Windows 7 priced below Vista, to allow upgrades from XP - Page 3

Alright, fair enough.

I was making a qualitative statement a well. As in, as a Mac user, I wouldn't even take it for free. But from a purely dollars-and-cents perspective, I'd agree, it's a fair price for an operating system.

Although Apple's releases are all full operating systems. Panther+Tiger+Leopard does not equal one Windows release.

XP was old and grey long before Vista was released. And Vista wasn't much of an achievement.

In fact:

Windows XP October 2001 - It was a functional OS (then again, they all are.) But it was a dog. Absolutely horrible, spaghetti-code. Required boatloads of 3rd party apps to keep from grinding to a halt and falling over. And it looked like a dog's breakfast, and performed the same way. Saying it was MS' finest achievement really isn't saying much. It played games real good, tho!

(Visited an Apple Store in April '06, and walked out of there astonished that I'd actually been using XP for so long when something like Tiger existed.)

Vista January 2007 - Not much needs to be said here. No point in flogging a dead horse. Everyone would rather forget about this one.

Windows 7 October 2009 - Not out yet. Average Joe will render the verdict after the first 6 months of use.

Windows users have been getting the shaft since 2001.

A full refund for Vista would have been more appropriate!

Also, it is IMHO a topic for this forum. I, like many others, run Parallels and VMWare to test work on other platforms and I shelled out for a real Vista and run Betas of 7 as well as XP Pro. I am not a Widoze troll and I appreciate some low level coverage of such things.

I type this on a Mac and I find OS X to be far more intuitive - I was amazed when I switched - but I try to take balanced view. I work in enterprise computing and OS X anything doesn't get a look in. I use AIX, Solaris, Windows and eek z/OS every day.

To be truly explosive, Apple need to get their foot in the enterprise door. A lot of people spend 40 hours a week working Windows and when they go to buy a computer for most people it's a natural choice to buy Windows. Not a bad thing in itself but there are probably better choices out there as you yourself experience every day. It has been said the Apple are happy with their 10% market share but I'm not so sure.

Trouble is I don't think Apple have the infrastructure at the moment to support an enterprise push. They couldn't give a flying fuck about Java, for a start. This kind of thing is the nuts and bolts of enterprise. Objective C/Cocoa/etc is, frankly, a distraction in the enterprise space.

I've also given up being inflammatory here. There's no point. No matter how good a point you can make, there's will always be an emotive response which clouds the original point being made.

It really doesn't seem that Apple is interested in that sort of enterprise push with OS X, no matter how good their Xserves are.

What they're looking at is getting the iPhone into that sector, with THAT version of OS X. And it looks very, very promising.

If you said snow was white and coal was black you'd get emotional replies. Some people get their jollies being argumentative. (Here we go, Eskimos see 256 shades of white ... Eskimos?? You mean Inuit! Coal.. Lignite or Anthracite? What about blind Inuit you insensitive bastard! I paint my coal white!)

Just thought I'd add my $.02 cents on this one. People are lambasting Microsoft for their "exorbitant" pricing (really not, if you pre-order) in regards to Windows 7. But really, if you stop to consider the opposite, what will the true cost of acquiring Snow Leopard be (or the true cost of any version of OS X, for that matter)? Unlike Windows 7, which can be installed on both PCs and Macs, Snow Leopard will only run on Macs. So, for any non-Mac user, the real cost of "upgrading" per say is much, much more because you must buy Apple's hardware (and the costs for OS X are woven into the pricing), and that typically runs over $1000 and way more if you want Apple's top tier configurations. I find it funny how people here always like to point out (in Apple's favor) how you can't adequately compare the value between a Microsoft notebook and an Apple notebook because doing so is like comparing apples to oranges (software company vs. software + hardware company). Well, the same goes for their respective OS's. You can't adequately compare the cost of "upgrading" between the two. In the end, the prices Microsoft has laid out for Windows 7 are pretty good. I'll be upgrading from XP, will probably even pre-order it for a mere $50, and then not install it until the initial quirks are ironed out in the fall time.

