Think Mac OS Upgrades are costly?
Engadget has an interesting article on upgrade costs, Windows-style:
“If you were surprised to see that Microsoft’s Windows Performance Rating tool—which ranks PCs on how well they can run Vista—gives even some fairly high-end current model PCs relatively low rankings, here’s another number to wrap your brain around: $370 million. That’s how much Samsung estimates it will cost businesses and consumers to upgrade their computers in order to make them Vista-ready.” (More…)
The fact is that mac os is backward-compatible almost down to the lowest PPC - albeit with some hacking necessary to install and some functional limitations. The $100-each-year or so it may cost is nothing compared to that of a new box.
My advice? Scratch MS Windows altogether! If you feel like a new, modern operating system on your non-Apple Intel or AMD box, go get a linux/Unix distro – such as Ubuntu or Novell’s SUSE linux. They are FAST, theye are FREE (!), and usually 99.9% compatible with MS Office documentations thanks to OpenOffice.They also come with a heck of a lot fewer security liabilities such as malware and viruses.
Oh – both distributions above ALSO run on PPC chips. I tried Ubuntu on an old 350MHz iMac, and while it was not Breezy – as the name of the operating versioon implied – it ran far better than OS X.