Windows 7 Home Premium Will Have A Family Pack

@my secret identity: they both get you porn?

poorGeek

@rt100 is loving his new MBP: I wont tell if you wont.

sqeakytoy of the apocalypse

@Signore Pinko-Panko!: I'd have to agree with that. I read past it and the greymatter kicked in and said, "was there something just not right in that statement?"

Excuse me, but since there is NO COPY PROTECTION on Apple's OS, isn't the $49 package a family-pack?

Toysandme

@eagles3 twits: *chirp*: Your family is NOT the norm. They are extorting nobody.

I already purchased 3 copies at the pre-order price...which cost me $150. So as long as the family pack is more than that, I'll be happy. :-)

@Matingmonkey is a proud eMac owner: They both "get you to the good stuff"...

Interpret that however you like.

@eagles3 twits: *chirp*: extorting money? really?
a.) they're not making you buy windows 7.
b.) they're offering a pretty cheap preorder upgrade special on single licenses, which is unheard of for MS, as far as I can remember.
c.) if there's a family pack preorder special that's cheaper than $150, I'd say MS is offering up a pretty good deal, far be it from extortion.

And if your family can't "survive" with only three computers, that's pretty sad. And I'm not convinced that the majority of families out there have more than three computers just because you said so. You might have to back that one up.

kineticarl

@rt100 is loving his new MBP: And how does the lower price of Snow Leopard have ANYTHING to do with the fact that a Windows family pack with 3 licenses will save money vs. buying individual copies of Windows?

@Valnen:

@psychiccheese: yeah we arent rich, but it is a necessity. Im in college and both my brother and sister are in High school. They each have older desktops, while my parents have laptops they need for work. Could we survive with 1 computer hell no, could we survive with three, absolutely not. Now im not saying that we need to upgrade all the computers, but having the ability to do so would be nice. If I'm paying X amount for a family upgrade, I'm gonna want it to cover my entire family if I want to.

Microsoft knows what they are doing, they are extorting money. And that, in this economy is just bad business.

@taniquetil: No, still doesn't make sense - because OS X updates every year, with a drastically improved version of OS X. It's like Windows 7 coming out every year, if one must insist on drawing parallels. The OS X updates, which come every 2-3 months or however often, are free, just as "service packs" like SP1 and SP2 did. I'm not even talking about "costs" or "good investments" when I question what TK-093 wrote - I'm not moving past the "service pack" misnomer.

"Snowy" is not a service pack, despite what you assert. For instance: on the upside, it has a lot of reworked and optimized (re: "faster") performance, and on the downside, It will not be a "service pack" for Macs without Intel chips.

The companies handle their OS updates differently. Calling OS X releases "service packs" is inaccurate. Service Packs 1 and 2 for Vista didn't drastically change performance (you can take that as 'good' for intel macs, 'bad' for PowerPC macs) from the original release of Vista.

As for costs, well... Despite what you consider a "good investment," I consider the years of paying for and using OS X revisions a better return for me. As for XP as a "good investment," maybe... but Microsoft certainly didn't WANT Windows XP to be lingering around; the market demanded it by not accepting Vista wholeheartedly. If this situation proves anything, it's that Windows 7 is the necessary "service pack," to try to move stubborn customers off of XP.

pixelpushing

Cheaper to buy TechNet and get the whole shmear to boot.

@superberg: (shh he thinks that he's making a witty comment about how macs are way overpriced)

rt100 is loving his new MBP

@eagles3 twits: *chirp*: you gotta remember, apple makes most of their money on hardware. MSFT relies almost entirely on software to propel itself forward. For macs, you pay high costs upfront, then the upgrades are cheap as hell. Microsoft makes you pay out the nose for software

and @WB: per user, windows 7 costs more than Snow Leopard. Period. Let's see, (I'm going to assume an upgrade from the most recent OS to keep things fair) so OSX 10.6 is $49 for 5 users = $9.50 per user. wow. cheap. And Win7 is $200 (but quite possibly much more) so that's $200/3 = $66.66 per user. That's over 6x as expensive, per user for Win7. Suck it up, windows OS licenses are much more expensive than Apple OS licenses. Apple just gets you at the hardware though!

rt100 is loving his new MBP

@$269.

rt100 is loving his new MBP

@URLyAdopter: well shucks, family of four and we have like 6 computers? oh geez....

rt100 is loving his new MBP

@eagles3 twits: *chirp*: really? how many families do you know that each person has their own computer? last time I checked, not everyone was rich, and we're still in a recession.

psychiccheese

@deanbmmv:

Better question. How many people have 5 computers in a family that they want to pay for to keep up-to-date.

