Be Excellent To Each Other

Just ordered my copy. £25 quid is rather a bargain for an OS upgrade especially considering Apple don't bother with all that serial number and activation nonsense so you can (install the OS on just one computer - Ed).

Microsoft, are you taking note of how you get people to upgrade to your new OS?

Mine's only £8. I bought my Mac on June 10th, two days inside the cutoff window for the Up To Date scheme.

Touche Microsoft

isn't the win 7 upgrade free on machines bought after June?

Apple being even more reasonable for new owners shocker. The kind of pricing they are offering ensures there isn't an excuse not to upgrade. Imagine the Vista take-up if it had been that price?

When I got my Acer laptop just before Visa came out, it was nearly 30 quid for the Vista upgrade which I had to jump through hoops for. They then cashed the first cheque, denied all knowledge so I had to send another cheque and it cost another 30 quid. The entire experience was appalling.

In the interests of fairness though:

• I did the free-ish upgrade from XP to Vista on the Toshiba laptop I was rocking at the time. I bought it a few months before Vista came out, the upgrade cost me about £15, and it shipped in good time. Chinny, your hassles would lie with Acer, not Microsoft. As Kovacs says, there is a broadly similar scheme in place for Vista->7; it's more complex though because you have to go through the OEM who made your computer.
• Snow Leopard (10.6) is the OS X release with the smallest set of changes yet. It's considerably smaller than XP->Vista (he vaguely asserts with handwaving evidence), although it's considerably bigger than a Windows Service Pack. Hence it's only £25 to people who have Leopard (10.5). Tiger (10.4) users are paying £130 for a full new licence if they want to upgrade.
• This is the first time Apple have had the £25 price point.
• The utter lack of any security around OS X is very interesting.

Trivia: I've run OS X 10.1, .2, .3, .5, and soon .6; this £8 is the first money I've paid towards them.

I'm not spending 2 grand on a laptop.

You'd struggle to spend £2k on a Mac laptop. You'd have to spec the monstrous 17" one and then start adding stupid amounts of RAM or solid state hard drives.

Can it play games now?

A ZX81 was more advanced than a Mac in that respect.

I'm hoping its a straight over the top install and stuff like Parallels and Bootcamp will be dandy.

I've already got the new Final Cut Studio upgrade but won't put that on until the new OS is on both boxes.

Yes. If you install Windows on it.

And that certainly doesn't compare favourable with the £47 pre-orders for Windows 7.

How big are these OSX releases? They list them as a point release, but charge for them like full OSs.

Yes. Yes it can. Here's the new Tour De France game that I just happened to be playing:

But Tiger is a few years old now. Those people really should have jumped to Leopard so I'm not that bothered if they get stung.

And the Windows 7 thing is only because of the Vista fiasco and is a limited time offer.

No, but then that was an unusual move for Microsoft. And the Apple £130 bundles in copies of iLife and iWork, which is either better value or pointless frippery.

Despite the numbering they are bigger than what I would regard as a point release, by and large. Although it's a pretty vague concept and I'm not sure how to answer it properly or prove/disprove my stance.

Here's a (fucked formatting) list of what was added in 10.5, for example.

Hmm - I'd probably call that an SP/R2 release in the MS world. But then that analogy doesn't really apply when you're doing persistant SP-type releases anually or so.

I dunno. Charging for that level of content on an annual basis, and then applying punitive pricing to those that don't keep current seems a bit cunty to me, more than anything else. Then again, you could pay for quite a few of those releases for the same price as a Windows upgrade.

My final decision - much of a muchness.

The thing is, up to know, Apple have attached zero security to OS upgrades. You can borrow a disc or warez it without any need for security keys

Do Mac owners still enjoy sniffing their own farts? Gaywood?

That's a reasonable enough approach in a community that has a very, very strong brand loyalty factor. If Microsoft did the same, they'd have trouble. Not that it's hard to warez an MS OS even with the security, mind.

Mac owners farts smell of Cider

Isn't that the essential difference though. Apple make hardware first - the integration of the company made OS's perpetuate the client loyalty

Perhaps. Most certainly, the amount of switching from MacOSX to Windows has to be near as damnit nil, and any that did switch would be doing it because of the availability of 3rd party software, not for anything specific to the OS itself.

