“Will Mountain Lion be a free upgrade? There’s some signs this is possible. The company recently began offering Mobile Me users free Snow Leopard upgrades in order to promote the move to iCloud,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld.
Why would Apple move to free OS upgrades? My thoughts:
• Partially to ensure rapid take-up of new operating system evolutions as it moves to make iCloud a central part of its multi-device computing experiences.
• Partially to put the kabosh down against Microsoft, which will ship its fee-based Windows 8 upgrade later this year.
• And partially to promote rapid Mac replacement — after all, in most cases, Apple ends OS support after two iterations, in order to run a secure system and to benefit from new system features, Mac users are therefore ‘encouraged’ to upgrade their Macs every two to three years.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: So far, Apple’s only official statement on OS X Mountian Lion pricing and availability is: “Mac users will be able to upgrade to Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store in late summer 2012.”