No Vista before SP

Apparently I’m not the only one thinking this way about Vista. Though it looks awful pretty, and if I bought a PC with it installed I’d probably have a hard time convincing myself to buy another XP license just so I didn’t have to use Vista for a few months! On the flip side, I would definitely consider holding off a hardware purchase that included a Vista license for a few more months, knowing a Service Pack is imminent.

Of course, if they’d got it right from the start, I’d be running Vista already… as it stands, I’m not too likely to drop $200 on something that runs slower than XP, supports less hardware, has arguably-worse power management, and makes the occasionally excruciating UI mistake (most notable is the automatic replacement of the “sleep” button with “install updates and shutdown” where updates are available). Really, the main reason I’d switch is to have consistent UI between Office 2007 and the rest of the system (instead of the presently absurd Vista-ish (but not actually Vista) UI available on XP), newer hardware (insofar as XP isn’t available), and a paid-for upgrade path… I’d rather fork out my money now and trust that another 3 service packs are coming, rather than pay full price for an OS and then pay full price again, and again. I acknowledge this is partially a psychological thing stemming from my opposition for paying for point-releases, but even so… many of the alleged ‘upgrades’ in OS X are thoroughly trivial.