is to trump Windows 7 with the release date in September, one month before Microsoft debut.

Apple desktop will be totally being revamped with most system applications taking advatage of the 64 bits architecture.

Apple is offering the upgrade to Snow-Leopard for a meager 29USD, almost 1/2 of the rumored W7 upgrade offer to Vista users.

One can dig more at (Apple) World Wide Developers Conference.

cheers ...

It is important to note that the upgrade price is from Leopard only I believe, and the price differential gets much greater really quick when dealing with the family packs, which is a $49 upgrade from a family pack of Leopard, which is 5 licenses.

I know this because it is exactly what I am looking at doing I am probably going to purchase Leopard as it is the last version to run on PPC form the looks of things, and I have one PPC iMac to update, and update my laptop in the meantime to allow me to utilize the newer version of Handbrake. Then pay $50 to update to 10.6 when that hits.

Seablade

Nice head up. 50USD for 5 licences - that is cool!

cheers ...

if you compare the specs on a MBP to a similar Dell then the price is about the same

but a lot of people don't want to spend $1700 plus tax on a laptop. they will be happy with a $600 laptop. until Apple comes out with a computer at that price range, it will just steal the high end from Dell and HP. I don't think MS cares because I think they worked out some secret deal with Apple and they will make it up on Exchange 2007, MS Office sales and iphone sales. believe it or not MS gets a cut of every iphone sold.

I've installed Vista SP2 and Windows 7 RC on a 5 year old Dell Inspiron and if you spend $30 to upgrade it to 2GB RAM then it works just fine.

Again upgrade pricing there, but the family pack was ALWAYS a great price, especially when compared to the fact I could get 5 licenses of OS X for cheaper than I could get a single decent license of Windows.

Seablade

Hahahaha, Microsoft getting money from Apple for every iPhone sold, that's great. The only way this would possibly happen is if Apple licensed the technology to open word documents but with docx being an open standard and previous word formats having been reverse engineered for years, this isn't going to happen.

I bet you see men in black suits and sunglasses around every corner, don't you?

I recently bought a Macbook Pro from the Apple Store and if you show your receipt when Snow Leopard debuts it will cost $10. Not sure the exact dates you had to purchase the computer for it to be legit.

I bet you see men in black suits and sunglasses around every corner, don't you?
Apple licensed ActiveSync from MS along with Google and Palm. That's how the iPhone can integrate with MS Exchange and how people can manage iPhones through the MS Exchange tools. Apple uses ActiveSync for MobileMe and Google uses ActiveSync for their data sync products as well.

there is also the FAT32 patent that Apple may be paying licensing costs on as well.

With SL having native Exchange 2007 support I think that Apple may have licensed MAPI as well. Not sure if that requires a license.

I have a personal conspiracy theory that MS, Apple and Google have a secret alliance to get rid of Nokia and RiM. MS seems to be flooding the market with ActiveSync just like they did with DOS and Windows so long ago. Even iPod touches have ActiveSync since they can hit Exchange server

Not very likely. MS is not likely to follow up on this, the moment they did there would be a mass exodus to an open source filesystem and they would have to inlcude support for it in Windows. Not to mention the negative press it would create.

Along with this though, there are open source implementations of FAT that they may not want to push to court for the chance of losing.

And of course the kickback they would recieve from the EU which has already shown itself to be anti-monopolistic(Possibly to a fault) when it comes to MS that if they followed up on the Patent they might end up suffering yet another fine.

In as far as the licensing of activesync, I don't know the terms of the licensing agreement to say whether or not they actually get money for every iphone sold, or were paid a bulk sum up front, or some combination of both. I owuld however bet that the cut they get of the iPhone sales is extremely small.

Seablade

It was a couple days after WWDC, I just don't remember the exact date.

Seablade

$10 update license. And only for newly bought mac machines? Hmmm ... Time to revolt here.

cheers ...

i think isupply estimated $30 licensing per iphone, but that was for everything. i'm pretty sure i read that a large part of MobileMe now runs on ActiveSync, just like Google's G1 syncing.

but you have to think of it this way, say MS gets $30 per copy of WinMo sold. Around $15 is dev costs. For ActiveSync the dev costs are already part of Exchange Server development so it's probably almost as good as free money especially since people will pay for it even though they will never touch Exchange. and no need to worry about putting too much resources into WinMo development

I haven't heard of them letting you go to the store to get the 10 dollar copy of SnowLeopard with receipt, however, you are eligible to sign up at http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate and take advantage of the offer.

qhn: Apple has always done this. When a machine is purchased after the announcement of a new OS or iLife you're eligible for the new version for a song. And don't forget that for people who have Leopard right now they're eligible for Snow Leopard for 29 bucks anyway.

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Alent: Fine, I'll give you that Apple might be licensing the relevant technology to get the iPhone/iPod Touch working with Exchange—though it's very possible Apple has access to this technology freely from their crosspatent agreement back in the late 90s—but like SeaBlade said, I seriously doubt they're paying anything for FAT. And if Apple is paying a licence I, again, seriously doubt they'd be paying 30 dollars per device for it.

Also, please tell me where you read MobileMe has Microsoft tech in it. THAT is hughly suspect.

Cool to know, I should pay more attention to Apple offers often.

cheers ...

By the way, on the topic of the FAT patents...

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/n...ent-claims.ars

It is a good bet that it won't even be an issue really. I agree with the analysis on it as well, support for no filenames longer than the 8.3 is old enough now that it shouldn't be an issue, and when it is there is the msdos filesystem that only supports it.

Seablade