The other day I received a letter from a reader wondering whether he’d get a discount on Mac OS 10.5 Leopard if he bought a new Mac for Christmas. He hadn’t been following the news lately, so he wasn’t aware that it won’t actually ship until the spring of next year.
Here’s what I told him, even though I don’t like the answer: Apple is very stingy in its operating system update policies. If you buy a new Mac after an Mac OS X upgrade ships, you can usually get the upgrade for a modest shipping and handling fee. Otherwise you pay the full price, even if you bought the previous operating system version the day before.
To be fair, Apple has occasionally instituted a somewhat more liberal policy, where the mere announcement of an actual shipping date is enough to trigger the upgrade discount, but I don’t see things moving in that direction.
In fact, I fully expect Leopard will cost more, partly because I expect you’ll get a lot more bundled applications. I’ll get to that shortly, but I am certainly not happy about the whole thing.
Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter. [1]