Apple put out a press release yesterday, formally announcing the official El Capitan release, later today.

My favorite part of the release, towards the bottom, is a section titled Pricing & Availability:

OS X El Capitan is available as a free update starting Wednesday, September 30 from the Mac App Store. El Capitan supports all Macs introduced in 2009 and later, and some models introduced in 2007 and 2008.

I just love Apple’s embrace of the free operating system model. It started with the release of OS X Mavericks back in October 2013 (Craig Federighi famously said “Today we’re going to revolutionize pricing”). The move was pooh-poohed and, eventually, embraced by the Windows universe.

Charging money for the OS was putting up a barrier, one that either allowed people to move to another brand or, more likely, one that kept users from upgrading. Charging money for the OS was pure friction. Making the OS free and easy to install is a major reason (along with controlling all the hardware) Apple’s OS fragmentation is so low, both for OS X and iOS.

Smart, smart move by Apple.