[nixgeek]

XP was still XP because Vista wasn't finished in time. Did you miss me saying that? Vista was meant to be released in 2003 when it was still called Longhorn. In all the time it took for Microsoft to "finish" Vista, all they came out with were 2 Service Packs. It's not that they didn't release anything because they were satisfied with the product.....all of the malware and security issues made sure of that. They were busy patching something that wasn't good enough for release to begin with. Now with Service Pack 2, XP has become much more stable but it's still far from perfect.

With each major release of Mac OS X, there have been significant changes made under the hood. Moves to the current FreeBSD branch with the Mach kernel and various other improvements have justified the releases. Besides, this has always been the case even before Mac OS X was released. System 6, System 7, System 7.5 (didn't mention 7.1 because I don't know if that was a pay release), Mac OS 8, Mac OS 8.5, Mac OS 8.6, Mac OS 9. Each one of these brough about improvements that made it better than the previous version, regardless of the duration time between releases. Same for Windows. You can't tell me that the 2-3 year difference from Win NT 4 to XP wasn't the same as the difference from 10.1 to 10.4. That's about the same amount of time, man! And Windows was SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive on all major revisions compared to the $129 charged for Mac OS X.

As for Mac OS 9, there's still hardware coming out that is compatible with it. However, as we move from the PowerPC to Intel that's waning faster. We're going to start seeing that with legacy Windows operating systems if we haven't already. At this point, I don't know how common it is to have computer users with Windows 98 especially with how cheap PCs are nowadays, so that would negate the need for companies to support Windows 98 at all.

And as far as upgrading, no one is forced to upgrade. There are people here who are using 10.3.9 quite happily and don't have the need to update to upgrade to 10.4.x. That might change with 10.5, but only because it brings some good stuff to the table. With 10.4, we got some nice speed bumps and features, but nothing that significant to make those using 10.3.9 to jump to the next version. Just like those using Windows 2000 and are quite content with it. So your point on this is not valid either.

To be honest, you sound more and more like a shill for Windows and Microsoft. It's rather obvious that you are content with Microsoft and Windows....that's good for you. If you have to ask why people need to change without even giving it a chance, you're just wasting everyone's time on frivolous chatter. This topic has been discussed since the early days of Macintosh and Windows....it is getting quite old. The proof has been presented to you as to why. If you're not willing to accept the truth and keep fighting it, then there's nothing more to say really.