OS X Mavericks adoption pushing past 7% in under 24 hours

>> "Apple has made it so easy to upgrade OSes"

I think this is the key. Last night it took only a few clicks to download and install Mavericks. I walked away, came back a couple of hours later and it was finished. My stuff was exactly where I left it.

When I used Windows only crazy people upgraded. Most people did a clean install of the OS then spent days reinstalling software and putting files back where they were supposed to be. I would have to wait until I had a few days free to make sure it didn't affect my work.

Apple is playing a slight of hand trick here. Mavericks isn't free. Apple makes higher margins than anyone else in the PC hardware industry, and you can only run OS X on Apple hardware (I'm talking broad market here, not hackers). What Apple has done is combined the hardware and software in to a single SKU.

No one gets all excited when a new version of iOS is free because that's just "the way things are" in mobile. I think the strongest reasons for paid OS updates on the Mac in the past are because of precedent. When IBM chose to license DOS from Microsoft, they created the operating system pricing model that would define all future operating system pricing models in the consumer market. Apple has always charged for OS updates because that's just how OS updates were done.

Apple has learned a great lesson from the success of iOS and the app ecosystem there. The consumer doesn't want to buy hardware and operating system software, they want to buy a device. That device should fulfill their other wants and needs, which are delivered through software that have been abstracted through the term "Apps".

A lot of people fear a wholesale re-implementation of OS X as a giant form iOS that runs on a laptop/desktop. I don't think that's where Apple is headed. Rather, Apple is going to apply the same broad strategies to OS X, but will maintain a distinction in the actual implementation (tactics, if you will).

I upgraded last night and haven't had any kinks. The only thing I had to do was re-set my maven environment variables for some reason (and was prompted to install a Java runtime when I opened IntelliJ, but that was an automatic process).

Other than that...no kinks. It's been a pretty smooth transition...just trying to get used to having menus on both monitors (which is AWESOME)

> What Apple has done is combined the hardware and software in to a single SKU.

When you buy an off-the-shelf PC, you have the same experience. The Windows licence is included in the price of the computer, for which the OEM pays Microsoft. However, subsequent major releases of Windows aren’t included in the price. Given the trend, that might change. I can imagine Microsoft making all future consumer OS releases free for those with a valid Windows 8 licence. For enterprises, little is likely to change, as they already pay for seats, not specific OS versions.

I don't know enough about the Apple ecosystem to have an opinion, but I wonder whether and how much Apple expects to save on support for older versions of the OS, over time.

In addition to being "nice", "free" may have payoffs that at least partially offset supposedly lost revenue from charging for the upgrade.