Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Originally posted by: drag
In fact 100 or so dollars for a upgrade for OS X is BS. It should be free.
Do you say the same thing about 2k from NT? What about XP from 2k? Each version of OS X has been significantly changed since the last. The "next version should be free" BS is just linux mind rot.
Damn this thread took a turn for the worse.
Haha, ya right.
It's not mind-rot. For instance I don't mind paying for linux stuff. I like the open source and all that over OS X's propriatory-ness anyday but that's besides the point.
And it's not like a upgrade from Win2k to WinXP or whatever, OS X is in a different sort of economic situation.
My reasoning behind OS X being a free upgrade is purely marketing.
You see each upgrade makes OS X better, and faster. The new hardware is often nessiciary to take advantage of the new and special features that each upgrade in OS X offers. Buy having these new features present, but not being able to take full advantage of them would increase the desire to have a faster Apple.
Also unlike Microsoft Apple makes it's money from hardware sales. Not from sales of the OS X, I think that the amount of money that is nessicary for upgrade doesn't come anywere close to the cost of developement, so why force people to waste money on it when it doesn't realy benifit you a whole lot?
Everything that Apple does it should be aimed toward making Apple people want to buy faster apples. Free software from Apple makes people get warm fuzzies about Apple, by costing less to keep up-to-date it would promote the viewpoint that owning a Apple, even though it is a big initial investment, is cheaper over the long term. It'll make people think they can afford to upgrade on quicker time tables.
It also makes owning a Apple more desirable then owning a Wintel. For Windows you have all these new features for WinXP, but you own win2k. It'll cost you to upgrade. If you own a Apple you get the latest features when they are aviable.
People will think: Apple is my freind, they want me to get the most out of Apple computers as possible and they care about their customers, were as Windows folks suffer thru vunerabilities and it costs them money to fix things.
Right now for Apple the impression people get is that Bug fixes that happen from OS to OS upgrade cost money. If you don't pay for it you get less security.
Also people who upgrade quickly, not only have to pay for the pleasure, but also end up being beta testers to a certain extent and bad things happen. This is a semi-serious error on Apple's fault and it pisses people off and makes upgrading not desirable.
Buy giving upgrades free to previous customers they will be able to upgrade quickly and you'll be able to say stuff like "this is a stable pre-release" you can upgrade quickly for free, but a couple of bugs may be present.
That way instead of insulting their customers by making them pay for a untested release (perception is everything in cases like this) they reward their customers by giving them advanced features if they are willing to risk it.
So (in conclusion) buy giving the upgrades away for free they may lose out a limited form of revenue (after all you're still using 10.1, right? No profit there for them) but in return they make buying a Apple much more desirable and thus increase it's marketability, and increase the sales of new computers. (not to mention make keeping OS X secure easier and cheaper, and make developing new applications cheaper for 3rd parties.)
Now I may be wrong, but it's not from being a Linux-fanboy.
hrmph.
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