Probably not that many.

You're disregarding the fact that the average home user, probably 90% of people, really don't care all that much.

We have 2 Computers running XP, 3 Vista, 1 Win7 RC. All the computers running Vista are chugging along quite happily with Vista SP2. Am I going to bother backing up data then doing an upgrade for all of them? It's just too much of a hassle. Vista SP1/SP2 on a garden-variety Core2 Quad w/ 4 gigs of RAM is good enough for everything my family would want to do. Good enough for anything 90% of people would want to do. At most I'll need two upgrades of Win7. Certainly not going to bother with 5.

Think about it this way. What do 90% of people user computers for? Internet, email, maybe creating some documents and Excel Spreadsheets, the occasional Powerpoint. They'll import pictures and some home movies, burn CDs, play music. Maybe they'll watch a DVD every now and then.

Do you need Win7 to do that? Hell no. Vista/XP work fine. There's no point in buying a 5-user upgrade pack which will provide marginal utility to only one maybe two of those computers.

taniquetil

@pixelpushing:

Actually, what he said makes a lot of sense. Snowy, to the average home user, has absolutely nothing they would want to pay for.

More-educated users say, "full 64-bit architecture, OpenGL3", but ask 100 people on the street that question, and 99 would reply, 'huh?'. Now ask those people if they would want to pay $30 for this thing. All of them would say no.

Snowy is a service pack to Leopard, which Apple is charging for. Service Packs 1-3 for XP and Service Packs 1 and 2 for Vista were free. XP has had a lifetime of almost 10 years now, with probably a few more to come. So paying $200 for an OS that lasts 10 years AND gets free updates: very good investment.

taniquetil

@sqeakytoy of the apocalypse:

Which is why Snow Leopard's upgrade is $20 less than Windows 7, and why the full version is $70 less.

@eagles3 twits: *chirp*: Wow you've really got yourself thoroughly convinced that a 3-license family pack sold for less than the price of 3 individual licenses is "screwing people over" because it is only 3 instead of 5 licenses.

@token_starless_commenter: And he IS the self-confessed BeerMan, so ... I guess it's excusable.

@hellrider: Jeez, with the rampant grammar and spelling errors so prevalent out there, that registered in my brain as "something odd here" but I just ignored it...

I will take it! There are 6 computers in this house, and all of them are hungry for Windows 7.

PaddyDugan

Is that a "Microsoft Tax" I smell?

pixelpushing

@TK-093: That doesn't make sense.

pixelpushing

@Harrison is playing FFVIII: Don't confuse him with facts. He's on a roll.

How many installs does the non-upgrade edition of 7 come with?

george9807

@WB: or buy one family pack of 5 and one single copy? Oops, 5 is still the better deal.

@soopafly: I have OSX and Vista + 7, and to be honest, I don't see any similarities.

I saw Steve Job's video where he explained the similarities, but I thought it was downright stupid, can you explain why its similar?

Matingmonkey is a proud eMac owner

@URLyAdopter: So you're a scientist with a family of self-created androids? Why didn't you make them Hackintoshes?

BFKelleher

@Colage: but you forget that sex with one's self does not create babies, except in a really tiny percentage.

sqeakytoy of the apocalypse

Family packs are good. Some of us don't have "human" families, but we do have a nice family of computers each with their own cute pet name.

@dsh: I thought that was Apple math, i.e., carry the five, add "x" times hundred dollars to the cost.

sqeakytoy of the apocalypse

@eagles3 twits: *chirp*: Family of five, we have 6 computers

@Nick: Did you not see the KY offer?

