Originally Posted by excalibur2 
No one has forced you to buy Vista, so why complain. You weren't exactly stuck without an OS, or do you think winxp was useless for your needs ATM.
i did NOT complain, quite contrary i cant wait to install it
Originally Posted by Bob Crabtree 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. 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.
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.
Originally Posted by Bob Crabtree 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?
Originally Posted by Bob Crabtree 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.
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.
Originally Posted by Bob Crabtree 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.
Originally Posted by Bob Crabtree 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.
You talk about higher build quality that Mac's have. Dont you think that's bit obvious? Can you build a Mac your self?
Windows hardware is like Open Source and Mac Hardware is completely closed off. If you want to upgrade your Mac what do you do?
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.
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.
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.