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.

Comments

Announced 2 months ago

[will_die]

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.

Re:Announced 2 months ago

[im_thatoneguy]

it's still pretty hard to to outfit a single host (virtualized or not) with 2TB of memory, much less 6TB and much less a 4 CPU+ host with 6TB that is a "desktop".

Windows Pro Workstation is essentially just a license to sell to Windows Pro users who were buying Windows Server. We've run a few monster machines before with 4 sockets and lots of RAM for complicated 3D simulations and rendering. They required Windows Server. It was a bit of a PITA because by default it's configured to be a server, not a workstation so everything insanely locked down and has iffy driver compatibility with video cards etc.

Re:Meh

[squiggleslash]

This is a fairly standard business model: develop one product, but sell various versions of it that differ in cost to manufacture by pennies, but cost massively different prices to the end user. The idea is to maximize revenue by getting more money from those who are prepared to pay more, while still getting some from those who can't afford the high prices paid by the premium group.

In this case, the logic seems to be "You can pay more, as you're proving by buying a motherboard that can support four CPUs, and actually buying four CPUs, so we're going to ask for a little more money from you." Which... makes sense I suppose.

Microsoft has gone in the other direction too: for cheap netbooks and tablets, they offer Windows 10 without a per-license cost, because they recognize you're not going spend $100 on an OS for a $70 tablet, especially with Android being around. Instead they hope to claw some revenue back from you in advertising and sales of apps (their own and third party) and so on.

Is this bad? I think trying to relate cost to ability to pay isn't a terrible thing.

Re:Paid the piper last week...

[Khyber]

Or you could just run Hyper-V core 2012, run your Windows machine in one VM, and Docker containers in another VM natively, for free?