Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7: More for Less vs. Less for More
Microsoft has announced pricing:
On Thursday, the software giant said it would offer through several retailers an upgrade from Windows Vista or XP to Windows 7 Home Premium at $49.99 or to Windows 7 Professional for $99.99. The discounted OS is already a best-seller in Amazon’s software category.The company said the normal price for the Home Premium upgrade will be $119.99, compared to $129.99 charged for Vista. The Windows 7 Professional Upgrade will be priced at $199.99, and the Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade at $219.99.
A lot of Windows advocates will compare the $50 upgrade price to Apple’s $30 for Snow Leopard. What the $50-to-$30 comparison fails to note is that Apple’s OS doesn’t come in “versions”; when you buy OS X, it’s not partially crippled. Which means that a more fair comparison is Snow Leopard’s $30 to 7’s $220. Not to mention that the $50 price for Windows is for pre-order only; miss that deadline and you’ll pay $120 for an upgrade to Home Premium.
The “Top Tech News” article says this, however:
Baker pointed out that Apple’s Snow Leopard upgrade will be $29 for one user license and $49 for five users. Some observers have suggested, however, that Snow Leopard is more of an upgrade, while Windows 7 is a new OS.
You know, I wasn’t going to go in to this–honestly, I wrote that I wasn’t going to, before I looked back at the article and saw the above paragraph. But now I have to.
Windows 7 has many of the same boasting points as Snow Leopard–improved performance on multi-core processors, improved boot performance, kernel improvements and the like. But Snow Leopard goes a lot further. The entire OS has essentially been rewritten, dramatically reducing it’s footprint and installation time, and notably improving performance–in addition to the improvements listed for 7. Windows 7’s improvements are incremental in comparison, and has not unfairly been called a “service pack release” of Vista.
Both upgrades also boast of improved bundled apps. Windows 7 speaks of Windows Media Center, a refined calculator, new gadgets; Snow Leopard speaks of Safari 4, QuickTime X, improved iChat, better Time Machine.
Both upgrades talk about new features making the OS easier to use. Windows 7 has Jump Lists, Snap, Aero Shake and Peek; Snow Leopard has improved Exposé and Stacks, a more efficient Finder, better Disk Eject, and faster wake-up and shut down.
Both improve accessibility; Windows offers Home Group sharing, Apple has more efficient file sharing and faster joining of Wireless networks.
In fact, when you go down the lists of improvements, the two OS’s have a surprisingly similar set of improvements. To call 7 a “New OS” as opposed to Snow Leopard a mere “upgrade” is patently false. Neither is a “New OS” in the traditional sense; Windows 7 only pretends to be, while Apple is more honest in both its labeling and the change in pricing.
But if one offers more than the other, it is unquestionably Snow Leopard. In addition to significant performance upgrades, Snow Leopard is a remodeling in preparation for significant future improvements; Windows 7 is an attempt to salvage the previous disaster of an OS release while pinning some new features on top. One is a streamlining, the other is a repair job. If Windows 7 is a better improvement over its predecessor, then that is only because its predecessor was such a failure to begin with. You don’t get extra points for not sucking nearly as badly as you did before.
The article (strangely, considering its title) goes a long way to pump up Windows 7 and make the Mac OS look more expensive. Why mention the $49 family pack for Leopard, for example, without noting that getting 5 upgrade licenses for Windows 7 Home Premium after the pre-order would cost $600? Or the “Ultimate” upgrade for a whopping $1100? Because you want to make the Mac OS sound more expensive, that’s why. But let’s not go into that, or the fact that the Mac OS is without serial numbers or copy protection, while Windows demands that you “Activate” your product every time you upgrade your RAM.
Is it really fair to compare the two? After all, if I have an x86-based PC (which I do) and I want to install MacOS on it, I can’t; Apple requires that I pay them for their hardware.
Microsoft, on the other hand, sells Windows to anyone without requiring that they buy their hardware.
The point here is that comparing Windows with MacOS is a bit of an apples-and-oranges deal for BOTH of them. It’s unfair to suggest that Microsoft is somehow screwing people without mentioning that Apple screws them far worse with their pricing on hardware AND attempting to require them to be locked into a sole-source provider on that hardware- Apple!
Anti-Microsofties often complain greatly about antitrust problems… but can you imagine how much more they’d complain if Microsoft initiated, say, a licensing program for Windows 7 and future versions of windows, and tried to lock people into only being able to use MS software on hardware systems that had paid MS for a license?
There’d be huge screams that MS was trying to use their advantage in software market share to rake in bigger profits by holding people hostage when it came to buying hardware. Those screams would be right, of course- that’s the way capitalism works (and where it fails).
Yet Apple does exactly that- holds you hostage and forces you to pay more for the same hardware- when it comes to THEIR operating system.
I’m not saying this should be changed; I’m just pointing out that comparing the two’s pricing policies on OS software isn’t exactly right because of the tied-to-certain-hardware-provider issue.
Personally, I think that Apple should be forced to sell their OS and software to anyone who wants to buy it and use it, without trying to control the hardware end of things. Apple consumers would benefit greatly thanks to being able to pick out their own hardware, spending less.
THEN it would be fair to compare MS and Apple pricing on the OS. Until then, it’s not.