Yes. A pirated copy of OS X isn't a lost sale to Apple, because as you say, they mostly sell hardware. The equivalent act to pirating a copy of Windows in the Mac world is taking running a hackint0sh.

I think the OS licence fees are essentially a tip jar from the loyal fanbase.

It all starts with a tip jar, then becomes a subscription model and ends up with Steve Jobs offering to meet us on an island at a run down seaside resort but then canceling at the last moment because it's a bit grey outside.

*Boots into Vista and pisses on your chips*

*Switches back into OSX, adjusts black polo neck*

Whatever, Richard.

The flip-side of Snow Leopard's vaunted cheapness is that it requires more memory which, despite the price of RAM, is still going to make upgrading a bit of a pain for owners of lil' old Minis like me (ie let's factor in the cost of having memory 'properly' fitted at the Apple Store). Add to that the things in Leopard that don't actually work (to the extent that you sometimes wonder if there's any code behind the pretty UI or if they just forgot) and £25 starts to look a bit cheeky for a patch that requires a hardware upgrade.

There's always the chance I'll be pleasantly surprised, of course, but I'm not expecting to feel like I got a bargain when I inevitably shell out for Snow Leopard.

a hardware upgrade you say... wow that sounds like what MS made you do with Vista..

Except that by (free) Service Pack 2 XP didn't seem like it needed fixing, hence I've stuck with it. On a similar tangent, Win7 looks nice but personally I'd be happier if MS and Apple would compete on footprint where their OSs are concerned -- were Win7 more elegant and performant than XP on minimal hardware then I would be far more likely to stick my hand in my wallet. As it is I guess I'll get it when I get it (ie whenever I buy a new PC).

Ooh, will I get this too then? Late July for me.

Yes -- http://www.apple.com/uk/macosx/uptodate/

Windows 7 is reportedly far better at running on lower-spec hardware (and obviously higher-spec too) by quite some margin compared to Windows XP and Vista.

Better than Vista, certainly. I'd be surprised if it was better behaved than XP.

I shall buy this.

It'll force me to buy a new drive to back it up before installing, which is a good thing. I could use an excuse to put some more Ram in the thing too, it crawls a bit when parallels is running.

"The Finder has been completely rewritten" - bet it's still shit though.

"With Snow Leopard and a compatible AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule base station, however, your computer can go to sleep yet continue to share its files with other computers and devices, waking when you need it and sleeping when you don’t." - nifty.

Is your objection to the functionality, the UI, or the reliability? The rewrite looks identical, so if it's the former two, you're going to be just as unhappy.

This is nifty.

I'll be getting this. First OS update I've paid for I think. Oh, apart from buying the iPod Touch 3.0 update.

Hasn't Media Cent[re|er] been doing that for years?

You're such a whore, Z.

I'm a cheap bastard when it comes to software, but I don't mind spunking wads on hardware.

Yes.

I wish GPSoftware did a version of Directory Opus for Mac OS X.

You possibly might want to consider the new version as its apparently better.

The £47 offer expired a while ago, but you can still order Home Premium for a discounted £75 I think. Clearly they're really desperate to be able to say "fastest selling Windows ever".

You mean version 4? I haz it. I think it does pretty well considering the spec of the machine (1.83GHz Core Duo - NOT Core 2 Duo) with 2 gigs of ram, but if you try to start something like neo office on the mac at the same time, you need to go and make a cup of tea.

Stupid Apple Store isn't recognising my serial number.

Hmm. I did register it, right..?

I'll stick with Tiger until such time as OS X 10.7 'Ocelot' (really) comes out. And I hope Ocelot is as long-lived as Tiger was because 'Ocelot' is an excellently ridiculous name and you get to tell people your Macbook runs Ocelot and that you're having trouble running program x under Ocelot etc etc etc. Yes.

Serial number? I didn't get asked for any serial number.

Generally available at £65 I think (PC World at least). I'd like to discover whether I can buy W7 OS in the US and use it here (can't think why not) as it is released when we're over there.

You should be able to use it here..