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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

TechCrunch is overstating their case a little, here. Certainly, that screenshot shows "PrereleaseARMEdition","EnterpriseEvalEdition", and so on. Obviously these aren't relevant.

The different flavours of Windows are disliked by consumers, and liked by corporate customers. The answer is clear: just have one 'consumer' edition and stop selling both Home and Home Premium. The rest- Professional, Ultimate, Enterprise, etc. are all fine.

Pet gripe: I wish people would stop saying that OS X costs $29.99 and that Windows costs considerably more. They both operate on considerably different models- OS X is released once per year, Windows much less frequently (and with service packs).

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OSX isn't released once a year. With the exception of the just-announced Mountain Lion, it has received major updates every two years since 2003. It also gets "service packs" in the form of point releases every couple of months.

$29.99 still seems like a great deal to me.

OS X doesn't cost $29.99. It costs $29.99 plus the cost of Apple hardware (the cheapest of which is the $600 Mini). Unless you go the Hackintosh route, you can't install OS X on non-Apple hardware.

Whereas you can install your $100 Windows license on your choice of hardware devices that support it.

You could just say "Windows runs on a wide variety of hardware, OSX does not" to more simply get your point across.

edit:

Okay, the point being made is "Apple hardware is not cheap, and you need Apple hardware to properly run OS X".

It's made in a very hand-wavy way, though, which I find a bit annoying.

That's not the same point.

Edit: At least the poster now acknowledges this. Anonymous downvotes? And people claim we're not edging closer to Reddit more and more each day.

> Anonymous downvotes?

All votes on HN are anonymous, whether they're upvotes or downvotes. Showing who voted which way on what just isn't one of the features of the site, and that's a good thing.

I wouldn't worry about random down votes, they happen all the time and are eventually balanced out by a level head with a click to spare.

> The answer is clear: just have one 'consumer' edition and stop selling both Home and Home Premium. The rest- Professional, Ultimate, Enterprise, etc. are all fine.

If you think Microsoft has all those editions just-for-the hell-of-it, now you're overstating your case a little.

I'd assume they've done their homework and found that 6+ editions bring in more revenue than 1-3 editions long before I'd assume my own unfounded theories on the subject.

What's clear here is that consumers are willing to pay Microsoft more money when there are 6 versions to pick from.

It's kind of annoying that I had to pay $30 for OSX 10.5 SP2.

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