10.2 "comments" policy
 

Found this on MacSlash.

Basically, it appears that Apple wants feedback on it's 10.2 upgrade pricing. They're talking about "watching the site" and so forth. I'm going to be making a call to the Apple store tomorrow to register my thoughts, and I suggest that we all do the same if we feel that £99 (or $129) is too much to pay for an upgrade. Who knows? It can't do any harm, might do some good, and at least we'll have registered our opinions.

As the man says, though, remember that the operators aren't the guys who've decided the pricing - they're just guys like you and me working in a call centre and trying to earn a measly living, so don't go in guns blazing - this isn't the time for "twitch" commenting!

Cheers :)

Flog that horse! Flog it!
 

I submitted an open letter to the Mac OS X Feedback Page stating my feelings. Any thoughts?

"Hi there,

I'm just posting some feedback about Apple's current policy (or lack thereof) regarding those upgrading to Mac OS X 10.2 from a previous version of the software.

Now, I realise that there was no way we were going to see a repeat of last year's fantastic 10.1 upgrade offer, which basically came in at costing zero, but I feel that forcing existing users to purchase the full-price version of the software shows a little contempt for your installed user base.

With your current "switch" campaign, you've now got a lot of Windows users on board, and they're going to be used to an OS upgrade path that rewards those who stick with a particular company. Now they're on Mac OS, do you really think it's a good idea to start off with this example of "This is how we run things over on this side of the fence"?

I feel that even a nominal reduction in price (say 30% off) for those upgrading would be welcomed. After all, we ARE getting a totally new system, and I feel that most users are happy to pay for this. However, refusing point-blank to differentiate between new users and existing users in your pricing strategy seems to me to be sending out the wrong message. This combined with the total lack of clarity about .mac's pricing scheme (is the email-only account mentioned in your help pages free? How do we activate it? Does it screw our $49 offer? How much does it cost in the UK? etc etc) is leaving a bad taste in the mouths of many Mac OS X users. Unless something is done quickly, MWNY is going to be pounced upon by the competition as the "Money Grab" expo, and that precious "switch" campaign might start to reverse itself.

I suggest that this (lack of) policy be reviewed with the utmost urgency to limit the possibly damaging PR fallout of the current stance, and to persuade your loyal customer base that everything is indeed all right at Infinite Loop.

I look forward to watching this episode unfold on your website, and hope that the situation will improve in the near future.

I will also be contacting Apple Store UK to register my thoughts with them directly. I am instructing those who feel similarly about this to do the same.

Thank you for your attention in this matter,

Jonathan Barrett
--
OS X user since the Public Beta days, and loving every minute until yesterday..."

Here's my $.02: While it looks to me like Jag is worth paying for, a separate upgrade price seems like a small thing considering we were the guinea pigs used for the testing. Hell, they still haven't fixed the internet connect program or the fact that the modem drops your connection all the time in 10.1.x (but not in 9.2).

I submitted something to this effect on the feedback page.

Thankfully, the education price is only $70.

When giving such feedback to Apple, it would put more pressure on them if you would say that you are looking forward to their final decision on pricing before making your own decision about whether or not to buy it.

Markle

You think you have problems
 

Strangely enough the Euro is just about in parity with the dollar but if you want 'Jaguar' here it'll cost you over 160 Euro....

Also I bought a 10GB iPod about 6 weeks ago :mad:

Re: You think you have problems
 

Guys, we got 10 free OS X upgrades, and it's been well over a year since Apple charged for the first release. That's pretty much par for the course, if you keep past history of these kinds of things in mind. (OS 7.6 to OS 8; OS 8.0 to 8.5; OS 8.6 - 9.0, for example).

In 1999 I bought an iMac running OS 8.5.1, and just a few months later, Apple came out with OS 9. Upgrade cost: $95.00 as I bought the iMac just before the cheap upgrade price. Sounds like some of you got caught with the same thing.

Personally, from what I've seen of Jaguar in the literature and on a developer friend's set-up, I consider it a major upgrade--moreso than 10.1 was. It's worth paying for.

What would be great is if Apple would offer and upgrade edition and a full edition, like lots of software makers do. Charge full price for the full, and, say $45 for the upgrade.

They've never really done anything like this, but it wouldn't hurt to ask, and I have.

Phil

What exactly is a fair price? The fact that an upgrade is more than you want to pay, does not mean that it is too much. Do you people run around writing to chevron about the price of gas? No, you don't. If it's too expensive (for your budget) you don't buy it. Why is Apple or 10.2 any different?

I can't believe all the winging going on. It's making me ill.

Buy the upgrade, or don't. The clearest message to apple will be if you don't open your checkbook and buy 10.2. Whining won't help.

