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OS Upgrades are nice but not essential. There are still lots of people using Win 98 out there. And by contrast, there are people with Pentium I machines (and 128MB RAM) trying to run Win XP Professional and wondering what's wrong.
The upgrade is really only the beginning. I think what really scares manufacturers is the support that follows. If they could charge $35 per call, like Microsoft does, I think you would see more willingness to create upgrades.
I presume that when I purchase a device it has been optimized to work with the existing OS and while an upgrade would be nice, I would not expect my current device to be optimized, and might even become buggy, running a new OS.
Now ROM fixes are another story and I think HP has been VERY slow in getting those out. I very well may be purchasing a next generation PPC before HP releases a ROM fix for my 4705. Now that's sad.
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