Incidentally, the total upgrade price from Windows XP to Windows 7 Home Premium is $109 at Amazon right now, and to Windows 7 Ultimate it's $171.(http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...)

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.

The point is that Apple has made the switch to lower cost OS upgrades while Microsoft has not.

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.

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.

Microsoft provides free updates in the form of service packs rather than calling it a new version.

That's a charitable interpretation of their inability to ship for most of the 00s.

Service packs have been there before and even after 00s.

OS X has free sub-point releases. What's your point?

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.

Although not officially supported - it works - I upgraded straight from 10.4 - 10.6 last month.

This is only true if you want to have iLife. I personally don't use iLife, didn't when I was on 10.4, and upgraded to 10.6 from 10.4 for $30.