The iBook shipped in only one model, with 128MB of RAM. The PowerBook G4 started at 128MB of RAM and topped out at 256MB of RAM. The Power Mac G4 started at 128MB of RAM and topped out at 512MB of RAM.
The smallest amount of memory you can get on a Mac nowadays is 2GB, and you would've had to buy an entirely new computer at least once to get Lion running in the intervening time.
(Whereas, if you didn't buy a new computer since Windows XP came out, you could run the 32-bit version just fine with 1GB of RAM.)
Methinks you doth protest too much about expensive upgrades.
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.
But then again, Apple has the benefit of being in control of the hardware, which makes up the lion's (haha) share of their revenue.
- 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.
(though, I'd still argue, an extra $70 per decade is not exactly breaking the bank.)
I use nearly 20 programs on a regular basis, and another 20 I use occasionally and would like the be able to find without digging through the Program Files menu, and I don't want to clutter the task bar with all of them. The way I have it set up in six folders on the top of the Start Menu (NOT inside "Programs", but above Programs), I can pull any of them up with a Ctrl-Esc and few hits of the arrow keys.
The text search feature works great when you can remember the name of the app you're looking for. My brain doesn't always work that way, though. Since I have the various apps sorted by category, I don't have to look through more than about 6 at a time to find the one I need.
I'm actually using a "Classic Windows Start Menu" app that replaces the new Windows 7 Start Menu with one that behaves the way I've come to depend on.
Until I found the Classic Start Menu app, I was getting stuck on the search line a lot, trying to remember what some tool was called. No fun.
Doesn't work for me, since I can't get to it from the keyboard. If there's a keyboard shortcut to open it, then I never found it.
I launch programs and find files like this every day. I find it one of the most useful features of 7 vs earlier versions (though I skipped Vista so maybe it was there too).
There are a number of ways in which XP is objectively less secure than successor versions of Windows.
Multiple user logins is a big part of it. All editions of Windows 7 above Starter let an additional user log in when the machine is locked without disrupting the locked session. It's an expected usage pattern that a family of 4 to 6 users will often be all logged in at the same time.
The windowing environment for each user takes on the order of 50 to 100 MB, plus figure 200 - 400 MB for the programs each user is likely to run, and you can get to 2 GB pretty quick.
(I suspect that might be what's happening when the wife and kids swap between 3 or 4 sessions on one of the Ubuntu machines at home -- but Linux isn't dumping actual running programs out to swap as fast as possible to make room for the 500 MB Word doc you might open, either)
It's not entirely difficult to shoehorn Windows 7 onto such systems either, I suspect it's sort of designed that way, to ensure that the only people who do it are the people who know what they're doing and won't be disappointed by the results.
The developers were probably happy to see it go after working on it for 10 years, too.
I would also use the auto-complete to find things as a second (distant) use case.
One thing that always annoyed me about the Start Menu was how companies would use it. For example, shortcuts notwithstanding I would have to go:
Start > Programs > Firaxis > Civilization IV > Civilization IV Beyond the Sword
The part that really annoyed me was putting the company name in there. I don't care. In fact it may not even be obvious who the company is that makes something you want to use.
I actually bought a copy of Windows 7 retail version for the explicit purpose of using it from computer to computer for years to come, probably in XP-like time frames (ie 5-10 years).
Microsoft needs to realize that these infrequent expensive upgrades (largely for features nobody cares about) are a decade out of date.
Honestly, there's still nothing wrong with XP. Microsoft just went out of their way to kill it by deliberately not supporting it with things they definitely could've. One of the great things about XP was the low resource requirements (minimum 128M of RAM). IIRC 64-bit Windows 7 is at 2GB minimum now. For what exactly?