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.
