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Amazon Offers Discounted Mac OS X 10.2
WCityMike writes "Apple's decision to offer no upgrade fee to existing Mac OS X users caused a great deal of unrest amidst Macintosh users, but Amazon may have made the argument a bit moot by offering a $50 mail-in rebate, thus bringing the price down to $79 for all users. Check out their listing for 10.2, or the mail-in rebate form. I wonder if, when Apple notices all its orders are coming in through Amazon, they'll get the point?"
Not only do you have to feed your personal info to Amazon by placing the order, but to get your rebate, you need to feed rebate.com as well.
Even if you use a throwaway email address and a 555-1212 phone number, that'll still probably mean more junk snailmail coming to my house.
An aside: I was at Sam's Club the other day and was told that I had to get an updated membership card. When the girl was doublechecking my info, she asked, "I have '555-1212' as your current phone number. Is that right?" I said yes and she just continued on. I'm debating on whether she knew what the number was or not.
OS X 10.0 came out about 17 months ago. $130 every 18 months doesn't seem too unreasonable.
>>why is it such a big deal to have to pay for an upgrade to your software
Its not a big deal to pay for an upgrade, the big deal is paying the same price as someone buying it new. With every other new software product, there is an upgrade fee and a new user fee (see any Adobe product). Apple said "Fuck You, pay the same as the lame-o who is still using OS 8" to the people who already bought OS X or had it installed when they bought their hardware.
I forget...are we at war with Eurasia or East Asia?
Interesting.
It's also worth noting the Microsoft Operating Systems rate #5, #8, #9, and #17.
If you're interested, here's the breakdown:
5. Microsoft Office XP Standard for Students and Teachers
8. Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition Upgrade
9. Microsoft Windows XP Professional Upgrade
17. Microsoft Office XP Professional Upgrade
It's too bad they don't release actual numbers. I wonder if Jaguar beats all of those combined?
- Vincit qui patitur.
Not particularly familiar with the Windows timeline, are we?
Windows 95 had at least 4 point releases, refered to as A, B, C, D, with the last one including FAT32 support IIRC. The upgrades were free, but they weren't easy to find.
Windows 98/98SE, well, I guess I can't really argue with you there. However, Microsoft caught just as much flak for that as Apple is catching now. However, the changes from 95 were significant enough for it to be more than a point release.
Windows ME, again, had significant enough changes for it to be more than a point release (that they were completely misguided is beside the point).
As for the NT timeline, we have (off the top of my head, and using Service Packs as point releases):
Windows NT4.0 - 4.6: all service packs free AFAIK
Windows 2000 aka NT5.0 - 5.2: all service packs free
Windows XP I can't really comment on, as I haven't used it. However, calling it NT5.1 seems a bit absurd to me.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.