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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

macOS being free is sleight of hand. The cost is just baked into the margin on their hardware. Maybe if you could run macOS on hardware of your choice (i.e. "hackintosh") it would be an apples-to-apples comparison.

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GNU/Linux is Free as in Freedom, Windows is free as in free beer, MacOS is free as in free airplane pretzels.

Except that Windows and macOS aren't $0 free, they just get included with hardware so people don't see the cost.

This comparison has never made sense to me. If I get a free beer, I can do whatever I want with it. Drink it, dump it, whatever. Same thing with pretzels. Am I missing something?

Yes

To get free _airplane_ pretzels you need to first be on an airplane, which means you need to buy an airplane ticket, which costs hundreds.

Similar with free beer. You need to do _something_ to get the free beer. It will probably cost less than the airline ticket, but it will still cost.

> The cost is just baked into the margin on their hardware.

Oh no! Wait, why is this somehow a concern? You buy a Mac and get an OS with years worth of free updates to that OS and additional years of security updates to the OS. Where's the problem?

There's no problem. It's just the same model as Microsoft with the only difference that Microsoft works with an ecosystem of hardware manufacturers vs. being the sole one.

If I buy a laptop from Dell the cost of Windows is also baked into their margin. And you equally get years worth of free updates. The point is that "MacOS is free, Windows costs money" is a bad comparison both from the end-user PoV and the actual economics of what's happening.

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