Windows 7 versus Snow Leopard: How much do upgrades really cost?

As for 10.6, anyone who's already on 10.5 can upgrade for $30 but anyone on 10.4 (Tiger) or earlier has to pay full retail:

Just like Windows users.

The bottom line is that if you bought your Mac 2 years ago and haven't already paid to upgrade once, you'll be paying the full $169 to upgrade to 10.6. If you bought your Windows box 2 years ago (whether you're running the free SP1 upgrade or not) and are unlucky enough to not snag the upgrade at $50 you'll have to pay the full $129 retail cost for the upgrade.

$129 is not the "full retail cost". It's the upgrade cost, and you are ignoring the fact that a huge number of people have avoided Vista, and those people are not eligible for the upgrade price. They must pay the real full price, which is $199, not $129. OEMs have been selling PCs with XP for a long time because people don't want Vista. Someone who bought a PC 2 years ago most likely bought it with XP on it, not Vista. They will pay $199.

Also checker, if you look at the numbers Ed is slinging around you discover that the 169$US price he is using is for a boxed set that includes the most recent versions of iLife and iWork ('09). So not only is the price wrong, but the actual package he does reference represents a discount price against the individual OS and software packages 129$US+79$US+79$US. Also Ed in his analysis fails to take into account that of the 8.3 million purchasers back in '06, some portion of that has remained, some have subsequently upgraded their hardware and some have migrated to PCs. To use market sales numbers without calling out the actual population remaining against those sales is to abuse the statistics more than usual. I can appreciate the fact that Ed is a Microsoft apologist and cut him a lot of latitude in his approach, but when he starts abusing the numbers with the assumption that no one will verify them, he undermines his case.

No, actually you're wrong. Most likely they're running Vista. Today Dell sells 4 configs with XP,...

We're not talking about today. We're talking abour 2 years ago, when Dell and other OEMs fought tooth and nail with Microsoft insisting that they be allowed to continue to sell XP because that's what most customers wanted (because most computers at the time could barely handle Vista). There may be more people buying Vista now, but that was definitely not the case when Vista first came out. The fact that you can even buy XP today on a new PC is evidence of how poorly Vista is still regarded.

Sure, the 'XP downgrade' has made the news but very few people actually bought it.

That's bull@!$%#. The very reason Dell fought to offer it is because so many people wanted it that they were seriously afraid of losing business if they could only offer Vista.

If you have an Apple link that says Tiger users can upgrade to 10.6 for less feel free to post it.

I'm not talking about Tiger users. I'm pointing out that you're comparing an upgrade price for Windows 7 to a full retail price for 10.6. If you compare the full retail price of both then 10.6 comes out ahead, and if you don't use the iLife/iWork package, then it comes out almost the same price as even the upgrade price for Windows 7.

You're also wrong on the regular upgrade price for Windows 7 Home Premium, which is the closest feature-wise to 10.6. It's $119 and Windows XP users qualify:

I don't know where you're getting that, because that link says nothing about XP, and neither does the original Microsoft source. You might be talking about the $50 temporary price, but (again) that's only temporary. It's not the real price. I have seen no indication that the $119 "upgrade" price is valid for XP users.

I'm also not sure why you think "Home Premium" is closer in features to OS X. Which features are lacking? Encrypting file systems? Check. Remote desktop? Check. Location aware printing? Pretty sure that's supported. The only thing left in this comparison table is Domain Joining (and I think that can be done, but not as easily).

I'd also be interested in any survey data that says the "vast majority" of OS X users are on Leopard instead of Tiger or older.

I never said anything of the sort, but I know Apple didn't have as hard a time getting their users to upgrade as Microsoft did because Leopard could actually run on older hardware, whereas when Vista came out it had a hard time running on even some new computers.

I'm sorry but I also don't buy the whole "PPC users don't really want an upgrade" argument.

Who said that? Are you having a debate with some imaginary people here?

This isn't Dell, but it's close enough:

"From the 30th of June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP licence," said Jane Bradburn, Market Development Manager, Commercial Notebooks for HP Australia. (Source)

According to that article XP was actually outselling Vista as late as July 2008. However, technically those people bought a Vista license that they didn't even use, so maybe they qualify for an upgrade after all. I don't know. They probably never bothered to install it, though.

Here's another source:

Microsoft will be extending the Windows XP downgrade option until 2011. While Microsoft has threatened to halt the option on numerous occasions, it has yet to set a date, write it in stone and actually make good on the promise.

Windows XP has been the corner stone for Microsoft as Windows Vista was largely rejected by businesses and consumers due to its initial rocky start. With Windows 7 right around the corner Microsoft will be looking to phase out XP but still must do so in a cautious manor.

You are in serious denial if you really think using XP instead of Vista was rare. It's been a well-known phenomenon for a long time. Multiple times Microsoft tried to stop allowing OEMs to sell licenses for XP, and they backed down every time because so many people refused to buy Vista. This is a fact which apparently you never noticed.

That's because I can upgrade a 5 year old XP box. You can't upgrade a 5 year old Tiger box. Did you read the premise in the original seeded article?

Anyone can upgrade for $50 right now until July 11. I have yet to see a single source that showed definitively that the $119 upgrade after that is applicable to XP users. Maybe it is, but even so it's barely less than the $129 full price of OS X 10.6.

And a 5 year old Tiger box can't upgrade at all, so it's a moot point. The price is irrelevant to someone who can't possibly upgrade (and that's a completely unrelated issue which you acknowledge has legitimate reasons).

I'm sorry but I also don't buy the whole "PPC users don't really want an upgrade" argument.

Snow Leopard contains almost no new user-facing features. Its two biggest features are a better ability to make use of the multi-core processors (that now ship on every single Mac) and harness the latent power of recent graphics cards for GPGPU computing. The only PowerPC systems that dual-core processors were a portion of PowerMac G5s (none of which, I believe, have graphics cards that can support the GPGPU/OpenCL stuff in Snow Leopard, though I'm not positive about this point). No other PowerPC user could even theoretically stand to benefit from Snow Leopard, even if Apple wasted their limited engineering resources on a chip they abandoned years ago.

My point here is that cutting of PowerPC users is neither capricious nor unreasonable. Moreover, it's not like they're being left to run an antiquated OS that came out in 2001 (ahem, XP). They still get to run Leopard, which is vastly more sophisticated than anything that has ever come out of Redmond.