prizrak
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$19.99 is a great deal for Mountain Lion. Anyone know why they're moving to cheaper and cheaper OS releases?
In their case money is in the hardware really. OS X basically only runs on their hardware (hackintosh is not nearly large enough to matter) so they make the money from that. On top of it OS X drops support for earlier hardware fairly regularly forcing hardware upgrades and again money to Apple. What they get with cheap OS's is a rapid upgrade cycle for their customers, meaning that ISVs don't have to worry about compatibility with more than one or two previous releases. On top of that they are growing their ecosystem, look at iMessage as an example, first it was just the mobile devices now its their PCs. Same with other iCloud features and things like AirPlay, the more of those new features they can push out to the market quickly the more "lock-in" you get.