That's actually a bad example, since a beer drinking club purchases beer from the market and it shows up on it's invoices, just like the OEMs.

Apple is like a beer drinking club that brews its own beer and has costs associated with doing that, from raw materials to labor costs. Not sure what the difference between those two clubs is regarding how they resell the beer to their customer.

Apple spends money on developing OS X in-house, the OEMs outsource the development to Microsoft. They sure can say it's complimentary. A hotel that gives free breakfast can say their food is complimentary regardless of whether they hire an outside firm to make it or if they make it in their own kitchen.

There was a report in the Guardian that they charged 75c per device, but later Google denied it.

Why should we listen to someone who can't spell the two letter word "we" correctly?

C:\> choco install VisualStudioExpress2013WindowsDesktop

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

The significance is that Open Source doesn't automatically mean not bloated. Just see Mozilla, Open/Libre Office etc.

Debian could argue that, since they make it freely available to all, but I doubt your argument would stand up in court. Apple knows exactly how much OS X developments costs, and since they're not a charity shareholders wouldn't agree if OS X dev costs exceed Mac profits. If they say it is zero, then they would have to demonstrate that they it for free from the developers which they didn't. They paid them salaries, bought office space and hardware just like the OEMs paid MS.

What bull crap. The price is what the market will bear, not how much it costs to make something. And software isn't special in this regard. Do you really think it costs ~$100 to dig out one barrel of crude oil? $15k to extract and make a diamond ring?

When was the last time you went to your boss and said "I can afford luxuries like A/C at home now, you're paying me too much, why don't you give me a pay cut and reduce the company's products' price to customers so they have more money in their pockets?"

If you find gold bricks while digging in your yard and they legally belong to you, would you sell them for $50 because thats what you would charge for digging someone else's yard for an hour?

The cost of the OS is definitely not zero. Apple only allows OS X on Macs, which means you're forced to purchase a license to OS X(and future "free" updates to it) when you buy a Mac. Mac sales revenue are directly used to fund OS X development. When reporting earnings and profits, OS X costs are included in the cost of sales revenue of a Mac just like the Intel CPU is. If OS X was really $0 and the costs not passed onto Mac buyers, it would be available to install legally on PCs and VMs like Debian is.

This is against the quote referred to in the summary:

It's because Windows boots too fast.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/arc...

That means you're buying a license to use OS X and updates when you buy a Mac, regardless of whether you want it or not.

It is definitely relevant. Where does the money for the development of OS X come from? Are they a charity like Debian? No.

They get the money from selling Macs. Which means the buyer of Macs is paying for OS X regardless of whether they want it or not.

Let me quote the summary here

If Apple gave away OS X to everyone to install on VMs and PCs for free like Debian does, they could conceivably they aren't charging Mac buyersbut are using profits from hardware sales for charity and public good.

Congrats, you(and the site you downloaded it from) just broke the law by committing copyright infringement and piracy.
http://androidandme.com/2009/0...

Also, http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

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.