Let’s Kill the OS Upgrade Disc – CBS News: “

Not having an upgrade disc is what the Mac OS X series has had from the start. Even Snow Leopard is that way despite the fact you are supposed to be on Leopard to pay the upgrade reduced price rather than full box set price. Snow Leopard is a bit of an outlier at any rate.

But this guy is saying just put in a subscription. Apparently he didn’t hear the corporations that paid just such a subscription to Microsoft and got nothing for it screaming for blood a few years back. And again was not listening too closely when that fee gave them Vista and broke rather sizeable chunks of their software and IT processes.

No way. If Mac offered a subscription for OS upgrades, even then I would say only maybe because sometimes old software you need breaks and you can’t upgrade until it’s ready to go. And until it’s ready, I’ll keep my money. With Windows, it seems you pay to break the majority of your software for home users, being games and fun bits that aren’t always written so well or on enduring APIs.

Applications, on the other hand, I’m all for his approach. In-app upgrades, fully downloadable. Of course, most of the solid apps do that already. At least on the Mac. Sorry, but I’m still amused at the catch-up. People seem to think the Mac is fan boy base and not capability. I got onto this platform after running Windows, Unix and Linux as my primaries for many years. I went to it because it works, and it’s higher quality. Losing some software options was outweighed by having this sort of capability and maturity already there for the past half decade. And it keeps getting better. I’m not turning the clock back. It’s just good to see another platform, especially the dominant one, trying to at least start to move forward at last.

Now about that WinFS thing…….. 😉