OS X Leopard (no snow) available for real?

Hi guys,

I think it's pretty ridiculous to pay $150-200 for a several years old operating system disc, and I would love to upgrade my Power Mac G5 (dual 2.0ghz) to the latest that it can possibly run, mostly for software compatibility reasons.

I'm not trying to scrape by for free necessarily, but I also don't think it's fair to pay a crazy price because Apple has stopped printing Leopard discs.

Can anyone help?? Should I just sell this Power Mac G5 tower and be done with it? I thought it'd be a good way to get into Mac for not a lot of money... I'm a pretty firm Windows guy and if I were to make the change to new Macs, I'd have to have a lot of good experience playing around with it and getting comfortable with it first. My Windows desktop is actually 4 years old, but still blows the doors off of what most people have (It's an HP MediaPC with an Intel QuadCore 2.4ghz), and this Mac technically speaking should be powerful, but the software support seems to be drying up....

Hoping for some helpful ideas

Keep your eyes open on Craig's List...sometimes you can get 10.5 cheaper there ($50-$75). You can probably get Leopard on e-Bay for around $125...if you're really lucky...maybe $100.

Look at it this way. Yes I understand that it stinks to have to pay these sort of prices for an older OS...but the reason it costs so much is it's the last/most modern version of the Mac OS available for the PPC based Mac's.

If OS 10.6 "Snow Leopard" was compatible with PPC Mac's...then used copies of OS 10.5 would be selling cheaply (probably under $50). This is why 10.5 has held it's value. If you had purchased OS 10.5 when it was the latest OS available (and still sold at the Apple Store)...it would have cost $129.00.

It's sort of like "Pay me now...or pay me later"...sort of an item. Back in late 2007 when 10.5 was released you would have paid $129...and now in late 2010...you still will pay around $125.

This is one of those very very rare items in the computing world that has actually held it's value...and in some cases (depending where you buy from) actually increased in value.

HTH,

- Nick