I gonna tell you how this is bad:

First of all you pay for ALL your Mac and you can't use it in all its glory 'cause a CLOSED company want you to pay for something that you ALREADY buy without knowing it, in the first place. You PAY for it already. You can't use it 'cause Apple want to charge you for something that you BUY and you can't do nothing about it 'cause your OS is CLOSED and THE ONLY ONES who REALLY have control over it is APPLE.

Now you understand how "this is bad" you Apple's lamb?

It's a bad thing for a company to saddle its customers with micro-payments to enable features on hardware that a customer already bought. Someone who purchased a Mac eligible for the upgrade already has wifi hardware in it capable of 802.11b/g/n, it's just that the firmware at the time of purchase had the "n" capabilities disabled. Anyone in "the know" lately knows that recent Macs were n-capable in hardware, just that the firmware & software didn't permit it yet. One would then assume that the n-capabilities would be provided down the line via "Software Update," not via an additional purchase.

Does this start a precedent for Apple to charge for other software and firmware updates? Is this a slow start to ease Mac customers into acceptance of paying for updates of currently owned products in the future? Like if the new Airport Extreme is buggy and unstable, will we have to pay for firmware upgrades to have something that works correctly?

I also suspect that Apple stalled on "n" in their Macs until their own "n" products were announced, like the Airport Extreme base station (lame without gigabit ethernet ports) and Apple TV (lame because this could've at least had WiFi router capabilities), in an attempt to steer customers to Apple products and not drift to competitors.

Apple is starting to look more like Microsoft every day, and they're getting to arrogant when they should be kissing their customers' butts to become Mac users, not nickle and dime them and release weak products.

How can you say that manufactures charging for firmware updates is not a bad thing? This is a ridiculous president they are setting. BIOS, DVD burner, Router, etc. not working properly? Just pay us a few bucks and we will give you new firmware. This is sick!

It is a dangerous precedent to willing go and give Apple money for something already bought. What’s next? Accounting does not require anyone to charge for anything, if you want to give away product or services it is no one’s business. How about us who continue to buy and use Apple OS and constantly upgrade because of either buggy software or some security risk. It seems that we as consumers are buying a defective product that at the discursion of the manufacturer is constantly changed. We live with this and pay up front to Apple knowing that the OS is buggy and in some cases ceases to work with certain applications and hardware, were is Apple’s liability. How about the ibook premature failures were Apple identified the problem with video circuit but failed to recall the units but simply extended the warranty. The ibook was doomed to fail either during that extended warranty or shortly after. My ibook failed 30 days after it expired. Apple did not repair the unit and getting it fixed was much too expensive. Apple is becoming another large cooperation were the bottom dollar rules and no longer deserves any loyalties to either product or services and as such has to be treated like any other large company. The illusion of personal touch and customer care continues because we as Apple users never question but follow.