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Is Microsoft's Price Model For the Surface Justifiable?
colinneagle writes "A blog post contending that Microsoft's decision to match Apple's iPad pricing on its Surface tablet will hurt its chances in the market has brought out some negative comments from readers who seem to like the Surface tablet. I was kind of surprised by this, as I and other bloggers seem to agree that making the fully keyboard-equipped Surface tablet roughly $120 more expensive than the iPad kind of negates the purpose — to build steam by appealing to those in the market for a cheaper tablet. Also, I've yet to see an argument that justifies pricing the Surface competitively with the iPad, so I figured I would bring the question to Slashdot: Is Microsoft's pricing for the Surface tablet justified?"
Are you seriously comparing a brand new OS to a relatively minor update? Why don't you compare the OSX upgrade to a service pack from Microsoft? The extent of the updates are comparable, but in Microsoft's case it's free. And Apple has charged a good deal more for upgrades in the past, most of which I'd also consider minimal.
Frankly I'm surprised MS is only charging $70.
Are you serious? A service pack is a bundling up of driver updates and patches. The equivalent of the service pack in OS X would be the 10.x.x packages which are free. The "version" stays at 10.x with each release because each release retains a high level of binary and code compatibility and for marketing purposes. In some cases, third party drivers (ktext) have to be recompiled in order to work while in others some rewriting has to happen. The kernel increased by a full version number with each 10.x release and new APIs were also added with each release.
When was the last time the Win32 API was updated? Certainly not with service packs. BTW. The .NET framework does not really count since you can download that separately and the API that is hooks into has not really changed much since Windows XP.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Oh, she was bobbing alright.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure