You seem to forget, young sir, that Snow Leopard actually will work only on Intel based Macs.

Therefore, anyone running an older PowerPC rig would in effect be forced to go out and purchase a new Mac Pro or MacBook Pro (at only $1000 and above), and then buy Snow Leopard for $29 to upgrade to it.

You buy Windows 7 Ultimate at what?? $320, and you are running it on a machine you already have.

So what do you have??

It seems Apple wins no matter what.....

pillainp said:

You seem to forget, young sir, that Snow Leopard actually will work only on Intel based Macs.

Therefore, anyone running an older PowerPC rig would in effect be forced to go out and purchase a new Mac Pro or MacBook Pro (at only $1000 and above), and then buy Snow Leopard for $29 to upgrade to it.

You buy Windows 7 Ultimate at what?? $320, and you are running it on a machine you already have.

So what do you have??

It seems Apple wins no matter what.....

exactly. snow leopard is an upgrade for previous macs. Buy windows 7 from MS and you can run it on any commodity hardware, built by you or oems. Buy snow leopard and you can run it on...an intel mac, which you had to buy in the first place from apple at a cost of many dollars. Your out cold if you own a PPC mac, snow leopard will not work. MS on the other supports all x86 processors, and even still supports the itanium line of processors with Server 2008 R2....plus all the other legacy hardware.

OS X - $29... plus the $500 to $1000 extra you pay to buy a mac compared to a similar spec PC. Apple subsidises the cost of continuing to develop OS X (they brought it over from NextStep) through the hardware sales. OS X doesn't even have activation so most users, at least the ones I know, will simply download it from a torrent site and install, no crack required.

Now also since 2001 there has been 6 new installments of OS X compared to 2 for windows. Perhaps if you add up the cost from upgrading from OS X 10.0 to 10.1 to 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4 to 10.5 to 10.6 to upgrading from XP to Vista to Win7 then the figures don't look as bad.

geometrikal said:

OS X - $29... plus the $500 to $1000 extra you pay to buy a mac compared to a similar spec PC. Apple subsidises the cost of continuing to develop OS X (they brought it over from NextStep) through the hardware sales. OS X doesn't even have activation so most users, at least the ones I know, will simply download it from a torrent site and install, no crack required.

Now also since 2001 there has been 6 new installments of OS X compared to 2 for windows. Perhaps if you add up the cost from upgrading from OS X 10.0 to 10.1 to 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4 to 10.5 to 10.6 to upgrading from XP to Vista to Win7 then the figures don't look as bad.

Yeah this is pretty much it... Microsoft isn't a hardware company, although they do sell mice, keyboards, etc... They need to make thier money on software sales.

I'll get upset about MSFT's pricing when they start charging $30 for service packs. You know, like Apple do.

tw33k said:

In terms of functionality, I agree. But m$ pricing is ridiculous. There's no way I would have bought 7 if I didn't have a technet sub and there are heaps of people who won't buy it because of the price

First....technet subscription costs more than an OEM license for Windows 7...so I don't see the savings.

Second....technet licensing is for evaluation purposes only. Microsoft does not intend for you to install anything from technet on your own personal computer and use it long term (production). So, by using technet in this manner, you are actually violating the end-user license agreement. When you decide to use something permanently, you are expected to purchase the full requisite license.

Third....technet subscriptions renew every year. I'm pretty darn sure that the MS licensing states that if you discontinue the renewal of your technet subscription...then you are to stop evaluating any of the software which came with it. I'm not saying that activated products will stop working....I'm just saying that according to the legal contract, you aren't following the rules.

tw33k said:

In terms of functionality, I agree. But m$ pricing is ridiculous. There's no way I would have bought 7 if I didn't have a technet sub and there are heaps of people who won't buy it because of the price

First....technet subscription costs more than an OEM license for Windows 7...so I don't see the savings.

Second....technet licensing is for evaluation purposes only. Microsoft does not intend for you to install anything from technet on your own personal computer and use it long term (production). So, by using technet in this manner, you are actually violating the end-user license agreement. When you decide to use something permanently, you are expected to purchase the full requisite license.

Third....technet subscriptions renew every year. I'm pretty darn sure that the MS licensing states that if you discontinue the renewal of your technet subscription...then you are to stop evaluating any of the software which came with it. I'm not saying that activated products will stop working....I'm just saying that according to the legal contract, you aren't following the rules.

As far as apple pricing goes...they rape you on day 1 for the hardware. And the change to Snow Leopard is really nothing more than a service pack from what I understand...so I cannot understand why anybody is excited to pay $29 to upgrade.