By comparison, OS X 10.1 was the latest version of OS X available at XP RTM. OS X 10.2 would've set you back $129, 10.4 another $129, 10.6 another $30, and 10.7 another $30. (I don't believe that you can skip OS X release-level updates, but I'm not a Mac user, so I don't know; if you can, feel free to correct me.) Even if you magically bought a computer in 2001 which would still run Lion today, you would've spent $310 on OS upgrades, for a period of time for which upgrading Windows cost less than half as much.
yeah, Microsoft's main competitive shortcoming against Apple in desktop strategy is twofold:
- Apple can let OS X be its loss leader, whereas Microsoft doesn't have a thing to let Windows be a loss leader for (the Windows Store, maybe, post-8?)
- breaking backward compatibility hurts Microsoft's sales, since there's no single source of application updates, and since so many Windows licenses are in the enterprise; it doesn't affect Apple's sales (maybe even helps them) because it sells shiny new Macs for shiny new features and because Apple doesn't live or die on OS X revenue.
its saving grace is that retail sales of Windows licenses are probably dominated by people refreshing their computers.
You can skip OS X release-level updates (they mostly aren't updates, just full installs), so it doesn't make sense to compare a leap from XP to 7 against upgrading a Mac to every release along the way.
hm, OK. in that case, I'll give Apple the benefit of the doubt and say that if 10.1 and 10.7 could possibly run on the same computer (since 10.1 was PPC-only, and 10.6 and 10.7 are x86-only), they'd let you upgrade directly for $30. thanks for the clarification. :)
(though, I'd still argue, an extra $70 per decade is not exactly breaking the bank.)
I don't know about the overall upgrade pricing for OSX, but if you wanted to go from 10.4 to 10.6, they required you to buy the full suite with iLife and all for $129 or whatever it was. $30 upgrades are only supported if you upgrade every time.
By comparison, OS X 10.1 was the latest version of OS X available at XP RTM. OS X 10.2 would've set you back $129, 10.4 another $129, 10.6 another $30, and 10.7 another $30. (I don't believe that you can skip OS X release-level updates, but I'm not a Mac user, so I don't know; if you can, feel free to correct me.) Even if you magically bought a computer in 2001 which would still run Lion today, you would've spent $310 on OS upgrades, for a period of time for which upgrading Windows cost less than half as much.