Came across this interesting article the other day.

http://boycottnovell.com/2008/10/26/...009-ugly-part/

Though it is mostly accusation, it is true that Microsoft's cash reserve has been steadily going down. If there is anything the recent financial crisis has told us it's that you can't believe a big company can't go down overnight.

It is worth every penny. I have 5 Macs and one Dell. Can't wait to upgrade the Dell to Win7. I also run boot camp on one of my MacBooks and have Win7 RC on that now. I have to say, coming from a Mac guy, it is worth every penny. It IS NOT Vista SP3 as some say. It is stable as h3ll and I highly recommend it to all my Windows friends.....right after they tell me they won't switch to Mac.

For all the other Mac people out there just bashing MS and saying Windows is crap...get a life. Windows and MacOS have come so far in the past 5 years. They both are great.

I was hoping someone (less lazy than me) will come up with such comparison. Thanks!

I'd just add that MS is getting all their income from software, while Apple is using nice software to sell good looking but underpowered, overpriced hardware with almost obligatory issues for first releases of every new hardware generation... and that hardware is where their major profit is.

And still, their software is more expensive.

There are things I don't like with MS, but pricing is not really among them.

And how much does it add for people with ongoing display problems on MacBook Pro, freezing iMacs and all other "it just works - not!" issues..?

My congratulations, by the way - you have managed to squeeze fair amount of pure, uncontrollable hatred, nice dose of racism, hefty serving of nonsense and utter lack of basic math knowledge in one very short post. Keep on.

LOL! This made me laugh

The man speaks truth.

Here's what I see in this thread over and over: People who have no idea what they're talking about, repeating the misinformation fed to them by other people who have no idea what they're talking about.

Everyone on these forums always bashes Vista, but I have YET to meet a person who actually has issues with Vista. Vista is a decent operating system. I've never had a SINGLE CRASH with vista.

Windows 7 is NOT a Vista service pack. It's an entirely new operating system deserving of a new name. The fact is, people here are simply running out of ammunition for bashing MS in these types of discussions, and they'll repeat moronic statements about Vista over and over, no matter what is told to them.

I read through everything, and there hasn't been a single statement made here that would have me second guess buying Windows 7 even in the slightest.

LMFAO! You guys are spot on today!

[QUOTE=camroidv27;1440619][QUOTE=macnyc;1440610]

If you ask me, it seems pretty obvious you've come here to troll...


Actually people are more pragmatic in politics. This hatred feels more comparable to extreme religious blindness...

Underpowered?

Underpowered to do what, exactly?

Seems to run everything I trow at it pretty fast. Easily meets the requirements of Final Cut Studio, for example. And Macs are often used in very video/sound intensive work.

GAMES!

pew pew pew

If I liked Vista, I'd continue to use it.

We're only exposed to Vista and other flavours of Windows on a daily basis. Who do you think fixes Windows for friends and family? Mac users.

And people here ARE ENTIRELY JUSTIFIED in their skepticism of Windows 7 or for that matter, ANY Microsoft product announcement, given their absolutely abysmal track record over the past 8 years. Which includes XP. If that was MS' best of all-time, I shudder to think what their worst might be.

If you look at what Apple has been cranking out since 2001, you'd think MS was standing still.

All the Windows beta testers praised Vista to the heavens before its release - it's as if they took their brains out of their heads. And the whole Longhorn botch-job fell flat on its faced when it hit the shelves.

Vista has great value for me. More stable, more secure than XP. Better looking, better (if not much different) interface. And going to 64-bit Vista finally let me have 8GB of RAM without sacrificing any of 32-bit applications I was using before upgrade.

Vista was frustrating in it's early stage (more due to 3rd party support, but still), and also for over-optimistic people trying to run it comfortably on 1GB (or less) Celeron notebooks and desktops. Everyone else - and, coincidently, everyone I know - is more than happy with Vista.

