Apple gives an OS away for free - users never see advertisements.
Microsoft charges $100 for Windows 10, virtually every corner of the experience is riddled with advertisements and marketing crap.
Microsoft charges $100 for Windows 10, virtually every corner of the experience is riddled with advertisements and marketing crap.
Microsoft trying that would absolutely kill the company- either by lawsuit or people getting up in arms over anti-competitive behavior. They make a small amount every few years when you buy a new computer, and hope you'll also pay for their other software (or give them data, which is tantamount to the same thing).
Microsoft, literally, sells Windows 10... for money.
Since they arent getting a massive markup on very well integrated, mediocre hardware, they need to sell more than just Windows. Office, SharePoint, etc are where the real money is at for them.
edit:
To make it clear to people not reading the comment carefully, I'm not saying MacOS is "free". I'm merely saying that once you pay for the computer, the OS is included in the price.
And there is no additional monetization under the form of ads or tracking. Unlike in the Windows world, where you pay for the license, yet you are still being tracked and served ads.
Where do I have to click to get those ads?
And anyway, surely that is a game, not an ad?
I'd go as far to say it is adware.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Candy+Crush+Soda+Saga+windows+10+b...
Probably it was this
https://gist.github.com/matthewjberger/2f4295887d6cb5738fa34...
You are misinterpreting the parent's argument by saying "it's pretty fair" then, as they were saying it's unfair to call MacOS "free."
In one case it just also happens to be impossible to avoid being further monetized via ads and tracking.
This, to me, is unacceptable for paid software, as essentially amounts to license fee + adware model.
The comment you replied to was a response to calling MacOS free, and was entirely about that topic. It's not a fair comparison to call MacOS free, that isn't justifying Microsoft's actions though.
Imagine how nice Windows 10 would be if Microsoft didn't own Bing, Xbox, and Office.
For well over a decade that didn't make OS X free. I 'member when upgrading OS X meant forking $129.
I'm pretty sure I see adverts for all these things on my "advert-free" Macbook.
* Most Apple apps (e.g. Home, Messages, Photos, Maps, Podcasts, FindMy) advertise their integration with other Apple hardware.
* Only pre-installed browser is Safari, and the homepage is apple.com.
They might not be blatant, but I'd highly surprised if the marketing department isn't involved in their placement. They don't, for example, mention any competing products.
Also, there's no obvious reason Apple has to advertise the Apple Music subscription when I open the app to play my own MP3s.
And not macOS, but in iOS they've had a giant row offering an Apple Arcade subscription trial at the top of Settings for a while
Maybe I'm cynical, but if MS is adding ads to the OS that you paid for, then how much worse would it be if they didn't have these other platforms raising money to offset as well. I'm imagining your OS with a desktop that looks like a NASCAR car and driver's suit.
Also the OS isn't free. When you buy an Apple computer, you're also purchasing a license to use macOS on that machine.
Now to say "virtually every corner of the experience" seems like a massive overreach. When you first install Windows, or buy hardware with Windows, you are likely to find some advertisements, i.e. programs pre-installed, and start menu tiles that offer other things they want you to install. And there is this obnoxious taskbar notification, which I abhor! It happens once after a major software update.
That doesn't cover nearly all corners of the Windows experience, though. It's just two items, and you can uninstall or dismiss the notification and it mostly never shows up again (except next time they release a major update.) About 363 days of the year, I will see zero advertisements in my Windows 10 experience from Microsoft.
Now, I'm not saying we give them a pass. We should absolutely be critical of these user hostile moves, but we should describe the experience using accurate terms and phrases.
For all intents and purposes their OS is free - the consumer does not ever need to worry about upgrade costs.
So the OS is basically included in the product (just like a washing machine or a car) and upgrades are free.
However, you most certainly are paying for the OS whenever you buy Apple's overpriced hardware. Perhaps the receipt does not state this fact, but we all know that the only way anyone will get macOS is if someone gives Apple money. So, the people giving Apple money are all paying for macOS... And if you're one of those people, you've paid for macOS.
Saying that you're not paying for the OS is like saying that you're not paying for solar panels when you sign a 15 year deal with some energy company middle-man. It's like saying that you're not paying the full price of a smartphone when you buy it subsidized from the phone carrier. You actually end up paying more for the solar panels and the smart phone in those cases. In this case, you're most likely paying more for the OS as well.
If you want to play games with semantics, anything you want can be true.
I think you'll quickly find out that's not the case if you, for example, start a macOS VPS hosting company that doesn't use Macs or that lends them for shorter time periods than one day.
> Apple's overpriced hardware
This meme needs to die, now more than ever (because of Apple Silicon).
>This meme needs to die, now more than ever (because of Apple Silicon).
This meme is relevant more than ever with the butterfly keyboards breaking all over the place.
That's not an end-user doing whatever they want, that's a company providing macOS to end-users. End users can do whatever they want.
> Apple's overpriced hardware...This meme needs to die, now more than ever (because of Apple Silicon).
Apple Silicon has nothing to do with overpriced base systems, SSD/RAM upgrades and overpriced accessories. Everybody knows Apple hardware is overpriced.
The fact that you actually get less functionality out of Apple hardware adds to the cost. For instance, I have an old 2012 Mac Pro among many other machines in my home/office. The amount of time, money and effort I had to spend to keep this thing running was ridiculous. I had to buy an RX580 to be able to upgrade it to the latest OS and then I had to spend time researching how to fix their locked down piece of shit UEFI loader so I could boot into a better OS (that would be Manjaro). After that I had to spend hours working around all sorts of little Apple-specific oddities like accessing settings that would be in a BIOS on a better computer.
Apple Silicon adds to the cost too because it's incompatible with everything. Now you can do even less stuff with your Mac, but you can do it really fast!
Any other PC in the house would have just worked. This one looks cool though and it's built like a tank so I spent my time figuring it out.
If you're a Microsoft partner or resell there are also options available for ordering for use with Enterprise volume licensing.
And "search with google" keeps pushing you to safari https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17935301/how-to-force-ma...
I don't have win app store / one drive too, removed that on the first day.
Once every x months, I have to install a larger Windows update - which has me click through a bunch of screens AGAIN, having to avoid accepting some kind of ad-pushing nonsense and tracking.
I did it after fresh instal and didn't have to do anything for years.
I agree that sometimes there's that privacy settings screen once a few months
Probably it was this
https://gist.github.com/matthewjberger/2f4295887d6cb5738fa34...
Every corner of my Windows 10 experience is not riddled with advertisements. All I have to do is to remove few built-in partner apps after Windows install which I'm doing every few years.
You're really exaggerating it. I don't like that Microsoft tries to monetize already sold Windows. But it's not that bad. Open web browser with a typical website and you'll have every corner of the experience riddled with advertisements. That's truly embarrassing.