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Price war brewing: Mac OS X Snow Leopard vs Windows 7

Published: Tuesday 9th June, 2009 | Author: Parm Mann
Products: Windows 7, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
Companies: Apple (All Apple content), Microsoft (All Microsoft content)
External reviews: Microsoft Windows 7

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In the midst of a long drawn-out and underwhelming WWDC conference in San Francisco, Apple revealed that its next major operating system, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, would be offered to customers as a $29 upgrade - a bombshell that would have been heard all the way in Redmond, Washington.

The operating system, scheduled to launch this September, will be priced $100 lower than the previous Mac OS X release. Either Apple's being generous, or it's hoping to put a dampener on Microsoft's Windows 7 - which is currently scheduled to launch a month later on October 22nd.

Dig a little deeper, though, and there could be more to it than meets the eye - indeed, Apple may actually be slashing the cost of its Snow Leopard upgrades in response to rumoured pricing from Microsoft.

Just days prior to the WWDC conference, a leaked Best Buy memo providing details of Microsoft's retail strategy was unearthed by Engadget.com. According to the memo, Best Buy will begin to presell Windows 7 via its website beginning on June 26th, with upgrade pricing listed as $49.99 for Windows 7 Home Premium and $99.99 for Windows 7 Professional.

Putting that into perspective, Windows Vista Home premium launched in January 2007 with an upgrade price of $159 for Windows Vista Home Premium and $199 for Windows Vista Business. Should Best Buy's memo prove to be accurate, the home-user orientated edition of Windows 7 will be priced nearly 70 per cent lower than the Vista alternative.

That's a generous decrease, but Apple, it seems, still has the upper hand. Snow Leopard will be first to market, and Microsoft will be hard pushed to match Apple's unprecedented $29 price tag. Furthermore, Apple will be offering users a five-license family pack for just $49. Microsoft, on the other hand, is yet to detail any multi-user packages.

They say competition's a good thing, and a price war between Apple and Microsoft could soon be raging. We're eagerly awaiting Microsoft's Windows 7 pricing structure, be it influenced by Snow Leopard or not, and in the meantime the Redmond giant has added Windows 7 to its online store, revealing its final boxart designs:

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Re: News - Price war: Mac OS X Snow Leopard vs Windows 7

Posted by Whiternoise - Tue 9th Jun 2009, 9:01pm

But in fairness against your point, Snow Leopard is not about features. It never was. The whole idea was that OS X Leopard was about all the new stuff, new UI, stacks and all that stuff (i.e. the whole "over 300 new features" thing). Then they realised that actually it bloated their operating system even though it looked cool and trendy, so Snow Leopard was brought in to make all the changes under the bonnet.

I'd say that all apps being 64 bit is a pretty big improvement, as is their "Grand Central" architecture along with the introduction of OpenCL. Snow Leopard is, first and foremost optimisation and it looks like it'll deliver. A 6GB decrease in installation size isn't to be sniffed at. Neither is searches being performed almost 90% faster apparently.

Windows 7 on the other hand IS a whole new OS, it's a lot lighter than Vista (the install clearly shows that) and it's been made a lot more usable and a lot less "hey this is just XP with a lot of bloat and Aero".

If MS release 7 as a fifty buck upgrade it'll be a landmark occasion, it's not even comparing like with like - even though most people see Snow Leopard as a new OS. As i said before, it's basically a glorifed service pack that's got too much in to give away for free.

EDIT: And i agree about the above, it's on the Air which is basically that they've realised that giving away a 64GB SSD or whatever it was is actually pretty cheap these days. However, the $300 drop on the macbook line is pretty damn good anyway.Quote

Re: News - Price war: Mac OS X Snow Leopard vs Windows 7

Posted by TAKTAK - Tue 9th Jun 2009, 9:01pm

Quote: article
Di*d* a little deeper, though,

typo :)Quote

Re: News - Price war: Mac OS X Snow Leopard vs Windows 7

Posted by aidanjt - Tue 9th Jun 2009, 10:46pm

Quote: Whiternoise
"10:16AM "We're also going to update the MacBook Air with more aggressive configs and pricing. It starts at $1499... the SSD config is $1799." Wow, that's a deep cut. $700 than previous."

From the Engadget WWDC feed.

So are you telling me the starting price of the MBA was $2,199?.. Or did someone fail very hard at mathematics?

Also, I don't care about US prices, because we don't buy at US prices, now do we?Quote

Re: News - Price war: Mac OS X Snow Leopard vs Windows 7

Posted by Ramedge - Wed 10th Jun 2009, 11:37am

Quote: aidanjt
You probably didn't shop around that much then.

I shopped around enough to get a good idea of how much 4 core xeons cost.

Infact nearly everywhere I looked was about the same. Scan at the time had them on their site for just over £420 a piece.

Then you've got to get a motherboard for those processors, one that can hold 8 sticks of ram.
So you are looking server grade motherboard - £200-300 would be a fair price if not more.

Then the memory,2gb DDR2 ECC Registered Ram that it comes with as standard - Again quite expensive at the time of purchase, I added an extra 4GB into mine

Hard drive/Graphics card wouldn't cost more than £200 in total

Then you have the Mac Pro Chassis - which is really well designed for great air flow so that the fans don't have to be spinning full pelt all the time.

I mean the closest you are going to get to a Mac Pro case is is top end Silverstone which you can easily spend £140-£200 on.

I have to say it is the quietest computer I have ever owned.

My Mac Pro cost little over £1500 - this is the 8-core 3.1 from this time last year.

Even if its was £100 cheaper to build your own its not worth it.

Quote: aidanjt
With fairy dust?

Every time I have phoned up Apple to place a big order for a machine i have managed to get 15% off.Quote

Re: News - Price war: Mac OS X Snow Leopard vs Windows 7

Posted by Irien - Tue 16th Jun 2009, 10:54am

OK Mac folks, time to put your one-button-mice to good use...

To support a business customer, I have to get two Macs for work. I have around 1500ukp budget. Ideally one will be used for demo/public-facing purposes, and one for light dev/support.

I'm ready to be converted... what's the best deal? I have to order this week or next.Quote

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