On Jun 14, 2008, at 5:55 AM, Shaun Jones wrote:
Do we think they are going to charge for this release? I don't feel that they should because stability be it more should already have been optimized for the regular version of Leopard. It's like all the upgrades to Windows which should also be free. remember Win 98 and Win SE? Windows SE should have been a free upgrade, but they charged for what was supposed to be optimization.
True, but there are a few differences. OS X sports a much cheaper price tag for one. Plus, the fact that they are limiting it to Intel means they can do some optimization that was either impossible or at least impractical while still trying to support Power PC users. However, some have speculated it may be a free or low-cost upgrade, because 10.1 was a free upgrade for 10.0 users of OS X. I'm in favor of a low-cost upgrade, given that it will have some new features under the hood, which will offer better performance and stability. I am not one who thinks everything should be free. There's still work involved. I think a $49.95 price, or thereabouts, would be totally reasonable for it. The biggest technical problem for Apple to deal with is how to offer a new OS version for free to those who already have Leopard, but not those who say only have Tiger. This poses a real problem because Apple does not impose difficult licensing restrictions on their OS like Windows does. If you can get Snow Leopard for $50 or free as a Leopard user, what's to stop Tiger users from doing the same? Unless, of course, you have to install Leopard first and then upgrade on top of it, something that would possibly compromise stability of the system. So, you see, there's a lot to consider. If the cost is $129 like usual I won't complain. It'll make business sense. And, let's compare to Windows folks...OS X is about half the cost of the most basic version of Vista. Big difference there.
Josh de Lioncourt ...my other mail provider is an owl...
