When Leopard was delayed early this year, a lot of my friends who use Windows took the opportunity to guffaw that the four month delay was equivalent to Vista’s five year delay.
Pricks. The lot of them.
Playing with an iPhone this weekend has made me realise where we’re going with operating system. The earlier realisation that Apple had “stuck NeXTStep on a phone” was one thing.
I’m pretty sure that Apple will charge iPhone users for a 2.0 software release is a second thing altogether. I bought Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”. Would I buy iPhone OS X 2.0?
My iPhone and my Mac are both running flavours of Leopard. In the next two years we’re going to see probably 12 dot updates to Leopard (10.5.1 is about to hit the streets) and we’re likely to see some updates to the iPhone software too, most notably in February when they’re about to release the SDK. These can be seen as maintenance updates much like the dot releases in Mac OS X. They tend to add minor functionality as well, but the major advances are left to pay upgrades.
I don’t remember ever paying for an upgrade for my Palm, Newton or mobile phone. But then the Newt didn’t even last a year before it was canned. The Palm Vx ended up in a drawer when I got my Sony Ericsson T39m and since then I’ve had a new mobile every year and never bothered upgrading any software. The ability to upgrade has never been advertised…
I did upgrade my Nokia N800 and I will again when OS2008 is released later this year. Nokia have stated they’re not expecting everyone to buy these devices as this is part of a strategy to build a platform rather than make a killing just yet.
From that point of view I think Nokia and Apple are the platforms to watch.
Obviously I’d rather not be charged for an OS upgrade for a phone, even a phone as sexy and capable as an iPhone, and I’d hope it was included in the monthly fees that Apple is gouging out of O2 (which in turn it gouges out of me).