Bob Crabtree;975529
The problem with buy an OEM version of Vista - as I understand it (and this is why I made no mention of OEM prices in the piece) - is that unlike the retail version, you will not be able to migrate the OS from one PC to another; it will be locked to one PC, or so the story goes.
And that is a serious restriction for a good number of the people who might want to buy Vista retail - the more so if, as you say, you are still paying £141 for the pleasure.
For general PC user they wont care about Retail, hell most of them wont even get any kind of Vista DVD when they buy their PC.
My view is that they won't even know what OEM is, so will go along to PC World (or similar) and buy the inflated-price retail stuff - or, rather, see the price and not buy.
The people that will care about the licence are those build PC's them selfs, as i do. Even thou i do build my self and understand that once you activate Vista OEM on one motherboard that's it, i still prefer the OEM version due to its price. As i said i will upgrade again soon as AMD's X4 CPU's come out. Now there are some that do it more often and they will need to get Retail, now that type of person is a minority when it comes to PC users.
Not arguing but would point out, again, that you've paid £141 for an OS than can only be installed on one machine, and the fact that you opted for OEM knowing this just highlights the rip-off nature of the retail pricing
This licensing we can thank ourselves. The reason being because previous version of Windows where constantly pirated and many of us didnt mind running a pirated version so MS took it a step further or as some would say too far.
You have a charmingly rose-tinted view of Microsoft.
Microsoft was perfectly happy for earlier versions of its OSs and applications to be pirated because it believed - correctly - that that piracy would help make them the most widely used. And, at a time when it saw fit, the company then put in place online registration of XP and versions of Office later than 2000 that started to take serious advantage of the ubiquity.
Microsoft, of course, wasn't the only company to do this but it wrote the book that so many others now follow.
How many programs do you know of that started off with copy protection and managed to establish themselves in the No.1 slot in a mass-market area in desktop X86 PCs?
Bob Crabtree;975529
Ah, right, so MS falls foul of the law and so dumps on us.
Three rousing cheers for Microsoft, then?
No, I don't think so.
I'm not saying that what the EU did made a great deal of sense to me but I think that Microsoft's own behaviour did bring upon the company the massive fines and other sanctions that were applied.
Care to point out what MS behaviour in perticilur was that made EU fine them?
It's a matter of record - go look at the record.
Bob Crabtree;975529
Er, I'm trying to think what's missing from Tiger that is found in Ultimate and not found in XP MCE and I'm coming up short.
I'm not saying you're wrong just that I don't know, specifically, what you think is missing.
As for the pricing - and remember what set me off on one today was the get-two-more-for-$50-each deal offered only to US & Canadian buyers - did you realise that UK price you quote for OS X (£139) is for the Family Pack, which lets you install the OS on up to FIVE Macs!
By my reckoning, that's £27.80 a copy - and the £139 price from the Apple Store does include free delivery!
If you just bought the one-Mac license, the cost is £89 but if you later decided that you wanted, say, to use that OS on two further Macs, you could still buy the Family Pack any time for £139 and you'd still be paying only £69.95 per upgraded Mac.
I checked the “Family Pack” deal after i posted, i agree that the licence for Mac OSX is much better to Windows, but then you dont see that many pirated OSX copies around, that might change now that they moved off PowerPC arch.
But my point was that the pricing for Mac OS X is massively cheaper than for XP and, therefore, it was appropriate for me to mention this.
Oh and many people refer the iLife pack when they talk about Vista features, its an add-on that costs more money, which is why i said that.
No,
iLife isn't really an add-in to OS X, it's a suite of optional apps - image editor, movie editor, DVD author, music editor, web authoring.
Bob Crabtree;975529
You tell me, if you can, what the difference is between the version you'd buy in the UK and version you'd buy in the USA.
If it's like XP - and I'm sure it will be - there will be no difference.
So what are we paying for?
The higher cost of distributing around the UK, rather than the USA?
The higher cost of the Indian-continent call centres that Microsoft UK uses relative to the Indian-continent call centres that Microsoft USA uses?
Really, I don't see that Microsoft could justify the price differentials even if it tried very hard - and it's never done that in my experience.
Same reason why people in US pay £100 for OSX and we pay £139.
I'm afraid you are failing totally to answer the question.
