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This is why I really don't like that Apple had their rant about "All versions $129, haha look at windows license mess". I've had my windows XP fully upgraded for five? years. The big thing in Vista (.net etc) is available, although with a somewhat crippled rendering engine. And I can still run a win32 program from over a decade ago.
If they feel the need to mock windows, there are other areas that actually are motivated to mock.
The "rant" makes more sense if you consider what Jobs cares about: complexity, not cost. Keeping OS X up-to-date may very well have a higher cost in terms of $/feature than Windows, over the period of the last 5 years. But there is no denying that the licensing scheme is simple. On October 28, I went into the Apple Store, grabbed the box with the big "X" on it, and one of the clerks checked me out right on the spot. Buying Vista isn't so simple. Indeed, without actually looking it up on the internets, I wouldn't even know which version to buy.




Member since:
2005-07-06
In terms of code changes, not that long (not as long as Windows). Monthly bug-fix releases stop shortly after the new release (eg: 10.4.11 will be the last Tiger build likely), and security fixes stop around the release after that (eg: security updates to Jaguar stopped soon before the Tiger release). Software support varies somewhat. Most frequently-released free programs tend to support only the latest couple of releases --- commercial software usually supports further back.
As for forums, macnn.com is a good Mac forum, as is the Machintosh Achaia on ArsTechnica.
Edited 2007-11-08 05:16