There is also the fact that a point upgrade in OSX is almost never as significant as a new Microsoft OS, that MS provides free service packs, and that (IIRC) apple allows upgrades to multiple macs with one purchase. So, really, they need to be assessed on their own merit.
Since the first OSX, all upgrades were point upgrades and all of them were very significant. They were also more frequent than Windows upgrades.
Re:Windows 8 Pro Upgrade to cost $39.99
by Mythbusters on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @02:37AM
(#4192838)
You put point upgrades and significant in the same sentence. Just saying...
The upgrade between Snow Leopard and Lion was a point upgrade. Every OSX release is a 10.x release.
Re:Windows 8 Pro Upgrade to cost $39.99
by Useful_Idiot on Monday July 02, 2012 @05:26PM
(#4191106)
I assumed it was common knowledge that Sony offered the PS3 at a huge discount retail <-> production costs to make Blu-Ray the industry standard (which did indeed succeed). e.g. Samsung Blu-Ray retailed @ $1000, PS3 retailed at $599.
e.g. http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2006/11/isupply_ps3_com/ ~ costs the PS3 components at $850 vrs the $599 retail price.
As for this topic: I don't think it's aimed at consumers, at all. Many companies still use XP as their back-bone, let alone 7. It's aimed at the software producers, akin to why some games companies are developing purely in DX11 now to reduce costs having to support DX9 ~ MS are making a switch to producing content for W8 as 'attractive' as possible.
The old options was buy a lower priced computer with Windows but pay more for the OS/upgrades or buy a very expensive Apple computer but $40.00 for an OS upgrade.