MacWorld: Apple charges even new Mac users $19 for Mac OS X 10.2 upgrade, $129 for the others.

Can we say MacWorld NY was disappointing this year? No! We knew how it would be already. Apple must be thankful to all Mac rumor sites that prepared Mac users with bad news before the event, to not be disappointed then.

For me, the most disappointing thing wasn't the lack of PowerMac upgrade, but the price of Jaguar for current Mac OS X users. I had predicted on an earlier article that it should be free or almost free like 10.1 and that it would be released in late August or early September. I was wrong for the pricing. According to what I could understand on Apple's site, Mac users that buy Mac OS X 10.1 or a new Mac from today will actually be charged $19 for the upgrade to Jaguar and others will have to pay the full price of $129 even if they own Mac OS X. Please stop sending me mails asking me to tell you were to get Jaguar for free! Jaguar isn't free you must admit it. If you want to get it illegaly it's your problem but I will neither help you nor advise you to do so. If you don't like Apple's pricing policy, switch to Windows but you must know that Microsoft's pricing policy isn't better. As for .Mac, there is already a petition running asking Apple to not charge us money for mac.com email.

We didn't have only bad news or disappointements though. Apple dropped the price of the 5Gb iPod and released new 20Gb iPod with many new features which is really great news. Apple also released the long rumored 17 inch TFT iMac and dropped the high-end iMac's price $100. I thought they would drop $100 all the iMac TFT line but it's understandable, they have to keep margins up to stay alive.

For this year, the most accurate rumor site was ThinkSecret, they predicted almost everything for MacWorld, congrats!

To conclude, I can say that these days Apple wants Windows to Mac switchers so much that it forgets Mac users. I hope for Apple that a lot of Windows users will do the switch but I guess a lot of Mac users may switch to Windows too but it's not so bad after all ;) Apple prefers getting 95% of the market than keeping 5%.