Apparently, the Home Basic edition of Windows Vista will be priced the same as Windows XP Home, at $233 ($259 Canadian). The Home Premium version, which includes support for Media Center and tablet PC abilities will sell for 13 percent higher rate, a price that translates to about $269 in American dollars. Microsoft has said it plans to urge customers to purchase premium versions of Vista in favor of Windows Vista Home Basic, the entry-level version for U.S. consumers.
Now compare this to the pricing for Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger"): $129 for a single-user license and $199 for a family pack. Expect the price tag for Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard") to be the same. Then there's the fact that Apple sees more overall profitability from its operating system upgrades than Microsoft by releasing them at a more frequent and stable pace, according to an [url=http://www.appleinsider.com]AppleInsider report.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster recently compared Apple’s Mac OS X and Microsoft’s Windows pricing schemes and found that although Apple prices its OS software at a lower average selling price (ASP), it costs Mac users more per year to have the latest OS. According to Munster’s analysis, Apple releases a new version of Mac OS X about once a year for $129 (or an average of $107 per year to keep current), whereas Microsoft releases new versions of Windows about every 2.25 years for an average cost of $114 a year (or $48 per year to keep current).
Looking at it this way, it's less expensive to own and run Windows. On the other hand, as Mac users, we don't have the problems with viruses and system crashes that Windows users have -- and it's hard to put a price tag on that. Also, would you want to wait 2.25 years for major updates to the Mac OS?
On the other hand, I wouldn't exactly cry if Apple lowered pricing on its system updates. If they were less costly, perhaps even more users might move up with each OS upgrade. Regardless, it's certainly true, up to a point, that you get what you pay for. And I've always found the major revs of the Mac operating system to be well worth the money.
Thoughts? Write me at daseller@earthlink.net

