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Originally Posted by Tristan
Windows XP was released in 2001. If you bought it then, you haven't had to pay a penny for the service packs and updates since, including new versions of Internet Explorer, Media Player, MSN Messenger, Windows Movie Maker, etc etc. Hell, if you bought XP Pro, they'll give you the 64-bit version for free.
With this in mind, how can Apple justify charging £99 foir a service pack every 12 months?
I'm not Microsoft's biggest fan, by a long way -- I'm typing this on a Linux box -- but even they don't seem as money-grabbing as Apple.
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I don't think it's quite fair to equate a move from OSX 10.3 to 10.4 with the issuing of a Service Pack by M$. Despite the naming convention Apple has opted for, what this really is is a move from version 3 to version 4 of Apple's Next generation operating system. More like going from Win95 to Win98. Apple, unfortunately, decided to do a Rover and carried on using the name 'Metro' even after the car was completely re-engineered from the chassis up, to make an analogy. I personally think they shouldv'e started again from 1.
Don't be confused by the headline marketing of all the new bells and whistles Apple has added to the OS. This is not just about adding freebie apps and applying fixes and patches. Us Apple users get fixes and patches just the same as M$ users do, the biggest ones prompting changes from 10.2.1 to 10.2.2 and so on ... (I still use 10.2.8, the last revision of OSX 10.2 before 10.3 came out). Apple makes significant improvements to the core OS with each release.
And, (can't resist a dig here), each version of OSX has actually performed better than the previous one, despite the extra features. For example anyone with a five-year-old iMac (like me!) will find that it runs OSX 10.3 as well as it ran OS9 that it shipped with way back in 2000. And it runs 10.3 better than it ran 10.2. This is quite refreshing when M$ is known for developing new versions of its OS that are a million times more bloated than their immediate predecessor and demand a relatively current PC spec on which to run.