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Microsoft May Have Price Increases in Store For Windows 10 Pro Workstation, Win 10 Downgrade Customers (zdnet.com)
Mary Jo Foley, reporting for ZDNet: Microsoft soon will be adding a new edition of Windows 10 to its lineup. That edition, Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, may include more than just a new name and feature set. It also may come with a change to the way Microsoft licenses and prices Windows 10 for its PC maker partners -- who potentially could pass on these changes to end-user customers. I've heard from a couple of customers recently who've been contacted by different OEMs about the coming changes. One said that Microsoft will begin licensing the Windows 10 Desktop operating system by processor family, and all PCs sold with Intel Xeon workstation processors will be affected by this change. One customer said he was told there could be a price increase of roughly $70 per operating system for use on systems with processors with four or fewer cores. For machines with Xeon processors with more than four cores, there could be a price increase of roughly $230 per operating system, I was told. Windows 10 Pro for Workstations is going to be available around the time Windows 10 Fall Creators Update starts rolling out, which is October 17.
we've got multiple administrations around the world that are either too weak to enforce anti-trust or simply don't believe in it. Now's the time to put the screws on.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Paying $0 more, regardless of what Microsoft decides to charge.
Was announced a few months ago. Has a bunch of new features for high end machine. It also increases the number of CPUs from the current 2, and increase memory from 2TB to 6TB.
Windows should be licensed to the PC, license control is too weak. There are too many hardware changes that can be done.
It needs to be licensed to the serial numbers of the DIMMs
it needs to be licensed to the serial number of the mouse and keyboard
It needs to be licensed to the EDID of the monitor
it needs to be licensed to the serial number of the HDD
it needs to be licensed to the serial number of the network card, wireless card
Now of course, for a small fee, users could add extra hardware.
-New network card, $5.00
-New mouse $2.50
-New keyboard $2.50
-New Monitor $5.00
-Dual Monitor $10.00
-New DIMM $2.00/Gb
-New Hard-Drive, $0.05/Gb
People need to learn that they need to pay for software.
Just checking
The intended audience of this seems like a footnote compared to overall users. The major changes, other than the sensionalist title, are support for 4 Processors, support for up to 6TB RAM, ReFS enabled by default, and and Direct SMB support.
We are talking about extremely high machines in what is most likely a fairly niche environment. If that is the case then a $70 surcharge for that OS seems reasonable given the cost of one of those computers.
The rest of us? Likely unaffected.
When I buy computers, I always delete the Windows installation that comes with them. Although I qualify to get reimbursed for the Windows portion of the selling price, I've never bothered -- it just wasn't enough money to be worth the hassle.
This might change that equation!
I guess as a technician, I'll stop recommending xeon and any other processors they decide to increase on. Also, we only buy windows 10 if the customer demands it. Still rock in 7 pro and 8.1 pro pretty successfully. 10 sux big balls.
They just made Macs look a bit less expensive by comparison.
#DeleteFacebook
I'd love to upgrade to a newer Mac, but Apple doesn't seem to care about the low-end Macs anymore. MacBook Air would be my first pick, but it still has a TN display in 2017 and there's no 16GB RAM option. The Mac mini would be my second pick, but you can't even upgrade RAM anymore, which is ridiculous for a desktop machine especially given the prices Apple ask for the RAM upgrades. And there's still no quad-core option.
A updated MacBook Air with an IPS display, 16GB RAM option, a good keyboard, both USB-A and USB-C ports, headphone jack and an SD card reader/writer would be nice, but Apple seems to think the future is already here and is dropping USB-A and headphone jacks from their hardware.
#DeleteFacebook
I wonder, if at the higher price point, you might get some of your privacy back? At least some decent options? I doubt it, but one can hope.
