Last week, Microsoft’s Canadian tentacle arm accidentally released the prices our neighbors to the north would have to shell out for the upcoming Vista. With the recent release of Vista’s first Release Candidate, Redmond has opted to let the rest of us in on the fun.
The four versions of Vista will be Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate; prices are available for full retail versions or upgrades. We approximated US prices last week based on Canadian prices and those estimates proved to be around $30-$50 higher than the actual prices.
As for the different versions, Home Basic lacks the Aero UI that Microsoft has been touting as its answer to Aqua. Premium adds Aero, Media Center features, tablet support, DVD authoring and burning and more. Business will lack the Media features and add higher end management features (but keep the tablet features). Meanwhile, Ultimate will roll together features from both Business and Premium into one diamond-encrusted package. Home Premium is a small enough price increase from Home Basic, with more than its fair share of feature upgrade, that I would be surprised to see the latter selling many copies.
But the real question, for Microsoft, who is shooting for 400 million Vista users within two years of release, is whether Vista will be a big enough upgrade from XP Pro, an OS many consider to be good enough, to warrant consumers spending their hard-earned cash.
And a complete version of Tiger is $129. Add $79 for iLife and you're still better off...
I predict that Vista will be Leopard's best sales enhancer. Apple's ad guys most likely already have some humorous Vista ads in the can.
I believe if you purchased a complete version of Tiger today, it may even come with the current version of iLife '06. Furthermore, you purchase a copy of Leopard when it is available at ~$129, it will come with iLife '07. It appears that Microsoft is doing some serious feature partitioning with its pricing of Vista.