Yes, I'm happy to pay for new features and to have the latest software but if you have to buy a full retail every 2 years + .mac + new hardware (bluetooth, rendevous compliant) to make full use of what you can do then your life on-line is going to cost. A little show of loyalty for those who purchased OS X 10.1 wouldn't be missed though surely?

What irks me about the price of 10.2 is that included in this upgrade are the OpenGL drivers to use features of my graphics card such as vertex shaders and texture compression which should already be there. When the GeForce3 was launched "in the mac first" Steve Jobs and David Kirk evangelised vertex & pixel shaders even though noone could use them because the drivers didn't exist. I would call that false advertising. And now I am supposed to be pleased that these features are coming in 10.2 and I can stump up another 100 quid for them.

As to the other new features I'm really not convinced there are enough, or at least ones that interest me, to be worth the price.

Just my tuppence anyway.

The people I really feel badly for are the new Xserve owners, who will need to pony up $999 for Jag Server unlimited. Yes they were told about this in the Xserve rollout but it still stings.

I won't be spending the $499 to upgrade my 10 user 10.1 Server this year. Maybe early next. Although maybe I can sell email accounts to some of youse guys; yeah, .craig, that's the ticket. ;)

merv@crarkoco.com

i'd buy that for a dollar!

By the way, to put this in a slightly different perspective: here's what the Windows world has to look forward to.

I especially like:

Microsoft unveiled Freestyle, which promised to unlock the operating system's digital media features via a remote control and new user interface, during the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

But digital media aficionados and other consumers will not be able to buy the new XP version and install it on existing PCs. Instead, they'll have to spring for a new system if they want Windows Media Center. Freestyle PCs could be used for either standard computing or digital entertainment.

It ain't all roses on the other side, either.

As I said, all anyone seems to be looking for is some sort of nominal tip-of-the-hat to those who have already taken the plunge. Hell, $/£10 off the price would really be enough for me to say "ach, at least they're acknowledging us"

I'm not moaning about the cost, it's the principle. I already own the basis of this software. This is an upgrade, not a platform change (like 9 to X). I know that it is a very substantial upgrade, but my cash helped to fund this upgrade. Surely I should see some sort of benefit from my investment. If Apple wants to play the capitalism card this month (which clearly it does, and fair play to it), then it should be looking at me as an investor.

At the end of the day though, I want OS X 10.2, and I think £99 is a "reasonable" amount to pay for it. I'm just worried that the bad feeling that the lack of an upgrade cost has caused will turn us all into supercritical nitpickers - "Dammit, Apple screwed me, so I'm going to pick up on every tiny glitch and complain about it vociferously to my friends" isn't going to help us, Apple, or Switch...

Apple's PR machine has been found wanting at this expo, and I just want them to make it right so that the mothership's shields remain intact.

One thing I've seen as a common theme is people wondering "will I need to pay $129 every year or not?"

I'm beginning to wonder about that, along the lines of what shape a 10.3 release might take. And I keep coming up with the answer - one that won't run on any hardware I have right now.

Based on the last couple paragraphs of this article:

it seems quite possible that the Mac hardware architecture will change a whole lot in 2003-2004. While not necessarily buying into the Intel idea, at the very least a move to 64 bit and HyperTransport would seem like a decent bet.

Which leads me to opine that Jaguar (plus updates) is the last version of Mac OS X which will run on current G3 - G4 systems. So, no you won't be paying for a 10.3 upgrade because the only way to use it will be on the new hardware you buy it with.

This does not mean that 10.2 is a dead end; there's plenty of life left in the old Cat we're getting. And a move to a higher performance architecture can only be a good thing, IMHO. And it will run an updated OS X, to be sure.

OK, you can tear me to shreds now. :D

I'm not moaning about the cost, it's the principle. I already own the basis of this software. This is an upgrade, not a platform change (like 9 to X). I know that it is a very substantial upgrade, but my cash helped to fund this upgrade. Surely I should see some sort of benefit from my investment. If Apple wants to play the capitalism card this month (which clearly it does, and fair play to it), then it should be looking at me as an investor.

Jay, you sound like you're kind of new to this and are finding this upgrade annoying. Apple has charged for upgrades of this sort many times before, and that without changing platforms.

Ex. in recent memory: 7.0 (1994?), 7.5 (1995), 7.6 (1996), 8.0 (1997), 8.5 (1998), and 9.0 (1999).

These were all upgrades for which Apple charged full price, unless you purchased a computer shortly before the upgrade, then you either got it for free or for a discount.