I recently upgraded Win10 Home on my $200 Dell laptop to Win10 Pro for $99. I can't run Dockers for Windows without Hyper-V being enabled and that's only available in Win10 Pro.
free for ever, oh yeah, supply and depend
I had a Mac. Matter of fact, I've had several. From a G5 Power Mac to a 2012 dual 6-core Xeon Mac Pro. But Apple doesn't support Nvidia cards, which I need for my software. While I was able to modify my old Mac Pro to fit one in, the 2013+ units have no ability to install anything but the included, already out-of-date AMD video cards in them. And after waiting a year for GTX-10x0 support to come, I gave up and sold my Mac Pro and built a new rendering monster that does everything I need.
It seems Apple doesn't give a wet fart about power users anymore. But their competition is more than happy to roll around in my money like little piggies.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Now of course, for a small fee, users could add extra hardware.
"Screw all that nickel and diming. I'm trying something GNU."
People need to learn that they need to pay for software.
All too true. Freedom isn't free.
[opens Debian donation form and donates half the price of a Windows 10 license]
You'd think a sane company would be happy to be producing an OS which is still on something like 90% desktop/laptop market share.
https://www.netmarketshare.com...
Of course if you go to somewhere like statcounter you find that mobiles have taken over from desktops/laptops and if you count all devices you find that Windows is basically neck and neck with Android with iOS and MacOS following up a long way behind. I.e. the move from desktops/laptops to phones/tablets has not been good for Microsoft who managed to go from 10% or so market share with Windows Mobile to 0% with Windows Phone.
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-m...
And Metro was an attempt to mix up the popular desktop Windows with the aggressively unpopular Windows Phone. And the end result seems to be that Windows Phone is dead and desktop Windows is dying.
And of course when it comes to servers the world has moved to Linux.
The problem with charging more for high end desktop systems is that they run the risk of simply moving those systems to Mac of Linux, just like Metro and the Start Screen didn't make Windows phone more popular, it made desktop Windows less popular.
Microsoft now are a bit like IBM were after IBM lost control of the PC market. They'll embrace open systems, try to launch new and more proprietary alternatives to the market leader etc. Windows Phone could be considered the Microsoft version of the PS/2 and MCA - i.e. attempt to move people from the cheap, somewhat crappy but multi vendor market leader (PC clones/Android phones) to a system which could only be bought from them.
I.e. a whole host of ways to avoid irrelevance. However I think irrelevance is probably the end result.
And it's a shame really. I like my Macbook, but it was noticeably more expensive than an equivalent machine running Windows. And now Macbooks have become the default in so many environments - education, media. startups and especially app development for Android and iOS - it's become harder to think different as it were when buying a new laptop. I.e. all Microsoft have achieved by running Windows into the ground is that people spend an extra $500 or so on a new laptop because they need a Mac to be able to develop for the two platforms, iOS and Android, where people actually make any money out of apps.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
GNU/Linux is free as long as bootloaders, chipsets, and applications remain compatible. None of those is guaranteed of hardware in U.S. showroom chains.
I didn't know there was a Windows 10 Desktop. Only for tablets/surface type systems (with Mobile disappearing). Oh, yeah, there's that "legacy mode" but even that's still 75% tablet-ified. Maybe that's what they are refering to?
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
I'm having a flashback to my days when we were installing SCO Unix systems. (I know - AIX, etc had the same deal) I had 3 separate file cabinets filled with the SCO license numbers, indexed by client as they added/upgraded CPUs, ran more "users", etc. Certainly MS has made things easier, but...when we finished our transition to Linux we had an Office Space-style bonfire where we burned every fucking license to ashes. Felt so good and so right!
Can you explain why [a surcharge for an extremely high-end workstation is] justified?
High core counts expose bugs and inefficient algorithms that might be expensive to fix, such as process destruction being serialized. Price discrimination based on core count applies the benefit principle to the Windows tax, allowing those affected by a particular defect associated with high core counts to foot the bill for its correction.
not worth a penny
Hell, we should complain about a simple incremental increase? Those bastards at OpenSuse QUADRUPLED the price on my desktop. Every Day! When will it end?