The fact is that in the instance you've chosen to quote, the differential between Apple USA and Apple UK is, in percentage terms, far lower than between Microsoft in the USA and Microsoft in the UK (assuming we know roughly the cost of Vista versions in the UK).
What you've also forgotten is to take account of VAT - which needs to be added to the US price if we are to compare Apples with Apples, as it were.
Do that and the US price is now equivalent to £118.50 - and so we'd be paying £20.50 more.
That's 14.8 per cent extra - and 14.8 per cent more than I like - but that 14.8 per cent/£20.50 isn't in the same ball park as the differentials between the price of Vista here and in the USA, assuming the figures for UK pricing of Vista are about right.
Bob Crabtree;975529
Sorry but I simply don't agree.
Some members of the Mac hardware family are more expensive to buy into than Windows equivalents but the hardware platform itself absolutely is not second-best, quite the opposite.
When i said platform i mean everything to do with Windows, so anything that touches on Windows is much better overall then what we can get with Mac.
That's demonstrably untrue.
You talk about higher build quality that Mac's have. Dont you think that's bit obvious? Can you build a Mac your self?
Nope - but there's far less reason to want to when what's available ready-built is so much better. And, realise, please, that the sort of people who do build their own PCs are a small minority of the community of Windows users, albeit one that HEXUS.net addresses full on.
Windows hardware is like Open Source and Mac Hardware is completely closed off. If you want to upgrade your Mac what do you do?
Well, those who like to do this sort of thing for fun could argue there are fewer upgrade possibilities with a Mac and in one sense, that's true, but the counterpoint is that there is a lot less in a Mac that you might need or want to upgrade -though rather more now that Apple has switch to Intel.
But, if we list out what you can readily upgrade, the main ones are the RAM, the graphics card, the optical drive and the hard drives - though you can really only upgrade the last three easily with the tower-format desktop Macs.
The way you describe Mac computer to me sounds more like its a High-End PC with Apple logo and it comes with OS X preinstalled. The Mac is now the PC equivalent of consuel its specifications are preset by the manufacturer and its offered in different models. That my friend is no way a positive reason, if it was then most popular PC's sold would be those made by Vodoo and Alienware.
If you had ever had hands on with top-end desktop Mac hardware, I know you would not mention Macs in the same breath as Alienware (I know nothing about Voodoo PCs, so can't comment).
But, remember, although HEXUS.net addresses the PC hardware enthusiast, HEXUS.lifestyle has a more general reader in mind and that reader is more like the typical home computer user who will, in the main, upgrade only those things on a PC that do not involve opening the case.
That includes upgrading the OS and software and adding a whole bunch of external goodies (mainly USB) - hard drives or burners, web cams, stick TV tuners, stick video-capture devices, USB memory-card readers and so on.
As I meantiend before i build my own PC's as i know that because of the open windows hardware many PC makers take too many liberty's. As you say Dell charges more for same hardware and yet they install bloatware.
But, you need to know that your view is NOT the view of the majority of home computer users who are likely to have to make a decision about what operating system they upgrade to.
If you want i can write to you a whole essay on why Windows is the dominant OS in the world, but the summery of it would something like this:
Windows is number 1 OS because MS invests back in YOU.
I don't think you have studied the history of the personal computer industry very closely.
Windows is number one for a number of reasons but yours is not one that would figure highly on my list or the list of anyone else who is familiar with the history of the industry.
Top of the pile is the fact that the IBM PC compatible architecture allowed the development by a whole bunch of competing PC builders of low-cost machines built from low-cost components - and Microsoft rather piggybacked on that whole thing.
Microsoft did do some clever things to get itself to the top spot in operating systems (and some downright nasty things, too) but Microsoft investments were largely aimed at benefiting Microsoft not YOU.
That said, I love XP to pieces and, for preference do use MS Word and Excel rather than any competing packages (though my email program of choice is Thunderbird, not Outlook or Outlook Express, and my browser of choice is Firefox, not Internet Explorer.
As an historical aside, Apple did at one time start down a sort of open hardware route (way after the validity of such a strategy was established by the IBM PC compatible architecture) but Steve Jobs killed that move on his return to Apple and it's only now with the move to Intel CPUs (that is, in a way, a move towards a more open architecture) that we are seeing Apple starting to actually grow the volume of its Mac computer sales - though the speed of performance of Intel CPUs relative to their IBM and Motorola forerunners is more important in this sales growth than any additional openness.