We've received 10 free upgrades since OS X. 10.1 could have conceivably been one that came for a price tag, but it was largely an optimization update with a DVD player and a few other goodies. Jaguar is much more than this, with speed enhancements, and also several new technologies and a slew of new applications. I can't think of an upgrade Apple's charged for (other than 10.0) that had as many new features as this one does. It seems to me most legitimate for Apple to charge for it, especially considering what we got with some of the upgrades listed above that we paid for--not to mention what I've paid for some Windows upgrades, which provided almost nothing but bug fixes in some cases.

Phil

I wouldn't mind a full price upgrade if there were one more upgrade in the 10.1 line: multithreaded finder and fix the damned internet connection problems. It's pathetic that apple assumes everyone will have broadband. Especially if they want marketshare to increase.

I'm in to group of people who don't normally upgrade each time a new release comes out. Hell, my laptop was running 8.6 until about 6 months ago.

OS X is a different beast though. Everything in OS 8.6 worked, and the only advantage to upgrading to 9 was to take advantage of the new features. Don't get me wrong, Jag has enough new features to warrent the price. But fix the last couple of things in the last system. Don't force me to upgrade so that the bugs might be fixed.

I will probably still upgrade (the acedemic price is more in my affordability window). But I'm a little miffed that the early adopters who have sung OS X's praises and trudged through the worst of the trouble shooting (anyone remember the ppp bug?) are being sluffed off.

I guess the real issue is that I'm on the bottom end of the demographic that apple shoots for, so it's a little hard for me to keep up all the time. And this isn't just an apple thing: MS is bitching that Apple isn't switching people to OS X fast enough, but I know only one of the dozen PC users I work with who has upgraded to XP...and that's because he just bought a new laptop that came with it installed. The average person simply can't afford to play the upgrade game...and shouldn't have to if s/he only wants basic functionality (i.e. dial-up modem access that actually works).

Did that clearify mi displeasure a little more? This isn't simply whining that I want more stuff for free. I want the stuff that was supposed to be functional to work as it was intended. I don't want to HAVE to upgrade.

sbur, from what I heard and saw demoed at Jobs' keynote, the Finder in 10.2 will be multi-threaded.

I'm not sure what internet connection problems you've had, as I've had no trouble with dial-up or broadband. Have you tried our Network troubleshooting forum to see what kind of help we might be able to give?

Yes, that's what I've been told as well. But this is a pretty minor beef. I've only had the finder freeze bad enough that I could force quit (had to reboot) twice since 10.1. That alone is miles ahead of where we were two years ago.

The big problem is that my G4 running 10.1.5 at home is unusable for any kind of web surfing (reading on-line journals, email, etc) because of the instability of the modem connection....which bring us to:

Yes, I've posted a couple of times. I've also posted at MacNN and on the apple discussion boards. The "best" solution is to connect at a slower speed. But even that isn't a real fix.

The problem (as a number of others have also reported it) is that the modem frequently disconnects with an "other side not responding properly" error. Sometimes you can be on for 10 minutes, sometimes only 2 or 3. As for the advice: One camp says it's the phone line quality....but the same computer has no problems in 9.2. Also, PC's connecting throught the same phone line have no problems. Another camp says its in the modem script, but I have yet to find another script that solves the problem (Zoom was suggested).

The discussion has pretty much died down for lack of response from Apple, but it has been a consistently voiced problem since the public beta. Given all the data, I've begun thinking it may be a firmware problem...my laptop (cinfigured that same way as the desktop in question) has no problems over the same line connecting with the same modem script.

But this is all an aside from the fact that it's a bug that I don't want to have to pay an upgrade fee to have fixed....maybe.

Internet usage over a phone line is the only problem I've ever had with OS X. Thanks to Finlay Dobie, the biggest problem (the legendary ppp freeze) was dignosed and fixed. This one has not received such attention for some reason.

sbur, I've experienced the disconnect problem you're mentioning when I'm on the road and using family and friends' standard ISP dialup connections. Not very often, and it hadn't occurred to me that this might be an OS X bug. Certainly worth checking out.

Amazingly, when I use AOL dial-up on the road (yes, I've kept one of those $4.95 accounts), it's rock solid. They do use their own protocol, though, don't they?

Phil

I don't know about AOL's protocol, but a number of different ISP's have been implicated which leads me to believe it isn't an ISP problem.

The weird thing is that my iBook running the same version of OS X and using the same modem script does not have the same problem over the same phone line. This almost makes me think it could be a firmware problem. The G4 was built about a year before OS X started shipping with new machines..... but I know next to nothing about tracking that down, so I suffer with a crappy connection at home.

Someday I hope to be gainfully employed (Post Doc is not a money making venture) so broadband may well be in my future....Or so I keep hoping. :)