Why is this anti-trust when Apple raising the prices for its machines is not? Raising the price of Windows seems far more honest and upfront than many of the schemes MS have pulled in the past with bundling and the more they raise prices the more people will start to look at alternatives like Linux. If they keep up with the price rises perhaps someday we may eventually see the mythical year of the Linux desktop.
So true. My "daily driver" is a Late-2011 17" MBP (which I got in mid-2012 when it was announced that they would discontinue the 17" screen size). So far I have replaced the trackpad and keyboard (the hardest repair you can do by yourself), and I had to send it out a few months ago to get the GPU replaced (thanks, Nvidia for that crappy chip build, is it any wonder Apple stopped using them?) I also found a used Early-2011 17" so that I could be sure to have at least one that works. And fuck the touch bar, seriously, fuck it.
Here we are five years later, and the MacBook Pro has gone from 2.4GHz i7 with up to 16GB of DDR3 RAM and a 2.5" SATA drive to... 2.8 GHz i7 with soldered 16GB of DDR3 RAM, and soldered SSD! Sure, that i7 is a tad more efficient (Intel has been slacking), and more VRAM, but no USB-A or old-style mini-DP/Thunderbolt connectors, crappier keyboard, a trackpad without a physical clicky button, no ESC key, lame. BUT HEY IT'S SO THIN. And let's not even get into the alleged desktop computer that looks like an overgrown Edison wax cylinder.
I would have been happy with one more generation of non-retina 17". That would have added USB 3.0, swapped the Firewire for a second Thunderbolt, and probably swapped out the ExpressCard (that has proved to be rather useless to me) with an SD card slot.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Get ready for paying more just because you bought a regular CPU with lots of cores/threads too. This announcement appears to only apply to Xeon processors but where will this lead? I have the feeling that all those AMD Threadripper or Intel i9 CPUs with tons of cores (16 or more) will soon cost you a lot more to use Windows than on a plain old Quad-Core CPU.
70$... 250$???!!!! Wow... Wait WHAT? Oh well... Why do I even care? Been a happy full time Linux user, since Feb. 2017. So I will not be bothered with the price on Win10. I have actually only payd for one preinstalled WinXP and one WinVista. Other than that I have never payd for any operating system in my life. Most of the time, I was given the software for free. Got MS-Dos-6.22, Win95, Win98, Win2000, and 7 for free. Even got Win8 and 8.1 for free. Never used the license. 70 and 250 US Dollars.... Are you freaking kidding me?
Offtopic fool.
Just what I wanted!!! To pay MORE for FORCED SPYING!!! Yeeeeeeaaaaaayyyyy!!!!!!!
Today I ordered a 16 core AMD threadripper, and this article made me realize that dual-booting had not even crossed my mind. My unconsciousness must have decided that at this point Windows was too pointless to even think about.
If any line is going to drop USB-A, it makes sense for the Macbook Air. The USB-A port is really fat for such a small frame and you can deal with the dongle. For the larger machines it makes no sense to drop it.
Now if they have the enterprise GPO's but with out the Volume Licensing / software assurance needs then it will be good for small business
windows enterprise users with out the ties to big domains?? Getting the people who run windows server as an desktop/workstation? (in the past had more sockets / ram then desktop os)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
So.. a NEW EDITION of windows with NEW FEATURES is more expensive than the current EDITION? Because that's what it sounds like (Windows 10 Pro for Workstations - an incredibly clumsy name, to to sure.)
BUT, this seems like "BMW announces price increase when comparing existing BOTTOM OF THE LINE CAR against new TOP OF THE LINE CAR"
And if you're buying Xeon-processor class systems, this price is immaterial to you. It's nothing.
As for the downgrade rights? Well, yes, Microsoft are really trying get everyone on to the one operating system. Next up: "Red Hat wants you to Upgrade". No ####. At this point, everyone should be migrated up to current operating systems or have plans to.
Anyway, the sooner Microsoft just announce Windows 10 Rental, the better. I would gladly pay a reasonable fee for ongoing support and upgrades.
mac pro is a joke. Imac pro just as much this is market that the HP-Z is in.