Oh.

I thought it was something important.

Seriously, if the whole "underpowered" argument revolves around running games, then that's hardly an argument. Games are not, nor have ever been (since OS X) a selling-point for Macs. They're not meant for gaming.

And frankly this whole "underpowered" issue turns up only on these Mac forums, in one small corner of the internet, and it doesn't even represent the forum majority.

Fortunately for MSFT shareholders, you aren't in charge of pricing. I'm fairly certain Microsoft will continue its dominant market position despite charging for this upgrade.

Additionally, there are a number of significant improvements. One of the coolest is the multi-touch support. I guarantee it is a little buggy at first, but I think that alone will pull many customers in.

Windows 7 is warmed-over Vista.

And there would be nothing wrong with that, except for the fact that it's trying to fix on what should have been fine in the first place, after 5+ years of development.

Windows users have essentially been getting the shaft since 2001.

something important? SOMETHING IMPORTANT? DUDE! I can't believe you just said that to me. You and I... We wouldn't make it as friends IRL ;P

Ok, but honestly, the plain honest truth is whatever you can do with a Mac, I can do with a PC (albeit not as smoothly in some cases.) Actually, I may be wrong in that statement. What I probably should say is, anything I would NEED to do with a Mac, I can do on a PC. Add to the fact that I love gaming (left4dead anyone? PM me) and I'm a system builder, and you can see why I haven't gone the way of the mac just yet (and I'm not bashing osx.)

With Vista, I never really saw a need to upgrade. I use it at work, I have no qualms with it whatsoever, but when it came down to it, I always tell people if they have XP, save your money. If you're looking for a PC and the one you want only comes with Vista, don't fret, it's not bad. Windows 7, on the other hand, is something I'll jump on.


It's statements like this that are completely ignorant and exactly what I spoke to above. Shame on you.

I will say, the problems I saw people had with Vista mainly stemmed from third party drivers. Microsoft put beta copies of vista out there long enough that these vendors could write popper drivers, but a lot of them were lazy about it. You'd be surprised at companies that took their time and F'd up. Creative? The sound card company... They were a main cause of system crashes because their drivers were just complete crap.

It's a shame really. Vista isn't a bad operating system, in fact I feel confident in going as far as saying it's a GOOD operating system, but little things at it's launch gave it a bad rep, and companies like Apple pushed that as far as they could. People who never used Vista before were saying they'd give it 0 out of 10 lol.

Underpowered compared to current hardware being offered in general. Quad Cores are mainstream for some time already, yet there still isn't any quad core Mac beside Mac Pro.

I have no doubts they are running fast enough - heck, my almost ancient AMD 64 X2 in my old box is still running most tasks in perfectly acceptable manners - but they would run significantly faster on i7 or at least C2Q.

Sure. You can e-mail and word-process and do up a website on both systems.

Guess that explains why such Windows using friends and families have so many problems

Can't imagine how satisfied with experience would Mac users be if Windows people would be fixing their problems

We wouldn't know because there would be nothing to fix.

Again, an ignorant statement that shows how little you know about Windows, or how hard you try to spread misinformation.

Seriously, what can your Mac do that my PC can't? Can you answer for me please? Since you know so much about Windows obviously.

Some people have more than one computer, and macs have bootcamp...

Make you Justin Long cool ?

Awww common. There must be some value even in troubled Macs worth fixing

With a decent rig for gaming Vista 32bit ain't that bad. With SP1. And then go 64-bit then you'll be happier*...again, caveat, SP1. And Googling lots if you are putting together your own system... I don't know about laptops... But Windows 7 offers the real promise. Like I said, if Microsoft don't screw it up, let's do Windows 7 and forget Vista ever happened.

*Driver issues ain't 100% sorted out even to this day, see my next post.

