Current RDMD, please?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i4en9n$dpu$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Andrej Mitrovic" <andrej.mitrovich at gmail.com> wrote in message 
>> news:mailman.343.1282068838.13841.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>>> But he's a Mac user! :p
>>>
>>
>> Heh, that was exactly my thought ;)  I'm not a mac user (nearly-immediate 
>> obsolescence is one of the reasons I left the Mac world after giving OSX 
>> a serious try for a couple years). My primary OS is ten years old (unless 
>> you count service packs), and I'm perfectly happy with it (well, much 
>> more happy than I would be with the newer versions of it, like Win7 - I 
>> swear, MS's devs are getting to be like Mozilla's).
>
> I'm using a 10 year old Windows XP version, but the difference between the 
> Mac world and the Windows world is Microsoft cares about legacy 
> compatibility, and my experience with Mac OS X 10.4 .. 10.6 is that Apple 
> goes out of their way to make it difficult to build backwards compatible 
> binaries.
>

I got into OSX with 10.1 and 10.2, and my sister had 10.3, and my exprience 
indecates that Apple's outright disdain for anything that isn't *the most 
recect* go back much furthur than just 10.4.

>
> On the other hand, OS X upgrades tend to be cheap ($25) while Windows 
> upgrades tend to be expensive (hundreds of $).

That's news to me. Going from 10.1 to 10.2 was $125 (despite the fact that 
there was *very* little change as far as I could tell). Same thing for 10.2 
to 10.3. And of course, if you've gone from 10.3 (maybe even 10.4) to 10.6, 
then at some point along the way you have to buy new hardware, and it's not 
nearly as cheap as the machines Windows runs on. My Windows machine is older 
than 10.2 and Win7 would run on it just fine (even better than XP, from what 
I've heard).

I seem to recall seeing a lot of Windows upgrades that were only around a 
hundered or so, too. AIUI, the Windows upgrades that cost hundreds (plural) 
are generally the bigger ones, like XP Home to Vista Pro, or 
corporate-oriented edition to corporate-oriented edition.

Plus, Windows has a lot of free service packs. From what I've been able to 
tell, OSX just gives their service packs a new cat's name, tosses in a 
couple of gee-whiz gimmicks, and charges $125.