed in part by a handful of Harvard lawyers, is a bar exam prep course.

Here's some copy from a promo site for BarMax:

BarMax is a complete solution and the most thorough yet flexible way to study for the bar exam. Listen to audio lectures right on your iPhone wherever you are. Practice MBE questions or review flashcards on the go. With BarMax, your life will no longer revolve around your bar exam prep course. Instead, your bar exam prep will revolve around you.

In fact, BarMax is so totally cool that you don't even need to have an iPhone to use it. For the $1,000 price of admission, BarMax LLC will send you a brand new iPod Touch, which you can use to review all those pixelated flash cards. As MG Siegler at TechCrunch points out, in some ways, BarMax is a bargain. Test prep for the bar can cost upwards of $4,000 – making the BarMax app look pretty cheap.

"The app is over 1 gigabyte in size," Siegler notes, "which is the largest application I've ever seen. It includes thousands of pages of materials as well as hundreds of hours of audio lectures. It's all the information you could ever want for the two-month course. And again, it can be done all on your iPhone. That said, if you do want some more tangible paperwork for certain sections, BarMax will send you that electronically as well."

Will we see more apps of this price in coming months? Unlikely. BarMax is a speciality product, aimed at a specific professional audience. Still, it's an eye-catcher. Talk to us: What's the most you'd ever pay for an iPhone application? Drop a line in the comments section, or follow us on our Twitter feed.

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