Well yeah. Imagine for a 250$ “Operating system” to take weeks until it performs the same as a FOSS OS.
Edit: 259€.
Ok, this is the second time I’ve seen this $250 price. Where did you get that from?
Worst I’m seeing is ~$60 for a usb set up to install Pro along with the license, and you can easily get OEM Pro licenses for far far less.
Windows 11 Pro, doesn’t matter if it’s just the License or with USB, officially costs 259€. Which is ~289 USD.
https://www.microsoft.com/de-de/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h4/000P
And even for the US, it’s 200$.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h4/000P
This is just the official price. Of course, you’ll almost always get free Win 11 Home with new computers, or a Volume License for 10€ from ebay, or you just don’t activate it. But the official price by M$ is 259€/200$. Which kinda means they think it is worth that much, and it would be justified to charge germans almost 300 USD for “an advertisement delivery platform strapped to a program loader”.
Fair enough. Just always seemed like a weird repeated sticking point.
For anyone looking to buy it cheaper, look for OEM key resellers. It’s the discounted price for companies preinstalling Windows. You can only install it on one device though, instead of whatever “multiple install grace window” they allow normally.
For anyone wanting it for free, MASgrave utilizes some sort of loophole with an official licensing method meant for corporations to get Microsoft to grant you a valid official license key for free. Microsoft can’t go back and somehow differentiate these keys from paid legit ones, so there’s no risk. Just make sure you’re getting MASgrave from their official source on github so there isn’t any malware snuck in. It also has some functionality for Office licenses as well.
Also worth noting that with effort, you can excise the overwhelming majority of the anti-consumer bullshit from Windows. Not really accessible to the average joe though, real easy to break shit or not disable things properly so they get re-enabled through updates.
Windows 11 Pro, doesn’t matter if it’s just the License or with USB, officially costs 259€. Which is ~289 USD.
https://www.microsoft.com/de-de/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h4/000P
And even for the US, it’s 200$.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h4/000P
This is just the official price. Of course, you’ll almost always get free Win 11 Home with new computers, or a Volume License for 10€ from ebay, or you just don’t activate it. But the official price by M$ is 259€/200$. Which kinda means they think it is worth that much, and it would be justified to charge germans almost 300 USD for “an advertisement delivery platform strapped to a program loader”.
$160 for OEM Win 11 Pro, or $120 for OEM Win 11 Home. Just be careful because swapping hardware could break the license, and you’d need to call M$ to get it fixed.
Or just install w/o a license key and deal with the watermark (I assume it’s the same as w/ Win 10). That’s what I did since I primarily use Linux and only use Windows to test random stuff.
Holy shit, that’s wild lol. I’ve only been thinking about the Home version, which you can get around here for about 140 bucks at most 😅
