since everyone is pitching in with their rhetorical opinions, here's mine...
First, numbering is irrelevant. The argument that "I would have bought it if it were 10.5, but 10.2 is not worth $129" doesn't make any sense. Are the features provided worth it or not? That is all that matters. It would have been ridiculous for someone to purchase the exact same OS for $129 simply because it was labeled with a different number. Second, no one has to pay $129. The OS is routinely available for anywhere between $79 and $99 with various rebates and all. Does it become more attractive at that price point? Third, it has been written ad nauseam that Apple is a sw company and not a hw company, or a hw company and not a sw company, etc. It is beside the point... Apple has to survive. With 20 mil users, and more than 95% still sticking on with a buggy but fast, attractive but crash prone, easy but limited operating system, they are not getting any revenues from there. Plus, there is pressure to deliver the "most advanced OS" on earth (whatever the #$%# that means). Whose gonna make it? So, they take team away from previous projects and put them on OS X to deliver something most (except for the most curmudgeon of them) are singing praises of. They gotta feed that team. Fourth, so they charge for it. In return, they give away a host of other apps that their "Mac" base really likes and uses, and their "Unix" base is amazed at because they had never seen something like it on their old, crusty *nix boxes. I routinely use a Linux box at work along with Windoze... the Linux box is a pain in the derierre. I don't have a desire to learn a cryptic command with a thousand switch combinations just to be able to add a new hard disk to the computer. But, that's how it is. Sometimes it is all fun and romantic to be doing it that way, sometimes it is just a pain in the ass. I come back to my iBook and I am happily reconciling my credit card statement via Quicken, teaching Scheme in the Dr. Scheme interpreter to my daughter, listening to streaming jazz from KJAZ, and writing a perl script to parse iCal files. What could be more fun. I like it, I pay for it. Fifth, the argument that "I got everything I wanted when I got the command line interface" is particularly perplexing from ostensibly Mac users because Mac users always want more, simple, bettah. I know there are die-hard fans of vi and vim and emacs out there, and all strength to them. But, I just happen to find the simplicity of jEdit or irEdit (which I am trying out) or any other regular window-based, mouse driven app much more familiar and comforting. MacOS X allows me that, and then some. Mac users gotta like iTunes (an amazing program if there ever was one), AddressBook that magically adds and picks out email addresses for me without my intervention, Palm Desktop (love its speed), AppleWorks (say what one will... it beats Office in most everything I do), iMovie (what a sweet, sweet application) and countless other "freebies" I got when I bought the OS. In the end there is only one argument... I found it worth it so I paid for it. You didn't find it worth it so you didn't pay for it. Nothing else matters... and certainly not the 'plaint that Apple is charging for it. Sure they are, but they are not forcing everyone to upgrade. Back to my ical parser... it is almost done. pk/