I got a family pack for Vista and it was a good deal. Now I have 32bit and 64 bit machines, I hope they are able to handle that in the new family pack.

hkancyr

@eagles3 twits: *chirp*: The Licences is per Computer not per person. And as many homes may only have 1 PC it really seem's rather redundant.
But then it may be possibly Apple try to get you to think that you need the family pack if you have five family members n not 5 PCs.

@eagles3 twits: *chirp*: Quickly becoming the present for rich people, maybe. Unless we're talking 300 dollar pieces of garbage from wal-mart.

@BeerManMike: Procesor badges are done by - holy shit - the processor manufactuers. Shocking, I know.

@kernel panic: 3 users X $200 a copy (+$200) = $800. Come one didn't you do high school math, you always round to 800.

@eagles3 twits: *chirp*: Most families can't afford 5 computers.

@psychiccheese: family of 5 we have 5 computers.

Only I read gizmodo.

Notebooks have changed the way things work. Come and meet us in the 21st century.

@andthepickles: From an OS that borrowed a ton from OSX, it's hard not to.

soopafly

@psychiccheese: the average person sees no advantage in having multiple Os's

@eagles3 twits: *chirp*: Suppose there's a family of six, and all six of them actually have a PC worthy of upgrading to Windows 7. But the family pack will only cover 3. They couldn't possibly buy TWO family packs, that would defeat your point! Microsoft is screwing them over!

@psychiccheese: just because your family has 3 or fewer doesn't mean many do. Part of the future, and quickly becomeing the present, is that everybody will have a computer so being able to accommodate an entire family is important.

@hellrider: Qualifised is perfectly cromulent.

I swear getting people to accept new words on Gizmodo is unpossible.

@Joshua L Lewis: Looks like Windows 7 will be a big hit in the torrents. Hopefully the TPB guys will be able to buy an island nation with their sellout money buy the time this hits the stores.

misterwho — according to my twitter feed, I'm still alive.

@Nick: That would definitely be a penis word worthy deal.

misterwho — according to my twitter feed, I'm still alive.

@Xjep: According to Mac forums... Mac users have way more sex than Windows users. So, you know, more kids.

@psychiccheese: And also, out of everyone who has 4 or more computers, they probably don't want them all running the same OS.

psychiccheese

finds this M&M buried inside the horrible trail mix...

misterwho — according to my twitter feed, I'm still alive.

@eagles3 twits: *chirp*:
How many households have 3 or less computers?
Many.

How many households have 4 or 5 computers?
Not as many.

do we have a loser?

psychiccheese

@Kaiser-Machead: Lol, I was thinking the same thing. Has a much better ring to it.

misterwho — according to my twitter feed, I'm still alive.

@eagles3 twits: *chirp*: In a family of 4 people, how many computers are there? Probably not 4 computers, unless one or more of the family members frequents Gizmodo. So basically, this deal is good for everyone who won't learn about it here.

psychiccheese

Yes, but apple charges for thier service packs. Are you spending $199 every year for a .1 .2 .3 release?

@eagles3 twits: *chirp*: I have a family of two and we have 3 computers eagerly waiting for the release of Win7... sounds like it fits me like a glove this time...

I hope they come up with a decent price though... I don't mind paying 200 bucks for a family pack

jlarroulet

Sorry to go a little OT, but I was wondering: If I get Snow Leopard and do the "Upgrade" install, will it still reduce the OS' overall memory footprint and strip the redundant 10.5 code?

How many people have only 3 people in their family?

Not too many.

How many people have 5 or less people in their family?

Many.

do we have a winner?

@Nekrik: that is not entirely accurate.

Mac OSx features many of the same features of Windows. And because of that it is compared to it. Lets see: both are GUI operating systems, Both allow you to surf the internets, both are useful for college, both can be used to make movies (debatable), and both required much the same amount of work and effort to create.

And yet one costs 5 times as much as the other, and doesn't allow for a reasonably sized family.

