Home › Forums › AFP548 Community › Open Mike › What does this group think about the upgrade pricing?
😈 Here’s my opinion that I recently shared with Apple. No response of course.
“As principal of a digital imaging/printing/prepress facility here in the Bay Area IÃve been a strong evangelizer for Apple for over 15 years. IÃve purchased more than 50 machines and currently operate more than 20 on a daily basis.
The graphics industry would not exist in the form it is today without the mac, but AppleÃs OSX upgrade policy is so offensive to me I may just begin the transition to PCÃs myself!
I love System X but I donÃt yet use it at my company. There are still too many bugs to put it into full production and frankly System 9 works fine! However I use it at home and I love it.
We operate our own web/mail server and utilize an intel box for it running Free BSD. It was running linux but the consultant I used (a 22 yr old hacker type) decided to switch me over. It doesnÃt have a graphical interface and itÃs very difficult for me to implement any changes. Looking at OSX Server 10.1 and AppleÃs claim about its legendary ìease-of-useî I thought IÃd move over and rid myself of being dependant on this flakey consultant.
I bought a used G3 Blue & White as a server and a 10 client copy of MAX OSX Server.
Well, IÃm a pretty experienced mac systems guy but setting up OSX Server is not easy! The documentation is pathetic! The only place to go for help are the user forums and then you see how inadequate appleÃs support for the server is and how badly flawed the product is. Yes its powerful and yes its interface is good, but most of the time you have to use the command line anyway to do anything!
So now I see a spiffy new upgrade to Jaguar and find out that Apple expects me to pay $499 to upgrade!!! ItÃs the worst thing IÃve seen from Apple ever!
OSX Server got off to a good start but itÃs obviously a flawed product. There are many bugs that are still to be fixed and yet we are to be forced to pay double what weÃve invested so far with no guarantee that any of these bugs will be fixed and no promise of any improved documentation, in fact, NO ACKNOWLEDGEMENT WHATSOEVER THAT EXISTING USERS EXIST AND ARE VALUED BY APPLE!!!!
I will never upgrade this software at that price, especially since Apple oversold its capabilities the first time around. YouÃve succeeded in stopping me dead in my tracks at 10.1.4.
I am completely disgusted by your company and itÃs non-existent upgrade policy.”
I’ve joined a couple of online petitions complaining about this but there appears to be no acknowledgment from Apple to any of it’s exisitng users.
What do you guys think?
i am in total agreement with you—its sickening. What upsets me is that there is no public response. Even a “We understand your concern but too bad” type thing to know they’re listening! I mean look at it—they only seem concerned with their past month’s customers!! what about those of us that migrated to OS X Server in the early days! However, after reviewing it, i doubt i would upgrade right now anyways…my only plan was to have it in case i wanted to.
I’ve had much better results home cooking my OS X server thanks to the help from this site.
I know exactly what would happen in an upgrade—say bye bye to all my custom configs—so in the long run I would have more time invested copying config files and modifying them back to the way they were in the first place.
In the case of a server, you can’t be in the mindset of a client system—where you want to upgrade for the new features. my own past experience has taught me this, unfortunately–now unless apple does something that really would knock my servers socks off, i dont foresee any upgrades for a while (unless home grown) 🙂