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Comment by Zababa | Hacker News Reader

People pay $100 for Windows? There are licenses on ebay for less than 5€ in Europe.

If you buy a laptop here it's ~100€ cheaper without an OS or Linux on it, so even if you want to use Windows you should buy the cheaper version and get a 5€ OEM key or the like. An additional benefit to that: less HW vendor crap installed.

At least that was the case with the Lenovo laptops I personally and also the company I work for (Linux shop) bought.

I think what you are being charged is a form of retail markup, by lenovo. They are paying $10-$15 max for that license. It wouldn't make sense on their cheaper laptops where they do not give you the option of linux or no OS, otherwise the laptop would lose money.

AFAIK the PC market is low margin, and the only place they really get margin is from all the crap ware they 'offer' and stuff like margins on windows licenses and such.

I think microsoft has realized the real price for windows is $10 too, which is why they are adding all the adware crap in it. Otherwise it's not tenable as a business for them, even if they are a selling a huge volume of it.

Windows 12 might be free. And then have premium sub with more features like O365...

>Otherwise it's not tenable as a business for them, even if they are a selling a huge volume of it.

I'm sure that is where we are heading in the long term. I used to spend a lot of money on software for my business, now the majority of what I use is free. I can't see Microsoft being able to escape that forever.

Some people don't like gray-market licenses. I'm not one of them, but they definitely exist.

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