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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

It's great to see Apple really sticking it to MS. Apple has no need to make money off their OS upgrades since the cost of the OS is already built into the hardware, but for MS, Windows is over 25% of their total revenue.

Plus this is great news for web developers. Hopefully this means that IE6-8 will be going away much faster than was previously anticipated.

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Why is it great? Apple is worse than MS in so many other ways. In a few years you are going to see Apple being the person that everyone hates. Now, people seem to like it.

Because Apple's cost cutting has increased competition. Increased competition is usually better for consumers.

While I agree that increased competition is better for consumers, Apple hasn't cut costs for the consumers -- they've merely absorbed the cost of the OS into their hardware.

If the average price of hardware hasn't gone up, which it hasn't, then they have cut costs for consumers.

Regardless of where they handle the accounting on their end, cost of ownership has gone down.

Eh? Next you'll be telling us W8 is going to be the nail in the coffin of Appple?

There's NO question that the W8 upgrade pricing is a DIRECT result of Apple's usual $40 upgrade pricing.

BTW: Lets see how easy it is to update WXP to W8 - a single click in the Microsoft Store?

How is it a "DIRECT result of Apple's usual $40 upgrade pricing" if the two OSes don't even run on the same hardware? A user won't be purchasing a Mac because his OS upgrade cost is $60 more (or however much Windows upgrades originally cost).

Microsoft knows that people will have little incentive to migrate from Win7 to Win8, so they are doing all they can to encourage that. This is not a response to Apple's pricing structure.

>if the two OSes don't even run on the same hardware

Macs are some of the best windows laptops out there. Tons of places buy MBPs then install windows.

When Windows 7 launched, early adopters could upgrade for $50. I doubt Apple had little to do with it. Microsoft always has a huge incentive (regardless of competition) to move consumers to their new OS.

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