You have access to the Play Store if you download and install the freely-distributed Google-apps zip.
Congrats, you(and the site you downloaded it from) just broke the law by committing copyright infringement and piracy.
http://androidandme.com/2009/0...
If, for example, the camera or microphone doesn't work or stops working, how does Dell troubleshoot it to see if it's a hardware issue or a driver issue?
If you think the CFO of Apple does not know exactly how much the cost of OS X contributes to a Mac's cost, you must be thinking their accounting department is a joke. At the medium business that I work, everytime we make a phone call or print something, we need to enter a project code that it's billed to against. Every square foot and chair is accounted for and properly billed to the appropriate project and client. And it's not even a public company like Apple is. Trust me, Apple's accounting and operations departments know the numbers exactly. You cannot run a company successfully if you don't even know where your costs are going.
Google is known to charge for access to the Play Store and services, but it may not be much. All the patent royalties and licensing(like h.264 encoding) on the software could be as much as $20 a phone. If I am not going to use those features, why should I pay for them when I buy the phone? Same as with Windows vs. Linux.
What about the Surface Pro 3?
From the judgement:
The judgment at p. 21 states: "Having been assessed that there are not technological obstacles, the 'packaging' at the source of hardware and operating system Microsoft Windows (as it would for any other operating system for a fee) would actually respond, in substance, to a trade policy aimed at the forceful spread of the latter in the hardware retail (at least in that, a large majority, headed by the most established OEM brands); among other things, with cascade effects in order to the imposition on the market of additional software applications whose dissemination among final customers finds strong stimulus and influence - if not genuine compulsion - in more or less intense constraints of compatibility and interoperability (that this time we could define 'technological with commercial effect') with that operating system, that has at least tendency to be monopolistic".
Great, now if they can take the same logic to phones so that I can install Windows Phone(buying it for ~$20 if needed) on Android phones and iPhones, and get a refund on the OS on those phones, it would be great. It's like we lost a lot of freedom going from x86 to ARM.
You can do that on Windows Phone.
In principle, maybe. But Apple gives away its software free. It's the hardware itself that's pricey.
Really? So you mean I can legally download it from Apple and install it on a VM or PC? Download link?
Because people keep claiming OS X is free, when it really isn't.
Then people need stop claiming it's free like they're doing in this thread. You're paying for OS X when you pay for a Mac.
Really free(as in beer) software will allow you to run it wherever it can, like say, Linux.
If it's really free, can I download and install it legally on my assembled PC?
The OEMs are forced to set the default search as Google though, if they want access to the app store. This hurts alternative search engines.
In the end it's free or even makes money for the OEM because of the bundled software(like Google pays OEMs to have Chrome installed as the default browser). A similar machine without the OS won't have that subsidy, so it might end up costing more than one with Windows. Would be funny if the OEM would force people to pay extra for laptops if you want one without Windows.
For phones, it seems that the OS is part of the device, especially in case of iPhones (what else are you going to run on them) Keep in mind that iOS isn't sold separately either.
So all this does is punish the software developers that don't lock their software into hardware they sell. So if Microsoft stops selling Windows and force everyone to buy Surface laptops and PCs then they should be good.
Since computing is moving to tablets and phones, can we get OS refunds for iDevices and Android tablets and phones also ?
Also, is this applicable to Macs?
Wrong, there is a compatibility pack that can be installed. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us...
"You don't go out and kick a mad dog. If you have a mad dog with rabies, you take a gun and shoot him." -- Pat Robertson, TV Evangelist, about Muammar Kadhafy
