I have Business 32/Business 32/Ultimate 32/Ultimate 64. My HDD is a Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD 160 GB/256 MB, on a machine with a C2D 2.2, 2 GB of RAM, 2 GB of ReadyBoost.
My problem is people who don’t use Microsoft software “on principle” – which seems to be alot of people. As much as you may hate them making money off of you, if you’ve already paid for a product which includes the functionality you’re looking for, why not use it? I mean, you did pay for it.
The different versions of Vista is, yes, due to the additional functionality. Although OS X has only two levels (desktop and server) it remains a very small percentage of the market. And although it does include much of the functionality of Windows out of the box, that is usually done through add-on software. For instance, with the Leopard 10.5 upgrade, that only gets you the Operating System. If you would like to have the iLife suite shipping on new units, you have to pay for iLife ’08 seperately. Between the two that’s $200 to upgrade an OS X 10.4 system. A Vista Ultimate upgrade costs $260. And yes, 10.5 has much steeper hardware recomendations than 10.4 (which was pretty bloated anyway, relatively speaking, it’s closer to Vista’s hardware recomendations than XP’s). Microsoft instead chose to roll them all into Windows, and then provide free upgrades that add functionality later in the product’s life. Their support is also among the longest in the industry. With Windows XP security patches out to 2014, yet Apple has dropped support for anything earlier than OS X 10.3, with 10.2 (no longer supported) being released in August of 2002 – two months before Windows XP. If you look at Linux, support is often droped for distributions after only a year, if not less in some cases. Commercial UNIX doesn’t even continue support for as long as Windows does. Look at when support for 98/98SE/ME was ended: July 11, 2006. That’s four years and nine months after the launch of the next OS. And that’s for a non-business product. Windows NT 4 was supported until December 31, 2004, with a launch of September 1996 – also unprecidented. Their support is longer because there are simply more of their products out there, so it has to be. If 1% of the Windows world doesn’t upgrade (believe it or not, more than 5% of the Windows world still runs 98/98SE/ME) it’s a bigger chunk of the population than if Apple totally dropped support for Mac OS X.
