Apple today announced that it sold (or delivered in the case of maintenance agreements) over two million copies of Mac OS X Leopard since its release on Friday, far outpacing the first-weekend sales of Mac OS X Tiger, which was previously the most successful OS release in Apple’s history. Sales included copies sold at Apple’s retail stores, Apple Authorized Resellers, the online Apple Store, under maintenance agreements and bundled with new Mac computers. Leopard is the sixth major release of Mac OS X and is packed with more than 300 new features.
“Early indications are that Leopard will be a huge hit with customers,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, in the press release. “Leopard’s innovative features are getting great reviews and making more people than ever think about switching to the Mac.”
Leopard introduces Time Machine, an effortless way to automatically back up everything on a Mac; a redesigned Finder that lets users quickly browse and share files between multiple Macs; Quick Look, a new way to instantly see files without opening an application; Spaces, an intuitive new feature used to create groups of applications and instantly switch between them; a brand new desktop with Stacks, a new way to easily access files from the Dock; and major enhancements to Mail and iChat.
Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard is available through the Apple Store, at Apple’s retail stores and through Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of US$129 for a single user license. The Mac OS X Leopard Family Pack is a single-household, five-user license for a suggested retail price of $199. Volume and maintenance pricing is available from Apple. Leopard requires a minimum of 512MB of RAM and is designed to run on any Macintosh computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5 or G4 (867 MHz or faster) processor. Full system requirements can be found at http://www.apple.com/macosx/techspecs
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “NeverFade” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Note: On June 6, 2005, Apple announced that they expected to deliver over two million copies of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger by the end of that week (June 11, 2005). Mac OS X Tiger was released at 6pm on Friday, April 29, 2005. Therefore, it took 43 days to sell two million copies of Mac OS X Tiger vs. approximately 3 days for Leopard.
Microsoft’s Vista “sold” 20 million copies in the first month (February) or 714,286 copies per day or 2.143 million copies in the first 3 days.
anyone know how this compares to Vista on a relative scale of installed user base?
My PB 550 is obsolete now. Time to get a new Mac.
I need coffee…….
M$ only gives figures concerning “items shipped.” They haven’t said how many copies of vista have actually “sold.”
Vista has something like 80 million adopters so far,
and more lemmings jumping off the cliff every day.
Of course, that number may slow now that Leopards out.
@aCe
Vista has sold 88 million copies to date, which is equal to about 3x the entire Mac user base.
I gonna wait a coupla months till the price goes down….
Here’s a list.
Tens of millions have bought a Vista PC without even knowing what an OS is.
With the new Mail and iCal working so well together, just emailing myself copies of sports schedules, I can add them to iCal with no problem. And since G-Mail added IMAP, Mail is worth using now. Thank God they added IMAP.
Tre, I don’t think you have any idea how large the Mac user base is.
@Chris
In the latest quarterly conference call, Oppenheimer estimated that the OSX user base was roughly 25 million.
2 million is a nice number. bought contracts yesterday, awaiting Leopard news. there are few tech companies outside of AAPL, GOOG, BIDU, VMW, RIMM that can give you an eventual return.
Out of the ones mentioned, AAPL (maybe BIDU) has the greatest potential to grow it’s bottom line. It’s “small” PC marketshare weighs in favor of AAPL owners now. MSFT has alot of baggage and Halo pretty much saved Xbox. The market is already Windows saturated. So, who cares about MAC OS X marketshare, as long as Apple’s bottom line beats expectations each quarter.
Tre:
You must work for Microsoft distribution, are in a senior position at MS or just don’t read, as it’s already been stated, that MS does not announce how many copies of Vista are sold, only those that are in channel [ie. “sold” to OEMs].
So maybe Vista has 88m copies in channel. But that doesn’t put them in the hands of consumer end-users. I can certainly tell you that large/medium-sized corporations have not yet upgraded to Vista. There’s too much at stake.
The animals get hungry when we don’t get our annual OS update.
There’s no way anytime soon (if ever) that OS X will “outsell” Vista, but to me what would be a VERY telling statistic, is how many copies of Vista were online or in-store sales to small businesses and consumers who bought, specifically, a shrink-wrapped copy.
If you buy a Doze box you are *NOT* buying Doze; it’s just something included in the price of the computer. And the millions of corporate Doze boxes are parcelled out to alot of unwilling workers like me.
On the other hand, those 2M Leopards have been, or will be, sold to those individuals who are purposely and willingly buying a particular OS. Big difference.
Those kind of statistics are around I’m sure. M$ probably would be embarressed by how relatively close OS X really is using free-will purchases.
In perspective…
Over the weekend, AAPL added a quarter of a billion dollars to their revenue. OSX is also a very high margin product.
aCe: “anyone know how this compares to Vista on a relative scale of installed user base?”
Yes, I know the relative scale: 22 percent of new Leopard owners routinely get calls from their relatives asking them how to accomplish a simple task or to fix a problem with their Vista PCs.
@Huey,
No, I don’t work for MS and yes, you are right, 88 million is the number of shipped or “channel” copies of Vista. I didn’t say otherwise.
my goddess what a bunch of lemmings! 2 million people just lined up and bought it over the weekend? where is Zune Tang?!?
lemmings!
…….i waited till monday.
BTW, for the record, 3 installs, all three the drive failed to show up for about 45 seconds. one fresh install, one update, one archive and install. all 3 flawless after the slow drive appearance.
my folks bought a Vista empowered PC and took it back within a week…they then “upgraded” to XP.
I think Leopard has room to grow.
@ gmac,
Well said!
Me thinks Leopard rocks.
Leopard rocks!
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I’m the “mac” guy in my area, but many of my friends still call me to fix their damn PC’s! It’s gotten so ridiculous, that i’ve resorted to charging crazy amount’s of beer, and they still call when I’m passed out.
This two million figure is bloated as well. In my case, I received our maintenance copy yesterday. 350 seats. No way I am implementing any time soon. Too risky to put mission critical machines in beta-test mode. Let the dust settle until 10.5.2 or 10.5.3 before even thinking about installing. Check CS 3 compatibility, etc…
So yes, I “bought” 350 copies, but no way they get installed on more than 2 or 3 machines anytime soon.