Even Apple said that all the added price of fairer labor practices in China (and the cost of anti-suicide nets on Foxconn factories), will be passed on to the consumers in the product prices.
Second -- how much do you think Microsoft makes from selling a $99/$139 license?
They can most definitely, absolutely, without a doubt afford to eat the cost.
I was talking about profits Microsoft exclusively makes from selling the $99/$139 Windows licenses to consumer, not the profits of Microsoft entirely. Two different vastly different things.
>Second -- how much do you think Microsoft makes from selling a $99/$139 license? They can most definitely, absolutely, without a doubt afford to eat the cost.
I dunno. How much does it make selling an OS at the price of two video games, while supporting it with updates for 10 years and paying devs US salaries to work on it for those 10 years?
Enterprise customers are Microsoft's bread and butter as those also buy the full AD, Azure, O365, Outlook, etc. package plus pay for support, but I can't imagine they make much money selling just an OS and 10 years worth of development for only $99/$139 to consumers who don't buy anything else out of the Microsoft ecosystem.
Keep in mind that Windows 95 retail box would cost consumers $209($409 in today's money), and you imagine that Microsoft is now making a huge profit on selling Windows to consumers today at 25% the original price with the much higher complexity and development costs of today's software?
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the consumer $99/$139 price points are actually loosing Microsoft money, similar how consoles are doing, but Microsoft is subsidizing it from the enterprise profits, to maintain the Windows market share monopoly, otherwise consumers would just switch to Linux if they had to pay more than a hundo for Windows.
In fact, you don't even have to pay for Windows (legal gray area). I activated my Windows 11 Pro copy with some CD key from Windows 7 I found online and it activated just fine. If Microsoft was actually making a profit on selling Windows licenses to consumers, they would have some serious DRM in place that would rival that of video-games, but the way I see it, it's not making them any money, which is why they don't bother enforcing even the most basic kinds of DRM, which in turn, explains to me why they penny pinch the $0.99.
How exactly are you calculating Apple's margin on macOS and iOS? How are you attributing the sales price hardware to macOS/iOS, hardware, apps, tools and services, iWork, Photos, iMovie?
> I dunno. How much does it make selling an OS at the price of two video games, while supporting it with updates for 10 years and paying devs US salaries to work on it for those 10 years?
An absolute metric boatload.
> Keep in mind that Windows 95 retail box would cost consumers $209($409 in today's money), and you imagine that Microsoft is now making a huge profit on selling Windows to consumers today at 25% the original price with the much higher complexity and development costs of today's software?
Yes, that's how economies of scale work.
Windows 95 seems to have sold 40M copies total [1] whereas they sold about a billion copies of Windows 10 by 2019. [2]
[1] https://techland.time.com/2013/05/07/a-brief-history-of-wind...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/24/20881418/microsoft-device...
Moreover, I believe Microsoft no longer charges for consumer Windows upgrades because they save more money by supporting fewer distinct versions of Windows (with security patches and compatibility with other Microsoft products sold to consumers like Office and games) than they previously made on consumer version upgrades.
Finally, the overwhelming majority of consumer Windows license sales are to OEMs bundling Windows with new PCs, and these licenses offload the burden of frontline technical support on the PC vendor.
Taking all these things into account, it would actually surprise me to learn that Microsoft loses money on consumer Windows.
As for "serious DRM", are you certain this would actually increase Windows sales enough to offset lost revenue (Office, Game Pass, search advertising, etc.) from consumers who would otherwise be running pirated Windows?
So what to make of the 99¢ codec charge? My guess is lawyers: one could make a reasonable argument that there is no material difference between bundling HEVC with Windows and making it available as a free download for all Windows users.
Are we talking OS only or everything else?…because there are two different answers for those.
The "crippling" of GPS lookup times and accuracy in cell phones. This was network assisted GPS locations, and each hit to the assistance server cost the carrier money (just the way it was licensed from the vendor IIRC). But RIM added a free maps app that would allow users to look up against the assistance server without having GPS in their plan (when it was a separate option).
The funny part was, when I applied the change, the tests didn't seem to work, and rolled it back within an hour or two. This was overnight, so when everyone woke up, they started testing their GPS and decided they'd been blocked and made a giant stink on internet forums, and the entire project was cancelled and never re-attempted.
You already have to purchase a Windows license
They are a trillion dollar company
Apple supports it out of the box
No, they don't. Apple just rides the hardware licenses, like almost all Windows machines do.