[Syn]

I have personally purchased the OEM Ultimate from overclockers.co.uk. In the end it cost me £141 with overnight shipping (i got an email tonight saying its been shipped it should arrive by monday at latest). Now to think that NA is getting the RETAIL copy for £100 less is bit wrong. To be honest i dont care about the fancy packaging but i do care about the licence. Due to me having to upgrade my PC for the DX10 era i am going to have purchase a new copy at the end of this year as i will have to get AM2+ based motherboard. Now the way i saw it at first was i am getting OEM which is less then half price of RETAIL currently. At the end of the year the price of OEM should have gone down even further and i could purchase another copy and still not pay as much as i would pay for a RETAIL today.

The prices of this OS are higher in EU but i have to admit that i think the EU it self is to blame. EU last year has done nothing but made MS give them millions of pounds in fines so that they would make a version of XP that none ever bought. I say this is MS telling us that they didnt like that very much and now WE the consumers are going to have to pay back all those millions MS had to pay to EU.

Also i looked at the prices for the OSX Tiger and they are cheaper. But if you compare Tiger without any extras added on which makes Tiger not matching to the Ultimate but to more Home Premium and the prices are pretty much even.

(Tiger UK £139.00 , Tiger US $199.00 , Converted Price US>UK amounts to £100.93)

The price variation between two continents is pretty big, but i bet you that MS can justify it, which is probably the reason for such prices.

Plus i dont believe that Mac Platform can justify its self to Windows Platform at the moment, sure the OSX it self might be better but the platform as a whole is 2nd best.