Imac pro at 5K base for 8 cores and only 32GB ram??
Hell just saying for $1200-1500 (with out screen) you can get a good gaming system with ryzen or Coffee Lake.
For about $2000-$4000 you can dual intel e5 systems with a wide range of video card choice and better cooling then imac pro.
Also amd Thread Ripper systems have lot's pci-e IO. So you can have dual 10G + 2 video cards (at full X16 each) + quad pci-e ssd at X4 each and still have pci-e leftover.
The mac pro at 3K base is a joke for it's hardware.
apple real needs a good gamer desktop at $1200-1500 (base I know about $200+ more then a pc) with video card choice at least room for pci-e ssd + hdd.
Apple won't do that. They charge $2,399.00 to $2,799.00 for a 15" Macbook Pro with Radeon Pro 555 with 2GB memory or a 560 with 4GB respectively.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy...
Logically if they wanted to sell a machine with a beefier GPU they need to sell it for more than that. Also it's debatable how many people really want a macOS machine for gaming when they can buy a Windows one for so much less.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
A normal person with your skillset would make double your pay where you live. Because you bother people you are only hired for jobs that by some snafu of bureaucracy end up paying under the effective silicon valley IT minimum wage of 60k which is the lowest pay you can give to an h1b visa worker. Which is exactly what you make 55k/year.
Why not concentrate on the single skill that has held you back more than anything? Pick up the phone, and get some counseling. Imagine a life where you couldn't give a fuck about your karma on slashdot. Imagine not running VMs on a single core dell. Imagine having so much money you can afford to drink lattes 3 times a day without spamming forums with links to amazon.
Why waste your time learning more and more skills that nobody is ever going to give you fair pay for? You need practice interviewing and interacting with co-workers in a healthy way.
sorry I dont have 3 grand to waste on a 4 year old PC with a crippled copy of BSD
It would be like raising the price of a shit sandwich.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
More licensing!! The new license will say, on the 455th page of fine print, in complicated legal language, that Microsoft executives can go into your refrigerator any time they want, and eat your ice cream.
Why do they want to do that? They like the feeling of dominance.
There has been progress in dominance in other areas:
Spyware:
Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made
Quote: "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC."
Malware:
Microsoft is using 'malware tactics' to trick people into upgrading to Windows 10
added USB 3.0 ... swapped out the ExpressCard (that has proved to be rather useless to me) with an SD card slot
For less than $10 you can get an ExpressCard adapter which adds an SDHC/MMC slot. Adapters are also available to add two USB 3.0 ports.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
The first hit is free.
You've had your first hit of Windows 10 now.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Please, no more year of the linux desktop crap, it will never be. It's written by hobbyists for hobbyists. On the server side? you can pretty much use any OS you want for this including freebsd. Look at all those hacks against the Corporate world who run linux servers. When will people(including Corporations and Small Businesses) get it through their thick skulls that things that are "free" always comes with a price.
We don't need more versions with tiered pricing.. we need less versions and less confusion.
Microsoft has been bought by Oracle and has a great original idea of charging by the type and number of processors/cores!!!
Windows 10 is a decent OS but with a UI full of hangovers from Windows 8 - itself a failed attempt to take over the tablet market.Windows 7 was the last version of Windows with GUI that was ideal for desktop computer use.
Jacking up the price and slapping a "Workstation" brand onto a product with so many obvious flaws is ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as slapping an S on the end of the name and trying to pass it off as a ChromeOS product.
The disconnect between the product teams and the dev teams at Microsoft must be huge.
Windows 10 Pro for the Workstation ( WPfW ) is such an obscure niche it's not worth reporting on except as a curiosity. 'And it's almost not worth commenting on, but here goes regardless:
What WPfW does is already done on Server 2016 Std. with the GUI. I suppose they are being anticipatory, hoping to cash in on some future the segment. However, by the time the niche grows to any importance they will want to handle it differently.
