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Comment by recoiledsnake | Hacker News Reader

>This isn’t actually the first time Apple has offered an OS upgrade at a steep discount compared to its Windows rival (which typically runs over $100) — Snow Leopard made its debut at $29.

A pretty flawed apples to oranges comparison. OS X is more similar to bios updates... you buy the hardware, the vendor makes money off it and gives away the software. With Microsoft, you're paying the OEM money for the hardware(with razor thin margins usually but that's another story), so Microsoft doesn't make bank on expensive hardware and upgrades to RAM/HDD/CPU that Apple makes.

Edit: Not to mention that 10.5 to 10.7 is not upgradeable, you have to buy and install 10.6 first, install the App Store and then install 10.7. Windows 7 may not be upgradeable directly from XP without a format, but atleast you don't have to but and upgrade to Vista first!

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I have 10.5 and held off on purchasing 10.6 because I was waiting for 10.7. It bums me out that now I'll need to purchase both 10.6 and 10.7, regardless of how much the Windows upgrades cost. Judging from some of the tweets & comments I'm seeing elsewhere, a lot of other consumers are bummed too.

if you can afford a mac, i guess you can afford saving 0.80 dollars a month for buying a $30 OS update every 2 years.

Admittedly, I'm cheap. I prized my $400 Dell Vostro for years and reluctantly switched to a Mac because I was ultimately convinced it was a better machine for software development. I ended up buying a used MBPro for ~$800.

You could wait until iTunes becomes incompatible with 10.5 and Apple will give you a free OS upgrade. (assuming they continue this policy in the no-PC required to activate iOS devices future)

Any money says 10.5 -> 10.7 will work (some how ;-)

Yes, in spite of claims to the contrary, 10.4 -> 10.6 worked for several people I know.

10.6 is fairly easily piratable, though.

>"Windows 7 may not be upgradeable directly from XP without a format"

So long as there is an available bootable partition/disk - you can install Windows 7 and leave the XP installation intact and create a dual boot system. It's not something Microsoft tries to explain to the average consumer, but it's pretty much painless.

True, but if Vista was $29 more people might have done it in the first place.

There was so much bad PR, noone would bother. They tried to give corporate customers (select agreement sized ones) free copies and they said no.

They didn't try with me. They didn't try with any of my friends. I think they're trying with the wrong crowd.

Interesting side thought here (at least to me). MS has traditionally done very well selling to the larger enterprise market. As the headcount in those orgs go down, will MS' influence drop? Newer people coming in will probably have come from smaller orgs where MS is less prevalent, and when there's overall fewer people at an org, there's fewer people to influence/market to.

I tell a lie. I had/have an Ultimate Vista that I won at a local user group raffle. I've installed it, but in virtual machines, which I've lost a couple times. Getting it re set up by going through the 'call up and get reactivated' is always a pain. :(

They probably are - I agree. They should make personal licenses cheap and ubiquitous therefore creating mindset.

Most smaller orgs just buy machines and live with what is on them these days and only tech-focused companies seem to care what they run. The entire NHS (UK's free health system) seems to run on Windows 2000 and XP quite happily still because that's what the machines came with at the time.

As long as you can upgrade the browser, OS probably doesn't matter for many organizations.

I'm sure plenty of end users would have taken the offer, thats just because they're corporate customers. They never want the brand new thing. Not only is the supporting an os upgrade a pain in the ass long process that will also involve a lot of waiting around for all your vendors to get off their asses about supporting the new thing, at the time the prevailing wisdom was to never use windows before the first service pack. XP didn't really get good until sp2.

If Windows 7 was $30 I'd update my wife's two computers tomorrow. As is I see no reason to shell out over $200 for one upgrade from XP and one from Vista.

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