Skyline_UK
UK note: What Craig says is very similar here in the UK, but I'd add an important caveat for UK taxpayers claiming a proportion of their home expenses as business if that home is freehold, i.e. owned outright.  If you sell your house then there is no Capital Gains Tax due if it's your main residence, except HMRC can seek to levy CGT on the theoretical gain made on the home office or studio based on the proportion of utilities costs you've been claiming in the past!

Paul P

BMOG
Great point about paying for cable

Who has time to watch tv these days ?  I cancelled my cable tv years ago since I only used it to watch the SuperBowl and get info on the latest natural or man-made disaster.  I do have cable for the Internet, but without that I couldn't even run Sonar.
 

Anderton

NeoSoul

Anderton

BMOG
 
$150 times forever adds up over time don't you think? 

Yes, no doubt it does add up. In fact 35 years from now, it will have added up to what I paid (adjusted for inflation) for a 4-track tape recorder in 1975 which had no mixer, no processors, no instruments, and a need to feed it $156 worth of tape every month. (No, that's not a typo...35 years.)

I really enjoy using Sonar.   But it is quite an unfair comparison.  Sonar doesn't do anything without a computer + audio interface

 
I think very few people dedicate a computer exclusively to SONAR (even though they should, LOL). They are amortizing the expense of that computer over multiple applications. All a tape recorder could do was push tape.
 

The $150 is also just an update cost.  To start the process, sonar costs $500 for the version under question.

 
Consider the price I quoted for my monthly expense for tape. You can't run a tape recorder without tape...over a year, that would more than cover the $500, as well as $150 updates for 8+ years.
 

I personally thought it was odd that the developers came out with Rapture Pro, but didn't add that to the premium product, they just provided a stripped down version, and offer it as a separate purchase. Even Apple gave Logic users (a full DAW that costs $200, and even includes plgins like drummer) the Alchemy Synth as a free add on, not some stripped down version.

 
When you want to dominate a market, have $200,000,000,000 in cash on hand, and more importantly hefty profit margins on the computers people have to buy to run your software, you can take certain liberties with pricing. Remember that the goal of Logic is to induce you to buy a computer.
 

The same can be said for some of the pro-channel models they have released on the side.  The model has changed, why not start including those in the package, especially since they are of no value to anyone but Sonar users.

 
Because developing software and paying licensing fees to third party developers is not free. The more things SONAR includes, the higher the price will have to be to cover the extra expenses. Then people would complain about "I have Omnisphere, why do I have to pay for Rapture Pro? And I already have the Waves Mercury Suite of plug-ins and UA's Powered Plug-Ins. Why should I have to pay for more ProChannel modules I won't use?"
 
If you don't think that would happen, look at all the people here complaining that they don't want to pay money for particular features they don't use. It's a balancing act. No matter what Cakewalk does or does not include, their choices will satisfy some people and not others. To stay in business, all they have to do is make sure that most people are satisfied.