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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?"
Definitely a very smart move by Amazon - they're bound to get a lot of Mac users' repeat business. Wonder if any other online retailers will follow suit?
The rest of us will have to pay full price :-(
If you use the current Amazon $5-off coupon, the net price comes down to $74. The promotion code is CHNKBKAMZNLT.
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.
Wndows NT came out how many years ago? And how much have they charged for their point releases (AKA Service Packs)? Windows 2000 has been out for 2 years now, and I haven't had to pay for any of those service packs, either.
Charging for point releases is an insult to your customer base. Charging $130 for a point release is rubbing salt in the wound.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
why is it such a big deal to have to pay for an upgrade to your software.
no one gets all up in arms when microsoft charges for the next version of windows, why this? is it because, unlike microsoft, they didn't change the revision number enough, but chose to call it 10.2 instead of 11 (as ms probably would have called it).
it's a brand new version of the os with thousands of programmer hours put into it, yeah, it's not open source or free or anything, but give me a unix with a useable graphical interface that i don't have to mess around with to get it to display fonts correctly or recomplile my kernel or the windowing system to support my graphics card and i'll gladly pay for it too.
and yes, i use a mac. and yes i'm going to buy it.
You're trolling, but I'll bite anyway. I bought MacOS X as soon as it was available. I got the 10.1 upgrade for free by going to the (reasonably) local Apple Store. 10.0.x was truly a poor performer, particularly in the GUI. The 10.1 release has been fast and stable for me, but in reality wasn't much more than tightening up the code and adding some device support.
10.2, on the other hand, is a pretty big change. The networking feature additions, graphics acceleration in the GUI, useful changes to included apps like Sherlock and iTunes and so on make this more of an upgrade than a bugfix. I don't have a problem with Apple charging for it, and I will buy it. I am going to wait a bit, though, and see if they give a large discount to upgraders, because I suspect that they will do so, and I'd rather not pay $129 for the OS, when I'm functional on the one I have now.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
MS has been charging for point releases for ages, they just hide it better:
Windows 95 - Windows 4.0
Windows 98 - Windows 4.1
Windows ME - Windows 4.9
Windows 2000 - NT 5.0
Windows XP - NT 5.1
OS 10.0 to 10.1 to 10.2 is no different. And 10.0 to 10.1 was free if you had a local store with the update discs, otherwise it was shipping costs from Apple.
Mac OS 10.1 is still on sale from Amazon.com for $129.00. Shouldn't Apple have asked retailers to lower this to $109.00 or something? This way if I buy OS X today, I can upgrade to 10.2 for the same price as never buying 10.1. I don't see why they wouldn't want to do this. This way, they keep selling 10.1 until 10.2 is available. If I wanted OS X today - and I was still running 9 - I would be foolish to buy 10.1 because 10.2 would end up costing me $129 + $19!
Apple could continue to sell 10.1 and offer people their upgrade incentive without making it cost more money to make the change in 4 weeks.
It could help to reduce the OS X.1 stock, IMHO.
How is Amazon sellign software at a loss going to "send a message" to Apple?
As if somehow Jaguar is "supposed" to be $79 and Amazon is "just showing Apple!"
The fact is Jaguar is worth the upgrade price. Apple has charged for its software for half a decade now and charging for Jaguar is to be expected-- and STILL a good deal.
I've been running the 6C106 developers release and this has to be one of the biggests upgrades in apple history in terms of big and little things that are different. I'm not goign to violate my NDA, but I will say that Jaguar is worth paying for.
that the company that invented the concept of "We don't see a need to ever turn a profit" is using it as a loss leader means nothing-- just that they want more people aware of the fact that they sell Apple computers.... and that they realize (even if most people don't) that these "rebates" are more often than not never redeemed. Either because they are too hard, or people are lazy or both.
I can guarantee you that Amazon is not getting jaguar for less than $100. They are taking a loss to get your business, and knoing that they won't really have to take the loss because most of you will eat the $50, leaving their average selling price around $100.
This has nothing to do with Apple. The only thing this issue brings up is that Apple users are apparently rather cheap, just as Linux users are. Or at least the people who whine online are cheap. So it goes.
IF you don't want to upgrade, then don't. Wait a year and Jaguar will be on sale for $10. If you do upgrade you'll find the value is there in the product and it was worth it. But its a free country and its your choice. Just don't expect something for nothing-- that is not a right you have.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
You don't have to pay $129 every six months. Apple has NEVER in its history charged for an OS upgrade inside of a year.
10.1 was FREE.
And the Apple software update is FREE. giving regular updates for the OS and many of your applications.
If the fact that you have to buy it is stopping you from using OS X, that just means you're cheap-- if your time is worht anything, you'll make that $100 back inside of 3 months by switching.
(I love linux, believe in it, have gotten paid developing java applications for it, but when it comes to home, I never boot the linux box and have been migrating OS 10 to all the machines. Even the 9500 which is so old its not supported. Linux just takes too much maintenance and hassle cost to manage-- I'd rather spend that time tinkering with code.)
Your bash against apple is annoying-- NeXT shipped NeXT step the late 80s-- if there was a beta it was arround then. None of the shipping OS X versions have been beta quality-- and Apple has given dozens of free updates since 10.0 came out.
That they are charging for a new release is to be expected. That Linux zeolots will whine about paying for software is to be expected as well.
That they never answer the question "If you don't want to pay, why do you expect to get paid when you go to work? Shouldn't your boss be saying "I'm paying you again for another two weeks? You spent most of the last two weeks reading slashdot!""
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
I feel your pain. I think its a tactical error to charge the same price to people who bought 10 and people who never did.
The problem is, I don't think there's a practical way for Apple to give a discount to people who bought 10 already.
Because Apple doesn't go thru the license torture that windows boxes do, 10 can be installed on a wiped hard drive, etc. (Imagine trying to reinstall from the Upgrade CD and it refusing because your drive is corrupted and it can't find a previous version.)
Also, I don't think the cupons really work for this large of an upgrade.
Personally, I think they should have priced it at $99 and made it an annual thing-- every year you pay $99. Then it would have been more popular and the price would have been a side issue.
That and the fact that most people don't really realize what tehy are getting with 10.2-- quartz extreme alone is enough to pay the price.
There is a program where you can just pay something like $200 and get the next three years of software upgrades for free. They might do a better job of promoting that as well.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Charging for point releases is an insult to your customer base. Charging $130 for a point release is rubbing salt in the wound.
I see. Your problem is with the name. Apple should have called it Mac OS XP and then it would have been ok.
To think that XP isn't a "point release" is just silly.
You're making an argument based on naming, not the value of the product. Silly.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23