AT&T's official stance is that there is no revenue sharing for the new iPhone.
Only the original.
But even still, the iPod touch is a $299, $399, and $499 device. The price tag alone entitles the owner to free updates for at least two years.
But as I said, you don't have to buy a single thing ever for either console. A game, movie, accessory, nothing. You could just buy it and use it for its media streaming features and you will still get free updates for the life of the console.
Windows Media Player is integrated into the OS. So it is an OS update when it receives a functionality update.
IE in XP is integrated into the OS as well, so an IE update is an OS update.
The thing with past Windows OSes is that software and hardware is generally compatible with that generation. If you bought Windows 3.0, it would run all of the 3.11 stuff. So you didn't have to buy the point upgrade.
Windows 98 brought a lot to the table that Windows 95 did not. For example, proper USB support. It also brought better DirectX support, standardized audio functionality, stability, it also built the roots for system wide hardware acceleration that we had in XP for many years and now have in Vista and OS X still does not have. Windows 98 SE was more of a service pack. You could download all of the updates for SE from the Windows Update site or pay for the cost of shipping for a CD. The only difference was the point revision. There was absolutely no reason for anyone with Windows 98 to upgrade to SE.
You can actually thank Windows 98's hardware and gaming support for the hardware we have today. The updated gaming support, better hardware capability, nVidia pushing out the RivaTNT and the original "Detonator driver", and those cheap Celeron 300As started hardcore gamers off in the world of overclocking, tweaking, customizing their computers to get every ounce of performance. Without Windows 98's driver, hardware, and gaming support, that wouldn't have happened. We wouldn't have had AMD see the potential and come up with the Athlon, which smacked Intel around. Intel wouldn't have had to fireback with the Core 2. Etc.
So you can thank Microsoft and Windows 98 for every piece of hardware in your Mac now.
And yes we know Microsoft did Windows ME. But you know, Windows 95 still ran nearly everything that Windows ME did. Windows 98 ran everything ME did. Windows 98 even ran most XP software if you modified the installer.
But let's look at OS X for a minute. Leopard was the first real major improvement to OS X since it was released. Every release so far has been minor, relatively speaking. No different than Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, and Windows ME, then XP. But, unlike OS X, if you decided to stick with 95 all the way to XP, you'd still be able to run all of that new software.