Valve's Steam is the best thing out there in digital games distribution. iTunes for PC games, and guess what, it's not rampantly outrageously geographically-restricted.


Try googling Linksys' WMP54G... A very common, popular, decent and continues to be sold, PCI 802.11B/G card. Here's a hint. It takes about 3 hours of serious Googling to actually realise it works on Vista 64-bit, if at all you realise it... I took Cisco's word that it wasn't supported and so stuck with 32bit for months more than I should have. In this case Cisco has to take the blame for not offering the **** driver. It was the one last thing stopping me from installing Vista 64-bit. That and game bugginess. But, GPU, MOBO and so on drivers have improved for Vista 64, and yes, games progressively are patched. It's not plain sailing though. Really, that WMP54G, ain't no joke finding the driver for that. ...And the whole DX10 Vista-only fiasco... With so many games still DX9 only, or DX10 titles being totally ridiculously demanding in terms of hardware (and still is).......

Yeah, all Macs since C2D support it, they just havent have built in the option yet. They probably will have it ready shortly, but if they dont it wont make much of a difference either way.

Always some straggler messing it up for the rest of us. At least with Snow Leopard you have a very slick method for going from 64-bit to 32-bit without having to reinstall the OS. The irony is that Apples approach to the problem also means that you are less likely to have these issues in the first place.

Would it really be too hard for MS to also ship a 32-bit version of the OS on the same or accompanying disc, yet still with only one serial key?

Ummm... Garageband and iPhoto. Not as trivial as they seem. A comparable PC application with similar ease-of-use, great, fluid UI and... comes bundled FREE... does not exist.

Let's face the realities. I know I can't play Far Cry 2 or Left 4 Dead at high resolutions and high quality on my MacBook (even with 9400M). But I know what my MacBook can do my PC can't.

Great idea, not gonna happen on Windows 7. Heck, they could ship the different 32-bit versions on one disc (Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, Super, whatever), but they're not gonna do that are they? <sigh>

Well that's the thing about Freeware. Apple got behind something low cost, and bundled it. Basically, they did the search for you. There ARE free programs out there comparable though. I mean, a lot of the features of iphoto are found free in Google's picasa software.

While osx has a lot of free goodies, alternatives can be found for the Windows OS as well.

(I admittedly don't know the details of garageband. I mean I know what it does, but why does a place like download.com list it as being $79? Is there a lite version that comes free or something?)

Macs are always worth fixing. Even the older ones keep an amazingly high value. Used iBook G4s in good condition go for about $650 CDN or so.

True, with SP1. Early adoption of Vista wasn't smooth.

But, hey. Neither was early adoption of some new Mac systems. For example, I've heard recently Apple still has no clues what is causing MacBook Pro screen corruption, and firmware update didn't help.

And that with much smaller hardware base, compared with what MS has to deal with.

exactly - anyone who upgraded from XP to Vista and now wants to upgrade again to Win 7 is getting royally screwed by MS. total cost is somewhere between $350 and $600 for the two upgrades depending on which version of Vista/Win 7 they have (and as everyone notes, only Ultimate really equals Apple's single version OS X).

what an insult. Vista was a flawed initial version of NT 6.x (6.0), but MS is making those loyal users pay twice to get the "good" second version (6.1),

A killer Microsoft Tax. think the press and MS loving pundits will notice? nah ...

Id wager that most Windows users wont upgrade their OS, theyll just wait until they need a new PC before getting the next OS.

what's sad is that this truly is the mentality of a lot of people. Really, it doesn't matter if it's a custom machine or a dell, individual components like the ram and cpu CAN be upgraded, and provide such an increase in performance that it feels like it's a different machine.

I used to get so pissed when my mom would randomly inform me of her new dell purchase. She did that to me about 3 times before I finally said, look, mom, if you buy another dell I will run away! Then she let me build her a system, and she's been loving it ever since. In fact, when I buy Windows 7, I'll be purchasing some extra ram for her to go along with it lol.