I would say people are justified in complaining. Microsoft is screwing people over with only 3 licenses in a family pack, I can think of very few families with only 3 People, and fewer with only 3 computers.

@Drew Hawk: 10.5 is almost 2 years old. younger than vista, but not by all that much. Apple does "service packs" too, in the form of point releases.

Its a different release style. Not bad, or good.

@dsh: cuz that makes sense

kernel panic

@Xjep: Doesn't matter, since the family could be made up of 12 people with Macs, and that single disc can upgrade the whole lot of them.

Kaiser-Machead

"..., but Apple's family pack pricing is $199 for five users. Only three (Mom, Dad and Junior) can use Windows 7, so theoretically it should be lower than $199."

Such BS reasoning, they're not the same the product. They have different capabilities, target markets, appications, etc..., etc... They are not interchangeable (despite everyone who likes to compare them and catagorize them the same) and they do not have interchageable price points. The sense of entitlement held by many Giz readers/writers is just silly.

Nekrik

i gotta go buy a family first. then i will worry about the rest of this rubbish. second thought, i will wait for one to appear on hobomodo.

Nick

@LizzieAgamedes: And I could care less. Whether they're taking a page out of Apple's book or not, it's for the freakin' better, so whatever.

The Apple comparisons do get annoying though. People should stop. It isn't always the case.

andthepickles

@LizzieAgamedes: Vista had a family pack too (although it was a limited time only deal)

@Xjep:
Apple sells 5 person family packs to help ensure that the entire family will really get a copy for the family price.

And why is Microsoft selling a 3 person family pack, when most families are 4 people? (to extort people)

@Improbable: I think all boxed versions of Windows 7 Home Premium and above come with disks for 32-bit and 64-bit. I'd hope the family pack would do the same

@BeerManMike: (its also way cheaper)

@Nick:
Crap on a fajita! Has it got that high already? it was 2.5 a few years ago... Shouldn't be that much higher next year when the crazies with all the kids and tin foil hats boycott the census.

Joshua L Lewis

Will these family packs work for both 32 and 64-bit systems, or will I have to buy one for my laptop and another for my desktop?

Improbable

the only bad thing about apples, is that you get to buy the family pack every year when they release a new version, with "over 200 new features!"

the win7 version will work into service packs for years, so will the mac version, but you know how you GOTTA have ultra-ice-kitten (10.7)

Drew Hawk

@Xjep: i believe it's 4.3

Nick

@Xjep: To justify the price by giving you something extra you probably won't use. Like if you go to the mall to buy shoes, both stores have the same pricing, but one gives you a ball of yarn, so you go to that one, you may not like yarn or use it, but its something extra, like your getting more.

BeerManMike

@BeerManMike:
Best game ever.
EVER.

Got the DS version for a gift last year, no DS, and I'm saving to go to Japan.

Meh, gives me more time to write/read.

How many installs does the non-upgrade edition of 7 come with?
I will be getting Home Premium E so thats a clean install for me!

george9807

Matter of fact why is Apples family pack 5; most families are made up of 4 members

Im glad MS is screwing people over with poorly labeled processor badges, multiple OS versions and confusing terminology. Keeps me with a nice and easy computer job and allows me to look like a genius.

Anyways, im off to play Chrono Trigger on my emulator for 3 more hours untill its time to go home.

BeerManMike

Ed Bott is the most annoying Microsoft appologist to ever live(period)

$200 for a retail copy of Home Premium, you say?

I'm guessing that puts the 3-user family pack at around... $800.

Chen, were you eating trail mix while you wrote this? The M&M's add too much sweetness when there's a lot of dried fruit in there, and really, if I wanted M&M's, I could get a kerflurgin' bag of M&M's. You guys are pushing it with the gum drop things and the extra sugar coating. Leave the candy-coated chocolates where they belong.

Kaiser-Machead

so if you got the discounted upgrade for 3 people you would have only saved $30 potentially? Lame!

Joshua L Lewis

someone is following Apple's OS pratice

LizzieAgamedes

@hellrider: I prefer Qualsified, like mama used to spell it.

Kaiser-Machead

Qualifised ?