When I first read a headline with WPfW in it, my first thought was thought they might have had "heard" their customers and produced a generally available SKU version for people who wanted to granularly control updating, telemetry and privacy. Oh well, one can hope, but this particular version doesn't appear to be that, so, *sigh*, it is back to workarounds.
I thought you were smart but held back in life because your autism annoyed people but I was wrong.
1) You probably need to enable hardware virtualization in your BIOS
2) If you can't see how running linux and docker on a shitty computer will be an improvement over running buttglutton windows 10 pro with the shithole windows version of docker then I guess you're actually bad at this shit.
Have fun exploring endless bugs, getting shit performance, and low industry demand with your stack. You are probably not actually intelligent in any way but from time to time your unique autistic perspective allows you to do work that would usually require a more intelligent neurotypical.
Because you live in SV you have a niche working for people who pay laughably low wages.
Because you keep posting in clusters with all your accounts, You put CAP: dickgirl at the bottom of all your posts, You keep telling the same stories, You make the same shit mistakes with the english language.
It's fucked up because I can tell the difference between you and your ACs and FatCashewsLovesMe at a glance. Notice nobody accuses him of being you?
nobody cares, msmash, you dumb fucking whore.
#DEFINE YOU CREIMER
How? I guess you just like diving 10 levels deep into creimer-cashew shitpostfests in order to be annoyed?
Literally nobody sees this shit unless they're (you) or someone who wants to laugh at (you)
It's an important feature to make sure that we're all judged fairly.
So don't forget to downvote creimer there too!!!!
apple real needs a good gamer desktop at $1200-1500 (base I know about $200+ more then a pc) with video card choice at least room for pci-e ssd + hdd.
Sorry, that's still at least 200-500 dollars too much.
PC parts are cheap. Wait for a sale on a big ticket item like the GPU or CPU, and you can chop real money off the price.
I've been building my own gaming PC's since before Pentium numbered the chips. I've never gone over a grand, and always had plenty of beef at my disposal.
This suggestion provides you 5+ years to prepare and execute and exit strategy from the Windows ecosystem. It is not suitable for most corporate situations, unfortunately, as doing this at any significant volume could be difficult. If you must use Windows, consider:
Build using previous-generation platforms (Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge, I believe Haswell/Broadwell are also unaffected by Microsoft's update lockouts for newer chips... though I might be mistaken, and that seems to be possible to bypass anyhow)
Buy new-old-stock Windows 8/8.1 licenses
Alternatively, buy off-lease or otherwise used business machines from your favorite auction site; this can save you substantial amounts of money.
Install Classic Shell or whatever to help cope with Metro if you can't stand it.
Enjoy security patches until January 2023 while Microsoft either gets its shit together, or other solutions become more viable.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
I run a bare win 8.1 on my 4 GB RAM 300$ dell laptop, I am really serious here! I declined the win10 free update.
Now, bare means updated, no apps installed, no nothing except virtual box. Then, I run linux in a virtual box guest and performance is acceptable.
Why did I choose this strategy or is there any strategy in there?
There isn't any strategy here, just laziness or cost effectiveness (could it be the same?). I didn't have time to play around with "signed boot protected sectors" or whatever it is called in the 300$ laptop BIOS settings that I didn't go into yet although I have done it before on other hardware.
Don't install anything on windows and you will avoid the registry cluster fuck (systemd anybody?). A bare windows install behaves better than expected if you follow that rule. Maybe they should re-market as microsoft GSX server or something? ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Interesting but
1) Your money situation is probably much better than cdreimers
2) You weren't spending said money on a $100 software upgrade
I have to admit that if you picked the wrong laptop linux can be frustrating
This increase price affects multi-CPU systems and CPUs with a lot of cores. In other words, the kind of CPUs you aren't going to find in a Mac, which is just a toy computer using weak, outdated mobile processors.
I would suggest Linux or BSD, which works on all kinds of CPUs, and you don't have to worry about licensing costs no matter what you run it on.
Good point.